Wide Publishing, Kindle Unlimited & Why I’m Back in KU

After my grand announcement last year about taking my books out of KDP Select (Kindle Unlimited), they are back.

There. I’ve said it.

After my third – and longest – foray into wide publishing, I’ve put my books back into KU. I don’t have a crystal ball – if I did, I’d have used it to predict far more useful things, like bestseller algorithms – but I suspect this will be my last trip wide.

Famous last words, obviously. Indie publishing has a way of making a fool of me, usually just after I’ve made a calm, sensible decision in public. But at the moment I feel oddly settled about it.

I left Kindle Unlimited because I wasn’t getting fabulous traction there anymore, and I started wondering if the ‘wide’ grass was greener. Authors talked about building businesses that weren’t dependent on Amazon; about finding readers on Kobo, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble and Google Play.

All of that sounded very sensible. It still sounds sensible. Wide publishing can work beautifully for some authors, and I don’t want this to be one of those ‘KU good, wide bad’ posts, because that would be silly and unfair. Plenty of authors do brilliantly wide – I was not one of them.

Wide publishing needs a particular sort of energy – again, not my sort. You have to build audiences in different places, understand the quirks of each retailer and keep nudging readers in several directions at once. You have to be visible, strategic, organised and persistent.

I am one of the least enthusiastic marketers on the planet. So naturally, I decided to make my life more complicated.

Because I have a fairly chunky backlist, going wide was not a quick little administrative job. I uploaded through Draft2Digital, uploaded separately to Kobo and Google Play, checked links, fiddled with categories, waited for things to go live, found things that needed changing, changed them, then noticed something else. It took ages. The sort of ages where you begin to question all your life choices and wonder whether you should have taken up brain surgery instead.

Then the universe played a trick on me. In my first week wide, somebody – or possibly several somebodies – bought a lot of my books on Barnes & Noble. ‘Ah,’ I thought. ‘This is it – the Holy Grail of publishing. Crack open the Bollie, darling.’

Sadly, the champagne was premature.

After that promising start, things began to fizzle out like a damp firework.

Meanwhile, on Amazon, I was still selling plenty of books – but I wasn’t making much money from them.

Because I’d gone wide, I had to price differently. Many wide authors recommend making the first book in a series free, which makes sense as a strategy. I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it, so I made my first-in-series books 99p / 99c instead. Then, because of Amazon price-matching, they had to be 99p / 99c on Amazon too.

So yes, I could look at my Amazon sales and think, ‘Gosh, I’ve sold 60 or 80 books this month,’ which sounds lovely. But when a lot of those sales are 99p / 99c books earning the lower royalty rate, it is not, shall we say, yacht material.

It’s not even dinghy material – more ‘small inflatable lilo with a slow puncture’ material.

In hindsight, I probably should have realised wide was never going to be a natural fit. I knew it required more marketing.

And yet I went ahead anyway. There is probably a useful lesson here about self-knowledge, though it would have been cheaper and quicker to learn it from a fridge magnet – or Instagram.

Some authors love the challenge of being wide. They enjoy direct sales, promotions, newsletter swaps, retailer-specific opportunities and all the clever things I admire from a distance while eating buttered toast.

I write books. I enjoy readers finding the books. I quite like tinkering with blurbs, covers and metadata when I’m in the mood. But marketing across multiple retailers with consistent enthusiasm is where my soul goes to die.

Still, the experiment wasn’t a waste. Uploading everything again forced me to look properly at my blurbs and metadata. I rewrote blurbs that had been quietly annoying me, revamped book covers and generally tidied things up. 

Now the books are back in Kindle Unlimited in better shape than when they left, which is nice – a bit like going on a long, inconvenient shopping expedition and coming home with a decent pair of jeans – not an entire wardrobe.

In the 90s, I learned Transcendental Meditation, and something Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said stuck with me: don’t have your feet in two boats.

That’s what I’d been doing. Before I took my books out of Kindle Unlimited, I was technically in KU, but mentally I still had one eye on the other boat. I kept thinking, ‘Maybe I’d do better wide. Maybe I should be wide. Perhaps all the sensible authors are being discovered on Apple and Kobo while I sit here being stubborn.’

Trying wide properly has stopped that. I gave it long enough to get a decent sense of it, and now I’ve come back to Amazon and Kindle Unlimited without quite so much dithering in the background.

Not because KU is perfect. It isn’t. Not because Amazon is a benevolent fairy godmother who sent me to the ball. It isn’t. But for the level of marketing I am realistically willing to do, KU makes more sense.

Advertising is part of that. When my books were wide, Amazon ads felt less appealing and more expensive, because without Kindle Unlimited reads, half the opportunity had disappeared. In KU, a reader can buy the book or borrow it as part of their subscription, which matters with series and a chunky backlist. It doesn’t mean ads will suddenly become magical money trees. I am not quite that deluded, despite evidence to the contrary. 

Oh, and I missed checking my Amazon dashboard for sales and Kindle Unlimited reads – sounds silly, but it’s true. 

So, if you’re another indie author wondering whether you should go wide or stay in Kindle Unlimited, I don’t have the answer. Annoying, I know, but in my case, the answer is Kindle Unlimited.

So I’m back. Happier and more settled than before I left – a hard-won win.