Kindle Unlimited or Wide? Where to Publish Your Debut Novel

Think of Kindle Unlimited as a buffet. Readers pay one monthly price and eat as much as they want, as long as it’s on the buffet. Going wide is selling your cooking in every market in town, one plate at a time. Both feed people. They don’t feed the same people.

A debut author asked a big indie group where to publish the first book of her new romance series. She wanted to be wide on every platform, mostly because getting into libraries mattered to her. She was planning her own website with a store for bookmarks, overlays and signed copies. She admitted she isn’t a fan of Amazon.

Almost everyone she’d asked gave her the same advice. Publish in Kindle Unlimited first, then pull the book after 90 days and go wide.

She wasn’t sure. Her genre is crowded, and she worried that with every new book locked into KU for its first 90 days, her series would end up scattered across stores. So she asked the group to settle it. The answers were better than the advice she’d been getting, and one of them corrected something my own platforms article had wrong.

What is the difference between Kindle Unlimited and going wide?

Kindle Unlimited is Amazon’s ebook subscription. You enroll a book through KDP Select, and KU readers can borrow it as part of their monthly fee. Amazon pays you per page read out of a shared fund. In exchange, the ebook has to be exclusive to Amazon for each 90-day enrollment period. You can’t sell that ebook on Apple, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Google Play or your own website while it’s enrolled. (Update: Kindle Unlimited’s new name, Kindle+, and the audiobooks it now pays for)

Going wide means you skip KU and sell the ebook everywhere. Most authors publish to Amazon through KDP and reach the other stores through an aggregator like Draft2Digital. I compared the platforms in self-publishing platforms: where to publish your book.

The exclusivity only covers the ebook. Paperbacks and hardcovers can go anywhere either way.

Watch: how does kindle unlimited work for authors?, Katesbookdate

Can books in Kindle Unlimited be in libraries?

Yes. A lot of authors haven’t heard yet. One of the group’s moderators answered her first on this point. Amazon lifted that restriction about a year ago, and ebooks enrolled in KU can now sit in every library system too.

For the debut author, that took away her biggest reason for going wide. If libraries are the main thing keeping you out of KU, they aren’t a reason anymore. Other authors in the group confirmed it. When they moved books from wide into KU, they could leave them in the library channels. Check KDP’s current terms before you rely on this. Amazon changes its rules without much warning, and it doesn’t always change them back.

Does the “90 days in KU, then go wide” plan work?

Not well. That was the moderator’s answer, and the reasoning held up.

KU readers are binge readers. Many read a book a week or more. When they find a new author, they treat the series as an investment, and they want to read every book without paying extra. If they see a series that’s partly in KU and partly out, many of them skip it entirely.

So an author who rotates each new book through KU for 90 days and then pulls it gets the worst of both. The KU readers won’t commit to a broken series, and the wide readers are waiting for books that aren’t in their store yet.

His suggestion for authors who want both was to keep the whole series in KU until 6 to 12 months after the last book comes out, then take it wide. Even that isn’t perfect. KU readers favor authors with lots of books in the program.

There’s a practical problem with going the other direction too. Pulling a book from wide and putting it into KU takes weeks or months while the aggregator gets every store to delist it. Amazon checks. I covered that delay in the platforms article linked above.

How much more do Kindle Unlimited books earn than wide books?

The moderator gave market share figures for global English-language ebook sales on retailers. Kindle sales are about 70 percent of the market. KU borrows add about 17 percent. Apple is about 9 percent, and every other retailer splits the remaining 4 percent.

So a book in KU reaches about 87 percent of that market. A wide book reaches about 83 percent, because it gives up the KU share and gains Apple, Kobo and the rest. Those numbers look close. The earnings aren’t. KU concentrates everything on one store, and borrows give the book visibility on Kindle. Counting retailer sales only, he said, KU books out-earn wide books by about 2.2 to 1 on average.

Readers don’t cross over much either.

