Kindle Unlimited for Authors - So What?

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..!

How to get the most from KDP Select!

I wanted to pass on some great advice that I just read from Ruth Francisco.  Ruth has a number of books published on Kindle - as a way of thanking her for this great advice why not buy one of them?  Here is a random link to one of them that is very well reviewed:

http://www.amazon.com/Sunshine-Highway-ebook/dp/B006O1IIKS/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1332903814&sr=8-2

OK onto the great advice.

For those new to epublishing, the Kindle Select program allows indie publishers (e.i. writers who self-publish to Kindle) to offer their books for free for 5 days every three months. In turn Amazon requests an exclusive. The question is how to best make use of a free give away promotion. Here's some tips I've picked up.

1. Wait until you have at least 6 good reviews before going free.

2. There has been much discussion about how many and which days to choose. I am tending to believe 1 or 2 day promotions are best, Wed, Thurs, or Sunday. Try skipping a day between two free days.

3. Several weeks before your free promotion, alert ENT (Ereader News Today) and POI (Pixel of Ink). (Several authors suggest one month for POI.) Google their names and look for sign-up forms. Alert other book blogging sites, particularly those in your genre. This squidoo lens has links to other sites to notify your free dates: http://www.squidoo.com/going-free-kindle-ebook-promotional-campaigns-for-authors

4. On the first day of your promotion, alert all your followers on Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter. Ask your Twitter followers to retweet your promotion.

5. Twitter about your book to all Free Kindle twitter addresses (do a search for them on Twitter). Here's some to get you started.

@DigitalBkToday
@kindleebooks
@Kindlestuff
@KindleEbooksUK
@KindleBookKing
@KindleFreeBook
@free_kindle
@FreeReadFeed
@4FreeKindleBook
@FreeKindleStuff
@KindleUpdates

6. Email all good reviewers of all of your books. Many reviewers have email links on their Amazon Profile. Invite them to "gift" free copies to friends.

7. List your link here on Kindleboards, both on this link for free books, and on your individual book thread in the Bazaar.
http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/topic,97167.0.html

8. List or update your book thread on mobileread.com about your free book.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/

9. On the first day of your free promotion, get up very early (like 3 A.M.) and add your book to the Amazon Kindle Forum thread for free books. Also add a comment to your book on the Amazon Kindle Forum Meet Our Authors thread that your book is free.

10. If you have several titles, try staggering free promotions. Free promotions seem to work particularly well for books in series, drawing people to buy other books in the series.

11, Try organizing a free promotion with four or five other writers, preferably around some theme. Each of you can blog and tweet about the other writers' free books, sharing the burden of self-promotion.

12. After your free promotion when your rank is slipping, gift copies of your book to boost your rank.

13. Several weeks after your promotion, run a .99 special on your books that are NOT in Kindle Select. Simply change your prices on Amazon, or lower your prices on Smashwords. Amazon will match the price. It will appear that you are slashing your prices, with the original price and discount. (Everyone likes a deal.)
I will certainly be following this advice next time around!

Amazon KDP - the first 90 days

I have just completed 90 days of being signed up exclusively to the Amazon KDP program - so how was it for me?

There were two main benefits that I was looking for - for people to borrow my book out of the lending library (so I would be paid a fee) and also to take advantage of the 5 free days of free promotion in that period (i.e. I was allowed to give the book away free for 5 x 24 hour periods.

The lending was not at all a success!  Only one book was borrowed in the whole three months, earning me a whopping $1.60!  To be honest, I cannot say I am surprised for a number of reasons.  Firstly, I am a very small fish in a big pond and there are hundreds and thousands of other options.  Secondly, my book has been priced at either 99 cents or 2.99 and one would think that borrowers would prefer to borrow a bestseller and save themselves ten bucks (the borrower can only borrow one book free per month). Thirdly, because I am enrolled in this program, savvy borrowers will know that I am likely to offer my book for free at some point in the 90 days, so why waste a borrow?

Frankly, I think it highly unlikely anyone is sitting around daily just praying that I will give my book away - chance would be a fine thing!

Anyway, I was always more interested in the freebie side of the equation.  This was rather more successful although of course not in the least lucrative.  I reckon that I gave away well over 600 books during the 5 free days, with a peak of 200 books in one of those days.  Not bad, although I could probably have done better.

How did I use the free days?  I spread them out.  One right at the start and one very near the end and the other three pretty evenly spaced.  I didn't opt to roll 2 or 3 days together as I wasn't sure that was the best way to approach it.  I am not really any the wiser having done it all day by day.  I think it is more fun to spread it out, personally.

However you space it, the key is to be as well prepared as you can be and make sure your advertising on various sites and boards, or Twitter is all in place for your free day.  The days where I did not advertise as much showed much lower downloads.  One snag is that by the fifth day, if you are using the same marketing channels, you may not be reaching as many new people as you would like.

Did my free sales generate any further sales when I reverted back to a selling price - the answer is yes but not a huge amount and the trickle soon dried up completely.  You do get the benefit of appearing in Amazon's "people who bought your book, also bought this" section, which must have some real benefit.  But there was no real explosion of sales, even though I got pretty high up in the free charts.

Did I get a lot of reviews from the freebies?  Hardly any, which is disappointing but hardly surprising - for a start I don't know just how many people actually ended up reading the book in the end, and secondly, why should I expect people to leave a review just for me, out of the kindness of their hearts - how many reviews have I left for other Indie writers - perhaps two or three at most.

Having said all of that - have I re-enrolled in the program for another 90 days?  Yes I have - probably through a sense of inertia as much as anything (you are automatically re-enrolled if you do  not opt out).  We will see how it goes this time, but like anything else - you only get out what you put in...

I am also conscious of the fact that to upload my manuscript to other sites such as Smashwords or Barnes and Noble would require some re-formatting and jumping through hoops - and I am not sure I am going to see the sales from it. My understanding is that Amazon is currently where it is at from a e-book perspective.