What is your opinion of the Kindle Unlimited program?
Hello there! Well, if it isnāt William with another pretty awesome technical/publishing question c;
((For those of you wondering, the Kindle Unlimited Program (or KU) is a new offer by Amazon that letās people read from a selection of books for $9.99 a month. It is basically pitched as the Netflix of books.))
The thing is this. This service sounds pretty good. As a customer I see the value in this. For people who read more than one book a month this service basically pays for itself. As a writer and publisher, itās a completely different story.
The thing is this. The pitch line to get people into this is pretty darn good. Amazon basically promises to pay you full royalties (usually between 70%-30% of cover price) as long as people in the Kindle Unlimited Program read more than 10% of the book. That isĀ crazy value. It sounds too good to be trueā¦
The big caveat is that you mustĀ have your book(s) in Kindle Select for you to be legible for this new program. What is Kindle Select? Itās an exclusivity agreement. You promise to only have your books on Kindle, and you get a handful of bonuses. Of course, the problem is that your books can only be on Kindle.
As you can tell, I have recently put Ravensgem on Gumroad as a DRM-FREE eBook Bundle. I had to wait like 2 months to cancel out of Kindle Select in order to do it, but I finally managed to get everything in order. Why do all of this? Well, I got a lot (and I mean, a lot) of readers and fans asking for me to have my books available in more formats. I talked with a bunch of them personally, and the DRM-FREE eBook bundle was the best way to go.
Andā¦ this is the biggest problem with this new program. I think as a publisher I would benefit from itā but I would have to double-down and have all of my books be exclusively available on Amazon Kindle. I hear the ātoo many eggs in one basketā thing being tossed around, and although I partially agree with it, that is not really my problem. I got a lot of requests from people to have my books be available in multiple formats. These are people who wanted to read my content, who wanted to enjoy my work, and who were invested enough to send me emails and messages. Itās kind of a tough gamble (for me) to just flat-out ignore the words of so many people just because I want to make more money right now. I would rather take care of my (very passionate) customers and go from there.
I just want to clarify that I am not saying that people who opt into this program are somehow mistreating their customers. In my current situation it would be very counter-productive to look down on the AMAZING RECEPTION Ravensgem has had on gumroad.
Overall. I think the service shows promise. I would just prefer if it was open to anyone who was interested. If such became the case then I would enter the program in a heartbeat. But, for the time being, if I have to choose between giving my customers what theyĀ asked for, or selling a few more copies right nowā then I will go with my customers, no doubt.
Thank you for the question! It was very fun to answer. I hope that you all donāt mind the technical chat, I have been meaning to touch on this subject for a while so Iām happy someone gave me the chance to do it~ ā„ļø
