A new-ish writer asks concerning SEVENFOLD SWORD: SHADOW:<\/p>\n
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?<\/em><\/p>\n I don’t like Kindle Unlimited as a concept very much for a couple of reasons.<\/p>\n 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%.<\/p>\n Second, the pay rate keeps changing, which is irritating.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Why? For the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks…because that’s where the money is. \ud83d\ude42 People who know what they’re doing can pull in serious revenue from Kindle Unlimited, and without doing anything scammy or ethically sketchy.<\/p>\n 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.)<\/p>\n 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<\/em> good month, and then most of the people who were going to read your book in KU have done so.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But there’s no way I would ever put everything into Kindle Unlimited. A diversified revenue stream is always a good thing.<\/p>\n -JM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A new-ish writer asks concerning SEVENFOLD SWORD: SHADOW: I noticed you don’t sign up your books for Kindle Unlimited, is<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8614,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,9,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-administrata","category-ebooks","category-writing"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pZ6ri-2sK","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/KindleUnlimited.jpg?fit=1541%2C819&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9470"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9478,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9470\/revisions\/9478"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}