Jonathan Moeller vs Kindle Unlimited, Yet Again!

The first six books of my SILENT ORDER science fiction series are now out of Kindle Unlimited, and should be back on all the other ebook retailers either right now or very shortly. The seventh book will be out of KU and back on all the other retailers by the end of April.

I put SILENT ORDER in KU to see how a series would perform in the program.

Overall, the experiment turned out well and it turned a profit, but not well enough for me to keep up with having books in KU.

There are a lot of pros and cons with Kindle Unlimited and it works well for some writers (and it is a really good deal for readers, especially ones with fixed incomes), but for me, it boiled down to four problems that outweighed the advantages:

PROBLEM ONE: You can’t have the book on any of the other retailers.

PROBLEM TWO: A book has to be in KU for three months. The problem with this is that in KU it seems like a book gets like one really good month, and then it drops off a cliff. Then it sort of limps along for the two months after that. When that happens, the book isn’t getting many page reads, and it is obviously not getting any sales on the other retailers because it’s in KU. So, it’s a double-edged sword – the book isn’t getting sales on the other stores, and there aren’t enough page reads to replace those sales.

PROBLEM THREE: For a book to do well in KU, you have to advertise it a lot.

Lots and lots and lots.

Like, in February I made more from having the seven SILENT ORDER books in Kindle Unlimited than I did from having all my other books on Barnes & Noble. The trouble is I spent about 2/3 of that total on advertising the SILENT ORDER books, because if a book drops off the bestseller list in KU, the page reads go way down. So the experiment turned a profit, but it was a lot of work to keep scheduling ads for it.

There’s only so much mental energy in a day, and I would prefer that the writing-related portion of my mental energy budget go to writing new books instead of constantly monitoring the ads. My usual approach to marketing is to 1.) make the first book in a series free, 2.) throw a bunch of ads at that free book when a new book in the series comes out, and 3.) not think about it otherwise. This has worked pretty well in the past, and I think I’ll do that for SILENT ORDER once the eighth book comes out this summer.

PROBLEM FOUR: All the drama and shenanigans. There are constant eruptions of drama and shenanigans with Kindle Unlimited as various writers try to game the system. Right now, Amazon is suing a self-publisher in the UK that tried to artificially inflate the page count of its books, and there a billion little sleazy marketing schemes around Kindle Unlimited, many of which have resulted in lawsuits. I don’t have time to deal with that (see the bit about mental energy above), so I’m switching SILENT ORDER to my simpler marketing strategy.

So, to sum up, it was a good experiment, but it’s time to bring SILENT ORDER back to all the other ebook retailers.

-JM