SILENT ORDER & Kindle Unlimited?

Back when I was planning the SILENT ORDER series, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to put it in Kindle Unlimited (KU) or not. Eventually, I decided to start it in KU, but enough people complained that I changed my mind and released it on all platforms.

But then I noticed something strange, something that might confirm a theory of mine.

I suspected that the market for indie-published science fiction is mostly on Kindle Unlimited these days (that is, that most of the people who read indie-published SF read on Kindle and not on one of the other ebook stores), but I had no data to prove it one way or another. And the sales of my books tend to break down in predictable percentages between Amazon and the other platforms. Usually somewhere around 60% of the sales are on Amazon, and the rest of the sales are on the other ebook platforms, mostly Kobo and Google Play.

For example, in November FROSTBORN: THE IRON TOWER had 62.8% of its sales on Amazon, and the rest on the other ebook stores. GHOST IN THE RING had 62% as well. CLOAK GAMES: SHADOW JUMP had only 45% of its sales on Amazon, and CLOAK GAMES: HAMMER BREAK had 52% of its sales on Amazon.

But the SILENT ORDER series looked quite different. IRON HAND had 79% of its sales on Amazon, WRAITH HAND had 77%, AXIOM HAND had 79%, ECLIPSE HAND had 81%, and FIRE HAND came all the way to 82.5%.

Granted, some of that might be because SILENT ORDER is still relatively new, and my new books tend to overperform on Amazon compared to the other stores before settling down to the 60% level I mentioned above. For instance, SEVENFOLD SWORD: WARLORD had 77.5% of its sales on Amazon in November, but FROSTBORN: THE DWARVEN PRINCE, which I released about a year ago, sold 62% of its copies on Amazon.

So I will wait to see how SILENT ORDER does in December. But if it stays at that 70 to 80% on Amazon, it might be seriously advantageous to put the series in Kindle Unlimited.

-JM