Kindle Unlimited~How I'll Approach It
I currently have five titles in Kindle Unlimited and borrows make up about one fourth of my ebook income. Of course, KU has some advantages beyond income--increased visibility in the Kindle Store, for example. I'm not sure how that can be measured in relation to an actual increase in purchases. I would say possibly a handful of purchases can be attributed each month to word of mouth from borrowers. That's probably a generous number, but one I'll go with for now.
With the changes coming up next month when KU switches to paying by page instead of paying nothing until readers read 10% of a book, and then once they do, Amazon paid the full borrow rate for that month. It averaged about $1.38/borrow.
What I'm going to do to determine if it's worth staying in, since Amazon will only give us the number of pages read, and not the number of books borrowed, I can only go by pages read. Call me a pessimist but I don't think we'll get more than 2 cents/page read. That will be okay, actually if most of my borrowers finish my books. At an average page count of almost 300 pages a book for 3 of my 5 books, and the other 2 averaging 175 pages, I'll make out better than I do with the current system.
Being even more conservative, I'm going to assume the worst at a penny/page. That would still be better for me--if readers consume the whole book. Big if. Of course I hope it happens more often than not, but the reality is, readers--especially readers who haven't invested much in a book--give up on books for all kinds of reasons. Some are within my control--write a better book, for instance--others are beyond my control. An example: a reader begins reading March Into Hell after downloading No Good Deed for free. Their real life gets busy, they stop reading, and then forget about it. A month later, they want to borrow some other book and have to return one to get within the 10 book checkout limit, and March Into Hell pops up and Amazon asks the reader if they want to return it. They debate, then decide to return it because they can always read it later, and they forgot what it was about anyway. Boom. Book returned.
My books are due to come out of Select in mid-July. Most of the time, I'd probably just roll them back into KU because I don't normally have a lot of sales on other platforms, but I recently had a Bookbub ad for No Good Deed, and I had thousands of downloads outside of Amazon. It's been killing me that I can't put my other books up on those sites. I wish I could do both and hate the exclusivity clause in KU. Okay, rant about that over. Reality is, I hate to leave those readers hanging.
To know if staying in is worthwhile, in my head I'm going to assign a penny/page read, average out the pages read/day, and see if the income from those comes out to the same income I'm earning now on borrows/day. If it's significantly lower, I'll yank the books out of Select, and put them back onto other platforms. I just hope two weeks is enough time to evaluate the program.
That may sound all very business-like, but I don't know how else to evaluate it. Up until this Bookbub ad, even the sales I did have on other platforms were 'silent' sales. I didn't get reviews or feedback in any way, so I didn't know if anyone was actually reading the books, but in the last month, No Good Deed has racked up quite a few reviews on other platforms, and I've had messages from readers who found the book on other sites. Hearing from them makes me even more inclined to pull out of KU.
One question I have is will Amazon count books borrowed in June, read past 10%, but continued into July. Say someone borrows a book on June 28th, reads the first 10% by June 30th, and continues reading the book into July, finishing all 300 pages. Will Amazon pay me for both the 10% borrow in June, and the 270 pages in July? Or will they consider that book as paid for already? Will they tally those pages, but then not pay them because the book was paid in June? And if they do that, how will I know?
With the changes coming up next month when KU switches to paying by page instead of paying nothing until readers read 10% of a book, and then once they do, Amazon paid the full borrow rate for that month. It averaged about $1.38/borrow.
What I'm going to do to determine if it's worth staying in, since Amazon will only give us the number of pages read, and not the number of books borrowed, I can only go by pages read. Call me a pessimist but I don't think we'll get more than 2 cents/page read. That will be okay, actually if most of my borrowers finish my books. At an average page count of almost 300 pages a book for 3 of my 5 books, and the other 2 averaging 175 pages, I'll make out better than I do with the current system.
Being even more conservative, I'm going to assume the worst at a penny/page. That would still be better for me--if readers consume the whole book. Big if. Of course I hope it happens more often than not, but the reality is, readers--especially readers who haven't invested much in a book--give up on books for all kinds of reasons. Some are within my control--write a better book, for instance--others are beyond my control. An example: a reader begins reading March Into Hell after downloading No Good Deed for free. Their real life gets busy, they stop reading, and then forget about it. A month later, they want to borrow some other book and have to return one to get within the 10 book checkout limit, and March Into Hell pops up and Amazon asks the reader if they want to return it. They debate, then decide to return it because they can always read it later, and they forgot what it was about anyway. Boom. Book returned.
My books are due to come out of Select in mid-July. Most of the time, I'd probably just roll them back into KU because I don't normally have a lot of sales on other platforms, but I recently had a Bookbub ad for No Good Deed, and I had thousands of downloads outside of Amazon. It's been killing me that I can't put my other books up on those sites. I wish I could do both and hate the exclusivity clause in KU. Okay, rant about that over. Reality is, I hate to leave those readers hanging.
To know if staying in is worthwhile, in my head I'm going to assign a penny/page read, average out the pages read/day, and see if the income from those comes out to the same income I'm earning now on borrows/day. If it's significantly lower, I'll yank the books out of Select, and put them back onto other platforms. I just hope two weeks is enough time to evaluate the program.
That may sound all very business-like, but I don't know how else to evaluate it. Up until this Bookbub ad, even the sales I did have on other platforms were 'silent' sales. I didn't get reviews or feedback in any way, so I didn't know if anyone was actually reading the books, but in the last month, No Good Deed has racked up quite a few reviews on other platforms, and I've had messages from readers who found the book on other sites. Hearing from them makes me even more inclined to pull out of KU.
One question I have is will Amazon count books borrowed in June, read past 10%, but continued into July. Say someone borrows a book on June 28th, reads the first 10% by June 30th, and continues reading the book into July, finishing all 300 pages. Will Amazon pay me for both the 10% borrow in June, and the 270 pages in July? Or will they consider that book as paid for already? Will they tally those pages, but then not pay them because the book was paid in June? And if they do that, how will I know?
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