For self-published authors: What is Kindle Unlimited and should I put my books into it?

Amazon, or the Zon, as some call it, has by far the lion's share of the ebook market. They also have an audiobook platform called Chirp, but I'm not going to talk about that. Today's post is about only about ebooks.

eBooks & eReaders

Amazon calls its ebooks Kindle books, because its ereader is called a Kindle. However, you can read Kindle books using the free Kindle app on almost any PC, Mac, tablet or phone. Basically, Amazon's market consists of anyone who has an Amazon account and some kind of reading device, including iPads and iPhones. 

Apple Books, however, can only be bought via an iOS device, an iPhone, Mac, iPad, etc. There are ways to move them over to Windows but it is not the effortless transaction that most Mac users are looking for.  Kobo and Barnes and Noble both offer a dedicated ereader but also have an app that runs on tablets and other devices. 

So, why does this matter to self-published authors? As an author or publisher, you can upload your books into the self-publishing platforms of Amazon (Kindle Direct Publishing), Barnes & Noble (Nook Press) Google (Google Play Books Partners Center), Apple Books and others, either directly or by using Smashwords or Draft2DIgital. But if you load them only into KDP and opt for the KDP Select designation, your books will be available to borrowers via an Amazon subscription service called Kindle Unlimited. The author is paid based n the pages read, not on the borrow, an important distinction.

Basically, by putting his or her books in Kindle Unlimited (an ironic name in a way, since all KU books are limited only to Kindle), an author promises not to put them in any other ebook store (print versions have no affect in KU status). How can this possibly benefit an author? 

A lot of times, it doesn't. In my experience, whether or not KU is profitable for a book depends on three factors: genre, book length, and ebook price. 

Genre

The only genre I personally have had any success with in Kindle Unlimited is romance, which in my case is actually science fiction romance, Romance readers are voracious. They read so much, it is worth it to them to pay the KU subscription fee. There may be other popular KU genres, but I have not found them. Certainly my YA books never went anywhere in KU. If you have books doing well in a KU, please let me know what genre they are! 

Book Length

Because the author is paid based on pages read, a longer book automatically earns more money than a short one, assuming the reader finishes the book. Of course, if the book is truly short--a novella or a novelette--it probably sells for less, too. But length is something to keep in mind when deciding on KU, yes or no,

Price

If you price your ebook modestly (none of mine are more than $3.99), and the book is long enough, you may well make more money from a KU borrow and full read than from a sale. Of course, price will also have some impact on sale rates, too, so it's all balancing act.

Things to Remember

An important thing to remember is, the Kindle Unlimited signup is for 90-day blocks of time. You can take the book out of KDP Select after 90 days, or you can sign up for another 90 days. I usually launch with the book signed up or KDP Select but pull it out after 90 days if it's not getting enough KU reads to make it worthwhile. 

Also, one benefit to keeping the book in KDP Select status is, you can run a sale or even make the book free for a select number of days per 90-day cycle. The advantage to just changing the price yourself is, the book looks like it's on sale. The regular price appears, but is struck through and the sale price shows as discounted.

You should be aware that Amazon makes no future promises on the per-page rate for KU borrows. It sets aside a chunk of money to pay KU authors/publishers, and then pays out at a rate determined by the number of reads. Right now the rate is approximately $0.004 per Kindle Edition Normalized Page.  My book Alien Bonds is a tad under 130,00 words and that translates to 649 KENP pages. I made about $2.60 on the last full read. At $3.99 retail I make $2.72 in royalties on a sale, which is 12 cents more than the KU borrow. On book 2 of the Wakanreo trilogy, which is shorter, I make less on KU but on book 3, the longest book, I make more from a KU full-read than I do from a sale. 

A non-financial benefit of KU is you can tell when people are actually reading your book because the page count shows on a daily basis. 

And once your pull your book from KDP Select, it is no longer in KU, and then you can load onto every platform available. There is no reason not to! But always, do what's best for your particular book! 

ALIEN BONDS Price Reduction!

Now that my second Wakanreo book ALIEN VOWS is out, I have reduced the price of ALIEN BONDS to $2.99!  The paperback version has not changed price and is still .$12.99.

On giving away ebooks: How much is “free” worth?

One question I get asked frequently, mostly by other writers, is “Is it worth it to give an ebook away for free?” It sounds so counter-intuitive to say that the way to sell books is to give them away to as many people as you can, and yet I have to say, the answer is, for an unknown author, yes, it's definitely worth it.

There are several factors that influence the success of a giveaway as a tool to sell books. The first is what platform are you giving your book away on? If you post a book on your blog and allow folks to download it for free, that will help you get readers only if your blog already has a ton of followers; and if you post it in Mobi or epub format, you will only get readers who also know how to side-load a book to their ereader. Putting the book somewhere that people go to find books is a much better plan. Smashwords makes it really easy to make a book free, and Apple iBooks and Barnes & Noble Nook will price match that, so you get more bang for your non-buck than you would just from Smashwords. Sony used to price-match, but it doesn't look they they're still doing that. Generally speaking, the Kindle store will usually yield the best numbers, in terms of a giveaway, but even with a book being free in the Kindle store, you need to advertise it, especially because unlike Smashwords, Amazon doesn't make it easy. You can only make a Kindle book free if it's in the KDP Select program (which means it only be sold as an ebook through the Kindle store), and it can be free only five days out of 90.

So many people have taken this route that it is actually difficult to give away a book in huge numbers. You should advertise the book being free on your blog, on Twitter and Facebook, and anywhere else you can find. There are lots of site to do this on, but be aware that many of them either charge up front or ask for donations.

I have made three books free in the last year or so, at different times. I launched my two most recent books on KDP Select and made them both free on different days. I gave away several hundred copies of each book, and after it was free, I did find I got more reviews and more sales after the books came off being free. I didn't try to make my first three books free on Kindle via KDP Select because there were already out there on many platforms and it is often difficult to get smaller vendors to pull books back when you “unpublish” from Smashwords. I did make my first book free on Smashwords, and after iBooks and Nook stores showed it as free, Amazon price-matched it to zero (although only in the US Kindle store)*, and I have now given away well over 2,000 copies of it! The big advantage to me is that my first book The Sixth Discipline has a direct sequel called No Safe Haven. NSH has only one review on Amazon, and yet it is now my best selling book! The increase in sales to NSH from making TSD free is much greater than the increase to the other two books that were free for a time.

Even if you only have one book out there, making it free in the Kindle store helps by getting your book into many readers' buying history (“People who bought this item also bought . . .”). It can also increase your chance of getting reviews.

Things to keep in mind when doing a promotion:

• Not everyone who gets your book for free will read it.
• Not everyone who reads it will like it; it's always possible you could get a negative review from a free copy, especially if the book doesn't live up to (or match) the blurb.
• There are tons and tons of free books out there, so you need to get the word out!
• The market size of your book still applies, even when it's free; check out the top 100 free Kindle books to see the genres and authors that are doing best.

* Important note! You cannot count on Amazon price matching Barnes & Noble for free books.

Kobo and Diesel: my books are not there right now

I had my books on sale for a while at 99¢ each, but now they are back to $2.99 for No Safe Haven and Tribes, while The Sixth Discipline stays at it loss-leader price of 99¢.  When I was checking to see if this change on Smashwords had been passed on to other retailers, I noticed that Kobo and Diesel appeared to have dropped my books. I am trying to resolve this situation. I don't get a lot of sales from those stores, so I don't know how long they have been missing.