So like most of you here, I’m an avid reader which means that any place offering free books has me doing a little happy dance. So when I heard about the Kindle unlimited program you could bet that I was one of the first people to sign-up. For those of you who don’t know the Kindle unlimited program is a service offered by Amazon where for $10 dollars, a month you have access to an exclusive catalog of books, think of it kind of like a virtual library at your fingertips. when I found out that I could enroll the book that I had just published into the program I was curious. So with a little more research, I decided to do an experimental trial run with the program here the few interesting things I found that I wasn’t expecting.
Number one: You do not get paid until your book is completely finished by the reader. This was one of the most interesting things for me because what I didn’t realize was the reader has no time limit on how fast they read my book. So depending on how popular it was it could be anywhere from a couple days to a couple months before I would get paid from one single read-through of my book. This was a drastic change compared to automatically getting paid for their one-time purchase.
Number two: While Kindle unlimited offers and exclusive readership what they don’t offer any sort of boost so to speak they do offer to advertise but, of course, you have to pay for that, if you’re trying to get your book off the ground and do not have very much money to do so, in the beginning, paid advertising would be rather costly. My book ended up and buried in the catalog listings because it failed to climb the sales ranking which means nobody saw book unless they specifically typed into the search bar on Amazon.
In short in my experience with the Kindle unlimited program, as a writer was an unsuccessful one, in the end, I’ve decided but I will try my luck with Smashwords And continue to blog and post to Facebook to see if I get different results. Now just because Kindle unlimited didn’t work out for me doesn’t mean it can’t work for you. Self-publishing is a mix and match of different puzzle pieces and you have to find the combination that works best for you. There’ve been a lot of successful writers who have utilized the Kindle unlimited program such as Bella Forest and Bianca Scardoni. So it is possible, My final piece of advice? Do what makes you feel comfortable and don’t let anybody else try to tell you otherwise.
Chandra Rooney books 