Why I Chose to Go Exclusive With Amazon
Six months of experimenting, royalties and a kick in the gut
There’s just no other way to start this story. I’m aware that a lot of articles start this way these days but…
Wasn’t 2020 a shocker!
It was a huge year of huge deeds and, it turns out, huge lessons. Including a rather hefty business one.
In June 2020, I started using Amazon Advertising and my sales did a wonderful whoosh up.
A month or so later, the returns started coming in.
Since 2020, readers have been buying my ebooks, keeping them for all of two weeks or so, and then returning them for a full refund.
Now, let me start by saying that it’s very easy to accidentally buy an ebook on Amazon.
Been there, done that.
I did a panic, searched for the refund button, hit it and breathed a sigh of relief.
No, I didn’t think about the poor author at the time. It all happened so quick.
The readers who wait two weeks to return an ebook have no such luxury.
How do I know they had those books for two weeks?
Well, my sales went up but not that by that much. I could still see patterns.
Readers, perhaps, don’t understand that authors celebrate every single sale and when their sales are low enough, they can see you returning that ebook.
It’s not a good feeling.
In fact, it’s a kick in the gut, angry, tearful, why am I bothering with any of this? feeling.
It’s a maybe I should quit feeling.
It’s a f*ck Amazon for having such stupid rules feeling.
And then you stop, take a deep breath and remember why you write and publish.
Personally, I write because I have to and I publish because I want to.
On a deep level, I don’t care if readers don’t like what I have to offer but that doesn’t mean my skin is thick (my skin is so thin, it’s almost transparent. I’m one of those people who gets sunburnt in Scotland).
The first time someone returned one of my ebooks and took money away from me, I paused. I understood. There’s a pandemic happening, people are losing their jobs, reading is the great escape but what if you can’t really afford the £2.99? Worse yet, what if you buy that book and hated it. What a waste of £3.
I get it.
I don’t agree with it but I get it.
Around the same time, I was experimenting with Kindle Unlimited. Or is it Kindle Select? It seems to change depending on what I’m looking at.
Readers pay Amazon a subscription fee and can download eligible ebooks and read them for free. Authors get paid by page read. Which means that if a reader downloads your ebook and hates it, you still get paid for what they’ve read before they discarded it and moved on. The reader doesn’t feel annoyed about a few wasted quid (or dollars) and everyone’s happy.
Yes, the royalties for Kindle Unlimited as less than those of ebooks but last year I was fast learning that ebooks could be returned and those royalties snatched away from me while page reads were all mine.
I have three fantasy series published and at that point only one series in Kindle Unlimited. The rest of my books were published ‘wide’, meaning they were available everywhere else you can get ebooks (Kobo, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Google Play, etc).
Slowly, as my Amazon adverts began to take off and work their magic, my page reads increased along with my Amazon royalties. Meanwhile, my sales in Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc, remained at a firm and steady zero.
What would happen, then, if I put my other two series into Kindle Unlimited?
I was getting a few sales here and there for them, thanks to the adverts, but nothing too amazing. I put a second series into Kindle Unlimited and, as the months passed, watched the page reads increase.
Then, later than I should have done, I took all of my books and put them into Kindle Unlimited.
The thing is, by enrolling your book in Kindle Unlimited, you’re agreeing to do so for three months and during that time, your ebook cannot be available anywhere else.
You’re exclusive to Amazon.
It was an experiment. I gave the books three months and watched my royalties. I watched them rise and, because Kindle Unlimited love a series, I watched them do another little whoosh with every new release.
I completely agree that Amazon shouldn’t have the monopoly. It’s awful that we have to stay exclusive to Amazon in order to get those page reads and it’s frustrating that the royalties of page reads are quite low.
However, seeing as how my sales on other platforms were a big fat zero and every attempt to buy a feature with those platforms ended in rejection, being exclusive to Amazon doesn’t feel like such a hefty cost.
These marketing tactics and positionings are always worth experimenting with. If I hadn’t, I would still be making around £5 a month from my nine novels. But with a mixture of Kindle Unlimited and Amazon adverts pointing readers in my direction, my royalties keep going up.
The next experiment?
What will happen when I dive into the hot, bestselling genre of romance. The genre known to give Kindle Unlimited authors thousand dollar months.
You can find those fantasy series at www.jenice.co.uk.
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