Momma’s Gone Wide: Abandoning KU For Access to a Larger Market
As an author who also runs an indie publishing house, I find myself in a weird position of guinea-pigging for my business.
I watched other writers talk about their journey with Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited platform—many of them to great success. KU is a subscription-based offering that allows readers to pay a monthly fee for access to thousands of books for their Kindle devices. Authors are paid per page read and the big marketing benefit is that we get to shout that readers can READ FOR FREE even though “FREE” is a wild stretch of the truth. Books that do well generate a lot of revenue for the author. (Romance and Fantasy and, of course, the hot new thing that is Romantasy.) Unfortunately, there are other genres that are notorious poor performers on the platform. (Literary, Speculative, APOCALYPTIC. You know, the kind of stuff I write.)
When I released When The Trees All Burned, I decided to enroll it in Kindle Unlimited as a business experiment. I thought if I could test the waters there it would leave me better equipped to advise the authors I support without putting any of their work “at risk.” The big ask (requirement) of KU is that your ebook must be exclusive to Amazon, shutting you off from a huge potential market. Knowing that, and knowing that my genre was not known to excell on the platform, I still agreed to sign my name on the dotted line, committing to remaining exclusive until I deemed it was no longer serving me.
I allowed that experiment to stand for eight long and unsuccessful months, effectively ending my contract on Christmas Eve with a total net income of $17.22 — Merry Christmas to me!
Things I can spend my $17.22 on:
a cup of coffee and an asiago breakfast sandwich from the local cafe where I sometimes like to write
3 used books from the local thrift store
5% of a one month residency in Montreal
a t-shirt that says “I listed my book on KU and all I got was this T-shirt”
Thanks Amazon KU!
It is with great pleasure and a sigh of relief that I let you know When The Trees All Burned is now available across multiple platforms, inluding Kobo, Apple, Nook, and as a direct download from Chicken House Press (currently listed for just $1.99 as a special get-it-from-the-publisher deal!) as well as most other places you might go to find ebooks. And by this time tomorrow? It should also be popping up in the OverDrive app, which means your library can get it for their Libby collection - you just need to go in and request it.
So happy e-reading friends. I hope you’ll consider this a warm invitation to dive into the world of apocalyptic survival. And if ebooks aren’t your thing, the paperback is always here for you.
