Y’all who have read, or attempted to read, more than one of my books might have noticed that I have a somewhat ambiguous relationship with Kindle Unlimited. (On the authors’ and publishers’ side, it’s called Kindle Select, but we’ll just refer to it as Kindle Unlimited here.) Impossibly Yours is in KU right now but will not be forever; The Hand You’re Dealt was in KU but now is not; and The Hacker’s Temptation is not in KU but will be soon.
Let me explain. On the reader’s side, KU works pretty simply: you pay a certain amount per month (I think it’s $13 now, though you can get a trial membership at first) and then get the right to check out copies of up to 20 books at a time, so long as the books have been enrolled by the publisher in KU. From this end of the table it’s a little more complicated. When a reader picks up Impossibly Yours on KU, I don’t get a set amount of revenue the way I would if they bough a copy of the ebook outright. Instead, Amazon pays me per page read. At the end of each month, Amazon totals up the number of pages read and the amount paid by KU subscribers, comes up with a per-page rate, and doles out to authors according to that page rate.
You might have heard about this because in July, the per-page rate was $0.039 cents per page, the lowest it’s been in a while. Impossibly Yours has 399 Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP), so if you read it all the way through, at the July rate I would get about $1.55 in revenue, which is about $2 less than what I receive from a purchase.
That’s actually not what I dislike about KU–but let me hold off on that for the moment. Let’s be clear: KU is great! There are tons and tons and tons of books that would have difficulty getting into a bookstore or library (including mine) that readers can get to via KU. The subscription model encourages people to read; how can I not like that? And it also eliminates the cost of trying out a book. Put it this way: if you read the first thirty pages of Impossibly Yours in KU and decide you don’t like it, I still get paid for those thirty pages, which would not be the case if you just read the sample, or put it back on a hypothetical shelf.
So if I think so highly of KU, why don’t I have all my books in there? Well, I have two major complaints. One is the opacity of the program. The monthly rates aren’t announced until well after the month is over. If you think of Amazon as my customer, rather than the reader directly, it’s pretty frustrating to have my customer tell me, “I’ll pay you a month from now, and I’ll let you know then how much I’m paying you, and not before.” Meanwhile, there’s no floor to the KENP rate. It’s gone up slightly since July (it was $0.0043 in September) but it hasn’t been above $0.005 since 2018. And how does Amazon calculate KENP anyway? Or determine the size the payout fund? There’s no way for publishers to know.
My other complaint with KU is its exclusivity requirement. Since Impossibly Yours is in KU right now, it cannot be offered to any other retailer. Throw in that the Kindle app allows for one-click borrowing but not one-click ordering, and it feels like Amazon’s trying to manipulate consumers into being locked into KU plus the Kindle app or device. That’s not terrible marketing, admittedly. I don’t protest Amazon’s ability to do it. I just don’t feel like playing along. Which is why, when my husband offered to buy me an ereader a couple birthdays ago, I deliberately requested a Kobo.
(While I’m talking up Kobo, I should add that Kobo has its own read-all-you-want service, Kobo Plus, that has the current twin advantages of being cheaper than KU and not requiring exclusivity from authors. In fact there is a grateful romance author group that bound together to promote their Kobo Plus offerings, under the banner YOLO with Kobo, as I type this.)
I would like to reach as many readers as possible, which to my mind means being available on as many platforms as possible. But in truth, if you’re talking about romance readers, reaching as many as possible might mean sticking with KU. Anecdotally I keep hearing that romance readers, being voracious readers, love KU. The Romance Books subreddit just released its annual survey responses, and two-thirds of respondents reported using KU. By “going wide” (publisherspeak for distributing an ebook across multiple platforms) I might be cutting myself off from my audience.
My solution is a strategy with the ungainly name “90 days to wide.” KU requires publishers commit their books for a minimum of 90 days and then renew. So when a new book comes out, I keep it in KU for its first 90 days, giving KU users a chance to check the book out (and hopefully review it), then distribute it to Kobo and Smashwords and Apple Books and so on. Impossibly Yours was published on 22 September, so it’ll be in KU until just before Christmas.
I have decided, though, to put The Hacker’s Temptation in KU on 1 November and keep it there for a while at least. The Hacker’s Heart will remain free to everyone everywhere, but I think KU users are still looking to try me out, and I want to give them a chance to continue Luke and Melinda’s story.
“But, Josie,” you say, “I’m curious about one of your non-KU books, and my budget’s very tight!” Don’t worry: I do plan to be running specials on different titles coming up. If you’re really, impatiently interested in a particular book, and you promise to leave an honest review, just get in touch. I don’t have a dedicated ARC team, but I’m always happy to have new reviewers.