![\"\"](\"https:\/\/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com\/images\/G\/01\/kindle\/ku\/KU-logo-LP._V321076100_.png\"){kind=logo}
Last year, Amazon came out with a book subscription service called Kindle Unlimited. As a reader and an Amazon customer, I’ve noticed\u00a0that they’ve been pushing this service quite aggressively. As a writer, I’ve been following it quite closely, especially with some recent changes with how they compensate their authors.<\/p>\n
However, if you check my Amazon catalog, you will find that none of my books are available on\u00a0Kindle Unlimited.\u00a0And if I had to tell you why, I could sum it up in just one word:<\/p>\n
Exclusivity.<\/p>\n
In order to enroll your books in Kindle Unlimited, Amazon demands that the content of your book cannot be available anywhere else. Not on competing retailers. Not on your website. Not on a site like Wattpad or posted on social media. It’s KU and KU only, take it or leave it. And you can’t get around that by doing separate editions, since it’s the content that must be exlusive, not the book.<\/p>\n
Recently, Hugh Howey\u00a0argued<\/a> that\u00a0KU’s exclusivity doesn’t really hurt writers or readers, because\u00a0all of Amazon’s competitors in the ebook market suck so hard that it’s no big loss to lose them anyways. I disagree, though. Different readers have different needs, and as great as Amazon is, it isn’t the best choice for everyone.<\/p>\n I believe that readers should be empowered to make their own choices, not only in what they read, but in how they read it. Some readers\u00a0would rather sideload their ebooks, and don’t want to deal with Amazon’s proprietary .mobi format. Others would rather\u00a0keep their books native to their device and not\u00a0deal with Amazon’s apps. Others live in parts of the world where Amazon tacks on an arbitrary $2 USD surcharge to every kindle store purchase, and that obviously doesn’t work for them.<\/p>\n Put simply, I believe that exclusivity is a bad deal for readers\u2014and that because of that, it’s also a bad deal for writers.\u00a0The less control that readers have over what they read, the less they are going to read. The more control that middlemen have over the market\u00a0(and for all the wonderful things that it does, Amazon is still a middleman between readers and writers), the less pressure there is for them to innovate and improve.<\/p>\n On many of the indie writers forums and communities that I frequent, it appears that other writers are more interested in\u00a0short-term monetary\u00a0gains\u00a0than in doing what best serves their readers. And that’s unfortunate, because Kindle Unlimited is structured in such a way that it pits writers against each other in a zero-sub game. Instead of paying a fixed rate for each page (or KENPC) read, Amazon\u00a0sets a “pot” and pays each author a share of it,\u00a0in proportion to how many borrows\/pages they got. Thus, if one author gets more reads than another (or games the system to make Amazon’s algorithms\u00a0think<\/em> that he had more reads), that means\u00a0less money for the other author.<\/p>\n A lot of writers\u00a0argue that it’s not really a zero-sub game because Amazon usually adds to the pot after the month is over, thus manipulating the borrow rate to hit some undisclosed target. Even if that’s true, though,\u00a0it makes things\u00a0even worse. If Amazon has a target borrow rate in mind, why not tell authors up front? It basically amounts to not telling authors how much they’re going to be paid until after their books have been sold.\u00a0In any other supplier relationship, this blatant lack of transparency would be insane.<\/p>\n From what I can see, it’s all about control. Exclusivity gives them a great deal of control, not only over the marketplace but over authors as well. The\u00a0lack of transparency and ever-changing borrow rates\u00a0make it difficult for authors to gather the data they need to decide whether to stay in KU or to publish their books\u00a0widely. And authors who decide not to opt into KU are punished by having their books rank lower, thus achieving less visibility in the Amazon ecosystem. In the year since KU came out, my Amazon income has fallen by at least 60%.<\/p>\n Even with all of that, though, I would be\u00a0happy to enroll all of my books in Kindle Unlimited if Amazon dropped the exclusivity requirement. There are a lot of readers who prefer Amazon’s KU subscription service, and I would love to make my books available for them.<\/p>\n But exclusivity is a bad deal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last year, Amazon came out with a book subscription service called Kindle Unlimited. As a reader and an Amazon customer, I’ve noticed\u00a0that they’ve been pushing this service quite aggressively. As a writer, I’ve been following it quite closely, especially with some recent changes with how they compensate their authors. However, if you check my Amazon… Continue reading Why my books are not in Kindle Unlimited<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[664,560,577,668,529,1008],"class_list":["post-9985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-amazon","tag-ebook-pricing","tag-ebook-revolution","tag-exclusivity","tag-indie-publishing","tag-kindle-unlimited","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2B3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9985"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9987,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9985\/revisions\/9987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}