Why is HALF-ELVEN THIEF in Kindle Unlimited?

With the release of WIZARD-ASSASSIN, a few people wrote in to ask why HALF-ELVEN THIEF is in Kindle Unlimited.

Short answer:

Business of publishing reasons.

TLDR answer:

Of my three unfinished series, I determined that one of them needs to be in Kindle Unlimited, and HALF-ELVEN THIEF drew the short straw.

What I’ve realized over the years is that if you have a new book that does well in Kindle Unlimited, Amazon puts its thumb on the scales for the book in a big way. More eyeballs get on the book, it stays higher in the rankings a lot longer than it would otherwise, and therefore more people read and buy it. More people get email or app notifications about it. A new Kindle Unlimited book that does well even has a halo effect on the rest of my backlist, even for books that are not in Kindle Unlimited. BLADE OF FLAMES and BLADE OF SHADOWS had their best couple of days in weeks when WIZARD-ASSASSIN came out, and even STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE got a boost!

Of course, the price for all this algorithmic bounty from Amazon is that a Kindle Unlimited book must be exclusive to Amazon.

A lot of writers get really mad about this, but the truth is this is how retail works and in fact is how retail has always worked. Let’s say you go to Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, Tesco, or some other big box store and see a big display of Tide detergent towards the front of the store. It’s partially there because the store thinks it will sell, but it’s mostly there because Procter & Gamble paid big bucks to have Tide detergent featured at the front of the store. This is even frequently true when the big box stores send out emails with discounts and coupons for this or that, though there is more of an algorithmic component to that than in traditional brick and mortar retail.

Admittedly, compared to the kind of contracts between a big box store and an industrial conglomerate like Procter & Gamble, Kindle Unlimited is relatively mild. Amazon doesn’t charge anything for it, and the term is only three months if you want to take your book out of it. The exclusivity requirement is probably anti-competitive, but the US government can’t even rouse itself to change Daylight Savings Time, so there’s no way it will address a more complicated and more obscure issue like ebook exclusivity anytime soon. (Of course, traditionally in US antitrust law, you only get in trouble for raising consumer prices, and Kindle Unlimited is objectively a very good deal for heavy readers.) And, for that matter, exclusivity is fairly common in retail arrangements, which is why you occasionally see things like a “special edition holiday themed body wash” available only at Target or whatever. Or in the book world, which is why Barnes & Noble sometimes has B&N exclusive hardback editions of various books.

So that’s just the reality of Kindle Unlimited since the program settled into its current form around 2015 or so. To deal with it, indie writers typically settle on one of four strategies.

1.) They go all-in on Kindle Unlimited.

2.) They ignore Kindle Unlimited, perhaps as a point of ethics in protest of Amazon.

3.) They split the difference with Patreon.

4.) They split the difference with publishing windows.

Strategy one’s big, big drawback is that book revenue becomes entirely dependent on Amazon, and Amazon’s algorithms occasionally go berserk and start banning accounts at random. A smaller but still significant drawback is that you cut yourself out of every market that Amazon doesn’t address, which mean if your Amazon sales tank, there’s no fallback position.

Strategy two is much more viable across the long term and I did it for a lot of years, but it does mean you have a permanent handicap on Amazon, which remains the largest book seller in the US and the UK.

The most successful example I’ve seen of strategy three is indie author Lindsay Buroker, who first offers her books to her Patreon subscribers, and then puts them series on Kindle Unlimited. Once the series is complete, she takes them out of KU and puts them on all the other retailers. I’ve thought about doing this myself, but I’m not ready to commit to the extra work of a Patreon, and the Andomhaim and CLOAK MAGE books have such large audiences built up on the other retailers that switching them to KU would be a massive rug pull for people.

With strategy four, the indie author makes the book available on all retailers for the first week, and then switches it to Kindle Unlimited. I think this approach has serious drawbacks, especially since you don’t have the opportunity to build up an audience long-term on the other retailers. An overlooked factor on a lot of indie publishing strategies is long-term effects that build up over time. Part of the reason my books do well on, for example, Kobo is because I’ve had the majority of them on Kobo for the last fourteen years, and so they have fourteen years’ worth of reviews accumulated on them.

So with all this in mind, in late 2023 and early 2024 I settled on Strategy Five, which plays to the fact that I’m pretty fast as a writer: start a new series unconnected to everything else I’ve written, and put that in Kindle Unlimited. Once it is finished, I will take it out of KU and put it on all the other retailers.

Honestly, this has worked out pretty well. In 2024, the HALF-ELVEN THIEF series did well enough that it paid for my health insurance in 2024, which as we know is no small feat. It didn’t do as well for the first eleven and a half months of 2025 for the obvious reason that I didn’t publish any new books in the series in that time. I had too many unfinished series and needed to wrap up some of them first, which was a separate self-inflicted problem I’ve talked about in other blog posts. 🙂 But WIZARD-ASSASSIN did really well, as I mentioned above.

So, moving forward, that’s my publishing strategy.

1.) Only three unfinished series at any one time.

2.) Two of those series will be available on all platforms.

3.) One of those series will be in Kindle Unlimited.

So when HALF-ELVEN THIEF is finished at nine books, probably in 2027, I will take it out of KU and put it on all the other retailers.

One rule for my Kindle Unlimited series: it will always have to be something new and unconnected to anything I’ve previously written. No Andomhaim books will be in Kindle Unlimited, since FROSTBORN/SEVENFOLD SWORD/DRAGONTIARNA/DRAGONSKULL/THE SHIELD WAR/BLADES OF RUIN have always been wide. Likewise, CLOAK MAGE is staying wide, and if I ever go back to the SILENT ORDER universe for a new SF series, that will be wide.

So, that is the longer answer for why WIZARD-ASSASSIN was in Kindle Unlimited.

And, as always, thanks for reading! I am tentatively hoping DRAGON-MAGE will come out in April or possibly May.

-JM