JM vs Kindle Unlimited!

A new-ish writer asks concerning SEVENFOLD SWORD: SHADOW:

I noticed you don’t sign up your books for Kindle Unlimited, is that so you can go wide on Kobo and similar, or are there other reasons also?

I don’t like Kindle Unlimited as a concept very much for a couple of reasons.

First, you have to have a book exclusive to Kindle to use Kindle Unlimited, and in a typical month only about 66% of my book sales are on Amazon, with the rest usually coming from Google Play, Kobo, iTunes, and Barnes & Noble, in that order. For example, in January 30% of my book sales came from sources other than Amazon, and if I put all my books in KU, I would have to hope that I could make up that additional 30% in page reads. And based on January’s pay rate for Kindle Unlimited, I would need some ridiculously high number of page reads to match that 30%.

Second, the pay rate keeps changing, which is irritating.

Third, there’s so much drama in Kindle Unlimited. KU has a serious problem with scammers who publish fake books or pirated books and then hire click farms to page through them. So Amazon is locked in an endless game of whack-a-mole with the scammers. The scammers will think up a new technique, and Amazon will come up with a new technique to ban them, which inevitably also catches some innocent writers as collateral damage, which generations a storm of Internet controversy. Then the scammers come up with a new technique, and the whole show repeats itself a month or so later.

So, that said, I don’t like Kindle Unlimited…but I do actually have seven books in KU right now, my SILENT ORDER science fiction series.

Why? For the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks…because that’s where the money is. 🙂 People who know what they’re doing can pull in serious revenue from Kindle Unlimited, and without doing anything scammy or ethically sketchy.

I wanted to see what would happen if I put a series in Kindle Unlimited and promoted it hard. It worked out pretty well. In February, I had a grand total of 76 novels, seven of which were in Kindle Unlimited. In February, I made more from having those 7 novels in Kindle Unlimited than I did from having my other 69 books in Barnes and Noble. (My Kindle Unlimited total was 45% of my Kobo sales, and 29% of my Google Play sales.)

SILENT ORDER’s term in Kindle Unlimited expires in April, and I have not been able to make up my mind if I’m going to keep it in Kindle Unlimited or not. I suppose it depends on how it will do in March. At the moment, I’m leaning towards taking it out. I suspect of the three-month Kindle Unlimited term, you get one good month, and then most of the people who were going to read your book in KU have done so.

To sum up, I think Kindle Unlimited is too big to ignore entirely, even if I’m not exactly fond of it. But as of March, I have 77 novels, so I can afford to put some of them in Kindle Unlimited to make it into another revenue source. Perhaps long-term I might rotate books into Kindle Unlimited and out again to give the books a short-term boost.

But there’s no way I would ever put everything into Kindle Unlimited. A diversified revenue stream is always a good thing.

-JM