Last year, I considered whether Kindle Unlimited is worth subscribing to from a reader perspective and also what’s in it for authors, who get royalties from pages read. Here’s what happened afterwards.
I later ran out of special offers when renewing my subscription and started paying for KU at the full price per month. Now, I find myself taking a break from the subscription. I’m sure I’ll be back at some point, however I was spending too much time browsing for KU books to read, feeling compelled to use it as my main source of ebooks. I wasn’t finding much that I wanted to read, or to continue with if I’d downloaded them. This doesn’t mean I’ve run out of good books on there! But it’s quite difficult to find the sort of books I like. The same irrelevant books keep popping up and there are lots of dodgy AI-looking books which clog up the search results.
I’ve read some excellent books on KU and I know I will again. For the time being, I’m going to read more ARCs as my main source of ebooks, plus occasional ebooks from the public library.
Now for the author perspective. I do get page reads from KU – approaching 30,000 since I published my first book! – although the royalties are very small compared with those for sales. For this reason, some authors decide not to be in KU, as it may lose them sales. They can also sell their books from places other than Amazon. I’m keeping my books in KU though, not only because I’m not ready to put the books on other platforms; I’m sure there will be readers like me, who want value from their subscriptions and who much prefer to borrow ebooks instead of buying them. I’m grateful for KU reads because at least the books are being read and this might, with any luck, lead to ratings and reviews. If writing books was my main career (one can dream) and the books were bestsellers, I would no doubt have a different perspective…