This author’s note originally appeared in the August 15th edition of my author newsletter. To sign up for my newsletter, click here.
It was not an easy decision to enroll all of my Star Wanderers books into Kindle Unlimited. For years, this was my flagship series, not only on Amazon but on all platforms. Enrolling it in KU means that the ebooks are only available on Amazon now, and the first book is no longer free to non-KU subscribers.
In the indie author community, KU has always been a controversial program. It all boils down to one word: exclusivity. In order to enroll your books in KU, you cannot publish them anywhere else but Amazon. The upshot is that Amazon’s algorithms give your books a huge signal boost—about 2.5x, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations. Getting writers to do anything is a bit like herding cats, but with the right incentive structure you can do it. Amazon wants to be the dominant retailer for ebooks, and KU is their tool for doing it.
I don’t blame readers for subscribing to KU. It seems like a great program: $9.99 per month gives you an awesome selection of books to choose from. And certainly, Amazon can do what it wants on its own platform. If that means reducing the visiblity of books that aren’t exclusive to your platform, so be it. But as a matter of principle, I believe that exclusivity is bad for readers and writers, which is why I’ve stayed out of the program.
Until now. What changed? A few things. Earlier this year, I finally wrote out a complete business plan that describes everything I do (72 pages, 22.2k words). That made me rethink a lot of things, especially my marketing strategy. If Amazon gives books in KU such a huge signal boost, could I use that to bring more readers to my books that aren’t in KU? If none of my books are enrolled in KU, isn’t that just another way of making my books exclusive?
When Kindle Unlimited launched in 2014, I had finally reached a point where I could live off of my book royalties. A lot of that was because of Star Wanderers: with a permafree first-in-series, it got a lot of visiblity. But then, the Amazon algorithms changed to favor KU over permafree. I chose to stay out of KU, and lost more than 60% of my writing income over the next 18 months as a result.
I learned several things from that experience. First, I learned that I couldn’t rely on Amazon to do my marketing for me. I had to come up with a plan. Second, I learned that it was a bad idea to be dependent on just one platform. It was time to diversify.
Paradoxically, this meant doubling down on my decision to keep my books out of KU. But it paid off. In 2014, more than 90% of my writing income came from Amazon. Now, it’s more like 40%-60%, depending on the month. If I had panicked and put all my books in KU, I wouldn’t have those other income streams right now, and many of those readers never would have found me.
Over the years, I also became less dependent on Star Wanderers as well. I began to move toward writing trilogies of longer books instead of longer series of shorter books. And as I wrote and published more books, interest in my Star Wanderers books seemed to wane.
So now I’m in a place where enrolling Star Wanderers into KU actually makes sense. I have a plan and a marketing strategy, I’m not dependent on Amazon anymore, and the books themselves seem well-suited to the experiment. We’ll see how it turns out.
If you’re not an Amazon customer, don’t worry: I’m not going to enroll all of my books in KU, and still plan to release all of my new books wide. For now, it’s just Star Wanderers. And if you are a KU subscriber, I hope you enjoy! These books have a very special place in my heart, and I’m happy to share them with you.
