The publishing world has been abuzz over the past few days as Amazon took the plunge and officially announced their latest wheeze - Kindle Unlimited. As an indie self-publisher myself (check out my book on the other tabs of this blog!), the first question I asked myself was, "How will this affect me?"
I did a search online to see what initial thoughts were out there, but many of them focused on the issue of what royalty would be received as part of this program. The general thinking seems to be that royalties will be cut and therefore this will be a bad deal for authors. I'll comment on that in a minute as well as some highlights some other key points which don't seem to have emerged yet. But first of all, just to recap what Kindle has announced, just in case you have been hiding under the proverbial rock for the last few days (Hey, it's summer and I know some people have better things to do than stay in front of a laptop 24/7!
To quote Amazon directly:
Kindle Unlimited is a new service that allows you to read as
much as you want, choosing from over 600,000 titles and thousands of audiobooks.
Freely explore new authors, books, and genres from mysteries and romance to
sci-fi and more. You can read on any device. It's available for $9.99 a month
and you can cancel anytime
So what does this mean to me? Here are some initial thoughts:
1) Quantity of books published becomes important (OK, even more important!)
I've lost count of the number of times I have read old publishing sages saying the same thing. Focus less on marketing and more on writing. The simple truth is that the more books you write, the more "shelf space" you will occupy and the more likelihood that people will come across some of your work and find the rest. Of course, writers are born to write and readers were born to pay to read what writers have written, so it all makes a lot of sense. It strikes me though, that there is another reason - now there is a way for avid readers to download books en masse that are not being given away for free. Previously, under KDP Select, a buyer could only borrow one book a month, now they can acquire as many as their device will hold. They have more shelf space that you can fill. If you only write one book, you can only get one royalty from that one reader. If you write ten, they may acquire ten - and hopefully read all ten! The numbers game becomes more important as royalties go down - to compensate your volumes have to go up!
2) Shorter may be better
We don't have all the details as to how the royalty system will work in practice yet. But, simply based on what Amazon has come out and said, it seems that a flat royalty will be paid out on all qualifying books (I'll come on to the qualifying in point 3). That would mean that the same royalty would be paid out on a 120,000-word epic as on a 10,000-word short story. If it works like that it does sound a little unfair. A writer would be wise to split his/her tome into 3 x 40,000 slices and therefore get three times the royalties (assuming of course the reader stuck with you all the way to book three!)
3) Don't hold back in the first 10%
To qualify for a royalty under Kindle Unlimited, you simply have to coax the reader through the first 10% of your book. Perhaps that is another reason to keep your book on the shorter side, for a 10,000-word book only requires the reader to battle through 1,000! However, the key message here is to make sure you give the reader every chance to make it to that 10% level. Now, obviously, any writer worth his/her salt will invest vast amounts of time in getting the beginning absolutely right - you want to hook the reader right in and propel them through what is coming. But now there is real, financial, skin in the game. It may be worth looking at the first 10% of your book to see if there is anything that can be improved, perhaps some back story that can be deferred until later in the book or perhaps there are some cliff-hangers that you can introduce.
4) Everything comes to he who waits
What I find fascinating is that royalties will still be earned, years after the download happens, as long as that 10% threshold is hit. In the past, as KDP Select only allowed one book per month, the expectation was that the reader would be very selective in purchasing and would be likely to read that book in the same month. Indie authors have had to deal with the grim prospect that their freebie books would be downloaded and left to rot on Kindles without ever being read. That still might happen, but at least the prospect now exists that there could be some financial reward down the line if the book ever gets rediscovered.
5) Whither KDP Select?
What remains to be seen is what happens to the KDP Select program once Kindle Unlimited gets fully underway. Will there be a high degree of cannibalization? The question is why people sign up to Amazon Prime - is it more for the books or for the delivery? Will Amazon Prime now focus on delivery and other bells and whistles and leave Kindle Unlimited to deal with ebook side? Obviously Kindle Unlimited gives you much more bang for your book (apologies for the terrible pun!) so I don't see many people wanting both. However, the way this is being set up, it's an all-or-nothing decision for a publisher - if they like what KDP Select does for them and want to keep it, they have to swallow Kindle Unlimited as well. Amazon didn't have to like the two so they are clearly doing this deliberately as part of their strategy. In the end, we might find out that KDP Select is redundant anyway.
So how does this affect me? Well, on balance, I am quite excited and intrigued by this. That's probably because I also also happen to curate 30 or 40 religious e-books for another author, that all fall into the 10,000 to 20,000 word count - and I think they could really benefit. At the moment, I am not finding that KDP Select is doing a heck of a lot for me, in terms of free download exposure or borrows. I am prepared to give this the benefit of the doubt and see how it goes.
Hope the above gets you thinking. Feel free to share any of the above, but link back to this page please..!
