(Note to readers: I try to keep this blog a place for readers, but occasionally I’ll do a writing or business related post intended for other writers. This will be one of those posts. I hope you’ll find it of interest too, but if not, rest assured, we’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming shortly:)
Disclaimer — What follows are numbers and results of my experience with KU. The rest is my opinion only. YMMV 🙂
I’m an Amazon fan, and I believe they’ve done more for writers than anyone in the past half century — perhaps ever. That said, as much as I like Amazon, I like writers even more — and I want to make sure writers know what they’re potentially getting into when it comes to KDP Select, and specifically, Kindle Unlimited (KU).
As an experiment, I put a standalone novelette, and a five part serial into KU for Q4 2014. I also had to pull the full novel of the serial from other retailers since the serial installments (which share the same text as what’s in the novel) were going into KU. This latter factor would prove to be huge.
So, one standalone, and five serial installments went into KU, plus the serial’s novelization that had to go Amazon only. What was the verdict?
I believe KU is a bad idea for many writers. I’ll explain why below. [Read more…]