Why Kindle Unlimited Is Killing Your Publishing Business

 

     Kindle is the best traffic source for ebooks hands down. There are a lot of ebook self-publishing platforms out there, but none compare to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (or KDP). It has has a reputation for making a lot of people money quickly and easily. But what you don't know about KDP or Amazon is that they don't have a reputation for playing nice with their vendors or publishers. Amazon over the years has taken a very hard-line stance at protecting customers. So much so that they even will terminate accounts with vendors and publishers over the smallest of infractions, or even worse, no infractions at all.
   
     Think of it from Amazon's prospective. You are profiting off of their platform and they take a cut of that profit. They have unlimited businesses who try to make money from Amazon's different services. If they feel that the customer is negatively impacted in any form, they will cut ties with your business.

     Let's take Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program. It is basically the "Netflix of books". Customers pay a 10$ monthly subscription to read as many books as their little hearts desire. You as the publisher, enroll your book into the Kindle Select program so that you can get extra profit from Kindle Unlimited members. You agree to only sell your book on Kindle in exchange for a second revenue stream. So now not only do you get paid sales, but you also get a second revenue stream for your same books.

     You get paid 1/2 cent roughly per page read of your book. Seems like a pretty sweet deal until you break down the numbers. Let's say your book is an even 300 pages. you sell that book for 2.99 in the Kindle book store. You are going to get around $2 per sale after Amazon takes their cut. Now lets say you get around 10 people to buy your book. You are going to net around $20 in profit. Now here is where the second revenue stream, KENP (Kindle Enrolled Nominal Pages) comes in. Let's say you get 10 people to download your book. If your book is 300 pages and they are valued at 1/2 cent per page, that gives you a total of $15 bucks! Here's the problem, of those 10 people, statistically only one will read the whole book. The other nine will read varying amounts but the majority wont read it past the first chapter, if at all.

     Out of those 10 People, you are looking more at around 500 pages read, or $2.50 dollars. Now take a look at things from a different perspective. If you were to not enroll your book into KDP Select and place your book on all the other platforms plus promote the book yourself from your own site (I show you how to do this here), Do you think you can make more than $2.50 dollars? I'm guessing you definitely can crush that number by selling your books on other platforms as well as selling it yourself.

     In the end Amazon wants content. Customers pay Amazon $10 per month to be a Kindle Unlimited member and they can't afford to pay you more than that per person without losing money. Amazon came up with a way around this by raising or lowering the per page payout and thus your profits and other authors profits. Amazon is essentially using your books for cheap content to fuel its Kindle Unlimited program.

     My suggestion would be to not enroll in KDP select anymore. In fact, My suggestion would be to sell your books on your own website and drive traffic to your website. You could sell your books at $5 dollars easily for a good quality book and there are tons of FREE ways to promote your books. You Keep 100% of the profits as well as 100% of the traffic.
When your book is on Amazon, its their website and they are out to sell everything and anything. You drive traffic to your books on Amazon, and they in turn post tons of stuff on your books sales page. "Other people bought this", "You might like this" bla bla bla. Its not your sales page, its Amazon's and they are going to sell on it. I could consider any money that you made selling your ebooks on platforms as Icing on the cake instead of the whole business model.

     You are selling yourself short so you can use Amazon's traffic. They don't care about you unless you are buying something. Buy into yourself and reach your full potential instead of scrambling for the scraps that Amazon was so gracious to leave you.