By Larry Archer
While I’ve understood the appeal of Kindle Unlimited (KU), up until now I’ve rejected it for a couple of reasons. First is narrow versus wide. With KU, you cannot publish your story anywhere but at Amazon. I think you can do print versions, but most of that stays with Amazon.
Going wide, you can publish at all the other sites such as SmashWords, Apple, Kobo, B&N, and others, in addition to Amazon. Another drawback to wide is that you can’t publish in ePub or other formats that are native to Windows, Mac, most tablets and phones.
Certainly, nowadays there are apps which allow you to read Kindle books on other types of devices besides a Kindle. But to me, it is aggravating that Amazon restricts you in an effort to keep you corralled into the Kindle World.
Publishing on Amazon and allowing your smut to be in the Kindle Unlimited section, allows people who cough up $10 a month to read all they can stomach. For an avid reader like myself, I like KU except the nonconformist side resents being told I can’t publish a story anywhere except on Amazon.
Amazon pays about one-half cent per page for every page someone reads of your masterpiece. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but when there are millions of people out there, it adds up.
I decided what the hell, I’ll try it again and published my latest story, House Party, both narrow and in Kindle Unlimited. This 85,000-word novel is my biggest yet, and I have to admit that I was a little hesitant about committing for the next 90-days before I could go wide.
I was floored when in the three weeks since release it has sold 31 copies, and almost 18,000 page reads, which translates into 74 complete story reads of the 243-page novel. This one story in three weeks has earned basically one and a half times my normal Amazon income for a typical month!
That’s all the bragging I’m going to do, and I apologize for it but what I’m trying to say is consider using Kindle Unlimited to see if it helps your book sales.
Normally I don’t pay a lot of attention to my Amazon sales as I’m too lazy to read all the reports but using Book Report (GetBookReport.com) makes it so easy to see your best selling stories and how much money you are making. Book Report also breaks out your sales per day, week, month, etc. so it’s a lot easier to see if you’re doing any good.
I’d had always read that Amazon has a 30-day cliff and will start throwing your story under the bus in a month. Since I’ve been using Book Report since May or June, I’ve confirmed to myself that is true.
If you release a story, it will bump your author’s rank for about a month, then you’ll see your rank start to fall. Publish a new book, and it’ll immediately jump up for another month.
So, the old saying “Publish or Perish,” is definitely a truism with Amazon. This does not seem to be true with SmashWords. From what I can see, SmashWords only goes by best sells or most popular, without considering age.
I have two books in SmashWords Men’s Erotica Best Sellers that are in the top 60, and one of the stories was published in 2014 and is ranked higher than a story published this year.
While certainly, you can argue that one story is better than the other, but the bottom line is that a story published four years ago is ranked about the same as a story published in the last few months.
This tells me that when you publish at SmashWords, your story doesn’t get forgotten in a month and continues to be ranked on its merits, without being penalized for age.
Up until recently, I’ve always made more money at SmashWords than I have with Amazon but the last couple of months have been just the opposite.
The thing I really like at SmashWords is that they automatically push out to Apple and others such as Kobo and B&N. My sales through SmashWords are typically split four ways between SmashWords, Apple, Kobo, and B&N.
Sales and marketing are the things I hate to do. I’d druther pound away at my keyboard than try to figure out how to market a story but I’m becoming convinced that I need to pay attention to things like sales figures, advertising, etc.
I’m not naive enough to think I’ll ever quit my day job and write smut but I am covering expenses and being able to buy a nice laptop every year or two.
That’s all for this month folks. Go out and VOTE on November 8th. Until next month, if it’s the 24th, it’s time for smut from the dirty mind of Larry Archer. LarryArcher.blog
I’ve always had the same attitude toward KU as you describe. Unfortunately, there may be costs to being contrarian….
I just hate to reward Amazon for its sleazy treatment of indie authors.
Anyway, I’m glad your latest is doing so well!
While on one side I can understand why Amazon prioritizes newer content over the older material, it still pisses me off that you have a limited time frame to stake your claim. SmashWords will allow you to search for Newest as well as Highest Ranked.
Hi Larry. Good insights and an interesting point of view from a wide self publisher. I’m the opposite – just the one wide and all the rest with KU. The thing about KU is that each download counts the same as a sale for ranking, so enrolling new releases gives you that all-important ratings boost that pushes you up the search results and leads to more cash sales.
The tricky bit comes when you want to go wide because those KU downloads are still trickling in and giving you that bit extra visibility. For some books it might be the difference between an ongoing stream of sales and becoming essentially invisible. Dropping out means you lose not only the KU revenue, but also a portion of your sales, and you have to weigh that up against potential gains from other channels. Not an easy choice since you may be signing your book’s death warrant for Amazon.
Belinda,
Exactly and up until now, I’ve gone primarily wide as I hate to miss out on SmashWords, Apple, and Nook. Almost half of my SmashWords sales are from Apple. My only potential solution is to write more and put every other book in KU. Up until the last few months my Amazon sales have been about half of SmashWords but that has now flipped and last month my Amazon sales doubled my SmashWords sales. I don’t know if Zon is telling me to stay narrow but my author’s rank has been under 1000 since my last story came out almost a month ago. My new Range Rover is getting closer and closer. LOL
Well, I’m back to being mad at Amazon! They just ranked one of my most popular stories, Nina the Fallen Ballerina, as Adult for some reason? The story has been out for almost a year and is now “Adult!” I try to be careful and not cross the line with them but WTF?
They did this a while back with “Seduced by the Dark Side” which had a cover image that I loved. The girl was wearing a wife beater t-shirt tied up under her boobs and didn’t show anything except a hint of nipple through the t-shirt. It had been selling as Safe for a long time and then suddenly was ranked Adult. I had to change the cover to get the ranking back and the new image (similar) is not nearly as appealing.
I looked at that book. Hard to say why. The cover looks okay. The title’s fine. It can only be the blurb.
You know, it MIGHT be the drug simile in the blurb. Otherwise, maybe just couch the blurb in even vaguer terms.
“Drug Similie” I guess I never thought about it that way. What’s weird is that the story has been on sale for almost a year. I updated the tag words is all I did. Thanks for the heads up and I’ll go back and rewrite the blurb.
I’m going to have to pull out all the hatpins I’d stuck in my Amazon doll as they saw the error of their ways and restored my masterpiece to its rightful place among the other smut on Kindle.
I’ve got two others in the dungeon and I’ve tried multiple times to get them a pardon but to no avail.