Kindle Unlimited Take 3

Like a lot of authors I have a love/hate relationship with Amazon. I admire their innovation imagination--and ruthless efficiency--but I also deplore their greed, their inflexibility, their indifference to the publishing ecosystem as a whole--and that same previously mentioned ruthless efficiency.

One of the things I've struggled the most with is Kindle Unlimited. The prevalent idea is you can only make money on Amazon through Kindle Unlimited, and that is simply not the case. You can earn six figures and NOT be in Kindle Unlimited. Granted, it does take one hell of a lot of effort and ingenuity (says the girl with the Patreon account and currently writing porn for a Chinese mobile game company).

I think writers putting all their eggs in one basket is a horrible idea, whether that basket is publishing with one legacy publisher or one indie publisher OR putting everything into Kindle Unlimited. I've been in publishing a long time, and I have seen the painful proof of that too many times to count. But people gonna do what people gonna do.

However you feel about Kindle Unlimited, (and hey, yes, I have a kindle and a KU account) it's pretty clear that right now KU dominates the publishing landscape--and that isn't going to change any time soon.

So how best to take advantage of that without handing my entire fate over to Jeff Bezos? To refuse to play ball at all is pretty much the equivalent of cutting my nose off to spite my face. But going all in on KU is not an option. I can't do it. And I don't need to do it. So what's the compromise for an author like me? I've got a largish and loyal readership, but now days I have trouble with discoverability and with sticking my landings on those best-selling lists which--it's no secret--are now dominated by KU titles?

If your readership isn't growing, it's shrinking. That's the way it works.

So what to do, what to do?

For now, I've decided to put a few titles at a time into KU and then rotate them out again. Some of the titles still sell pretty well wide, some don't. So far, I don't plan on putting anything new into KU, although I have an idea about that too (but not for this year).

Here are the titles currently in Kindle Unlimited:

Mummy Dearest 

The entire up-to-now Holmes & Moriarity series (gulp)

Winter Kill

Murder in Pastel

The entire up-to-now Dangerous Ground series (including the Point Blank box set)

The Partners in Crime box set

The I Spy books (including the box set)

Some of them return to wide in November and the rest go back up in December.

This hopefully introduces me to some new readers. Yes, some KU readers are solely price-point based, but the majority are actually readers like me. We use KU for discoverability; the books we know we want, we buy outright. (There's loads of data to confirm that this is how it works.)

Better yet, this gives me a chance to reformat and repackage these older titles as they come off KU, without trying to tackle everything at once. I can reconsider price points, update back matter, update bonus materials, look at box sets, etc.

So we'll see how this goes. As per usual, I'll keep you updated. If it's a success, terrific! But if it's not, that can be useful to know.