A KU reader has to read three to five books a month for the subscription to pay for itself. Someone paying for the buffet doesn’t order off the menu. He said a KU reader is about as likely to buy a book outside KU as an Apple or Kobo reader is to switch to Kindle to read a KU book. It happens, but rarely.

Those figures come from one experienced author. Amazon publishes almost nothing about how its store works. They line up with what a lot of fiction authors report.

Why I don’t use Kindle Unlimited

I tried KU seven or eight years ago. The results were mediocre, and certainly not enough to justify the restrictions.

I haven’t used it since, so it’s probably changed a lot.

I couldn’t use it now if I wanted to. Amazon terminated my KDP account after I followed its own instructions to change a paperback subtitle. I wrote about that in why Amazon KDP sucks. All my books now go through IngramSpark, and Ingram distributes them to Amazon. Books that reach Amazon through Ingram aren’t eligible for KU. That’s the main thing I gave up when I moved, and I explained the rest in IngramSpark: how I publish now.

I don’t think KU is worth the trouble. I write a lot of nonfiction, and authority nonfiction isn’t what KU readers come to the buffet for. But some authors seem to be having real success with it. My experience is one data point, and an old one.

When does going wide beat Kindle Unlimited?

The moderator was clear about this too. Wide gets strong when you’re ready for direct sales. He said direct sales with strong ads behind them can outstrip retailer sales, and he knows authors making $500,000 or more a year from direct sales alone. That takes a big ad budget, thousands of dollars a month. Crowdfunding is another source, with ebook add-ons on Kickstarter campaigns. You can’t do either with a book that’s exclusive to Amazon.

The debut author already planned a website store. That counts for something. If you expect to run a real direct store within a year or so, it can make sense to start wide, so you’re beginning the way you plan to continue. Wide is harder to learn, he said, and much more stable than KU once it’s working. I covered the numbers on selling from your own site in direct-from-author book sales.

Another long-time author made a different case for wide, one I think gets too little attention. KU readers and readers who buy on many stores are different groups of people. Market to KU readers at the start and they become your fan base. Market to buyers across all the stores and those buyers become your fan base. She started wide before KU existed, built a diverse readership, and still makes more wide than she ever did when she experimented with KU.

Her readers skip the buffet. They shop in every market, and they found her there.

Do you need a different pen name for each genre?

The debut author planned romance first, then a mystery thriller, then more romance, then an eight-book fantasy romance series. The moderator brought up pen names before the format question.

Retailers build audience profiles at the pen name level, he said. If you write romance, Kindle shows your next book to romance readers. If that next book is a thriller, the romance readers won’t buy it, Amazon concludes the book is a flop, and it stops showing it to anyone. Then you’re paying for every new reader with ads.

His rule was one pen name per audience. Where two genres share a lot of readers, one name can cover both. He writes science fiction and fantasy under one name because those readers overlap, and his romance under another. He also pointed out that every new pen name is like launching another imprint. More books per year, more ads, more social media accounts. Keep to the names you need.

He also mentioned that he thinks about four or more books a year per audience is the pace that keeps an audience growing. That’s a lot for a new writer with a day job. Plenty of authors manage with fewer, and grow slower.

How should a debut author decide between KU and wide?

Start with the money you plan to make and where it’ll come from. If you’ll rely on retailer sales for the next year or two and you write in a genre where KU readers are hungry, KU is likely to pay more. Put the whole series in, and leave it in.

If you’re building a direct store you’ll advertise every month, or crowdfunding, or you want readers on every platform from day one, go wide from the start and stay wide. Don’t plan to bounce between the two with every release.

If library access was your main reason for going wide, look again. That isn’t a trade-off anymore.

And whichever way you go, don’t let a store own all of it.

Keep your email list and your files somewhere Amazon can’t reach. I learned that one the hard way.

The publishing and marketing hub has more on platforms, pricing and launches. If you’d like help planning where your books go before the first one comes out, my self-published author service covers that. The buffet and the market both feed people. Pick the one your readers are already standing in.

From the author

Publish Your Book
Publish Your Book is my self-publishing guide, written after more than 100 titles. It compares five platforms side by side for authors choosing where to publish.

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