Kindle Unlimited and some observations on the business of self-publishing

I wrapped up my book on Windows 10 this week, so I thought I would take some time to talk about the business side of self-publishing.

First, let’s talk a little about Kindle Unlimited, version 2.0.

In July, my DEMONSOULED series got 139,255 page reads. In August, it got 105, 932 page read. Assuming the payment rate per page stays at about $0.0058 cents, that means I would have made about $590.00. That’s more that I made off Google Play for August. I think a writer might benefit from rotating series in and out of Kindle Unlimited – in October DEMONSOULED will go out of KU and back on all the other ebook platforms, and I might (emphasis on might) put the first nine GHOSTS books in, just to see what happens. That will depend on what the payment per-page is for September, though.

Speaking of that, I suspect there is a chance the payment rate for Kindle Unlimited will remain around $0.005. I could be wrong, but I think that Amazon originally intended Kindle Unlimited to operate on a per-page read payment rate, and that the original implementation of Kindle Unlimited (payment per borrow) was rushed out in July 2014 to compete with Oyster and Scribd before Amazon was entirely ready on the back end. Having a per-page payment scheme, I suspect, makes KU a lot harder to game, which in turn makes it easier to maintain a stable payment rate.

But, I could be wrong. We’ll see on the 15th of September when Amazon announces the rate for July. 🙂

I almost planned to put my WINDOWS 10: 101 TIPS & TRICKS book in KU since most of my nonfiction sales are on Amazon anyway, but large portions of the Windows 10 content on my Computer Beginners Guides site is similar to the book, and I didn’t want to get in trouble with Amazon. So WINDOWS 10: 101 TIPS & TRICKS will be available on all platforms.

Speaking of non-Amazon platforms, August 2015 was the first month I made more money off Kobo than Barnes & Noble. Kobo seems to be doing a better job of competing in the ebook space than Nook. It only takes selling about thirty or forty copies of a book to get into the top 500 sales rank on Nook, whereas on Amazon it takes between a thousand and fifteen hundred copies depending on the day. Hopefully an ambitious company will buy the Nook ecosystem off Barnes & Noble the way that Rakuten bought Kobo. The Nook space has, to paraphrase a real estate broker, “good foundations”, but B&N seems content to let Nook drift along. Though the new Samsung S2 Nook seems like a clever device.

CLOAK GAMES: THIEF TRAP did really well – over 500 copies its first month. My hope was that it would surpass the first month of FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT back in August 2013, which did about 430 copies. So mission accomplished! (Thanks everyone!) Of those 500 copies, about 200 were from Amazon US, 230 from Amazon UK, 10 from Google Play, 10 from Apple iBooks, and 49 from Nook. (Kobo only did 3, alas.)

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the State Of Ebook Publishing in the last quarter of 2015. It really is an excellent time to be a self-published writer. Thanks everyone!

-JM