Kindle Unlimited vs. Wide Book Launch Strategies

There are many pieces that go into a successful book launch strategy, and frankly, every successful author has a strategy that is unique to them.

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There are many pieces that go into a successful book launch strategy, and frankly, every successful author has a strategy that is unique to them. I'm not in the business of talking about unique one-off ways to find success, though. I'm all about finding the common threads between hundreds of authors and putting them together in something cogent and relevant to your life.

Luckily, some of the strategies used by authors overlap enough that we can create a likely path for success when it comes to your book launch. Authors disagree, and this might not work for everybody. However, when you talk to enough authors, you get a sweeping view of the landscape, and herein I will talk about what is successful for most authors most of the time. Your results will vary.

Mainly, the goal of this article is to suss out the answer to an age-old question: Do I launch your book on Kindle Unlimited or wide on all platforms?

This is the quintessential problem authors face with every book launch, and while there is no right answer, there are specific strategies that will guide your book launch that can help answer this question for you.

What is a book launch?

Very simply, a book launch is when you publish your book and make it available for the public. This is a very fancy way of saying that you hit the launch button on the project in your KDP, or other, dashboard. In reality, this is an overly simplistic view of the process, even though it is technically correct (possibly the best kind of correct).

The reason we say book launch instead of just using the word publish is that launching a book is so much more in-depth than hitting the publish button. It involved many aspects of marketing, which when harnessed properly make your book launch more successful. Book launch strategies can, and should, start months before a book is published in order for them to maximize effectiveness.

That is what the majority of this post will be about, the launch strategies that differ between Kindle Unlimited and publishing your book wide to all platforms.

What is Kindle Unlimited?

Kindle Unlimited is the customer-facing name for the KDP Select program. When you publish a book with Kindle, they ask if you would like to enroll in KDP Select, and that program is the same as Kindle Unlimited - KDP Select=Kindle Unlimited.

By enrolling in KDP Select, you are granted certain luxuries which are not available to authors who opt out of the program. For instance, when you enroll in KDP Select, you are allowed one "countdown deal" every 90-days which is where you can drop the price of your book and still claim your higher royalty percentage of 70%, instead of the 35% which is usually offered to Amazon books priced below $2.99.

The biggest advantage of KDP Select, however, is that your book is placed in the Kindle Unlimited program, where readers pay a flat fee to read as many books as they would like that are enrolled in the program. It's like the Netflix of reading.

In return, authors make money every time a Kindle Unlimited subscriber reads a page of your book. That amount earned is incredibly low on a per page basis (and changes every month), but over the course of a month and many thousands of page reads, it can add up to a very nice sum. I know people who make upwards of $60,000-$90,000+ per month on Kindle Unlimited page reads alone.

Why do so many authors enroll in KDP Select

Authors enroll in KDP Select because it allows them to make money without the reader purchasing their book. Since the subscriber pays a single monthly fee, anything they read which is available in the program is absolutely free...and getting somebody to try a free thing is way easier than getting somebody to pay for something.

Since the entry cost for a Kindle Unlimited book is nothing for the subscriber, and since Kindle Unlimited readers are generally voracious readers, the odds that they will try any book offered to them in their genre is very high. As a quick note, longer books tend to do better in KDP Select because people have to read many more pages to complete them. If you write short novels, the benefits of KDP select will reduce considerably, but they may still make sense for you.

What does "going wide" with a book launch mean?

The other option for authors when planning their book launch is to "go wide". What does going wide mean? It means that instead of enrolling in KDP Select, an author chooses to place their book on all platforms, including but not limited to iBooks, Amazon, Nook, and Kobo, among many others. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of places an author can choose to distribute their books.

Uploading your book to so many places might sound daunting, but there are services like Smashwords and Draft2Digital which can upload your books to most major platforms for you so that you only have to upload your book once. However, there are caveats to this which we will discuss below.

Notice that when you "go wide" you will also be uploading your book to Amazon. You will just not be enrolling it into the KDP Select program. It is a common misnomer that going wide precludes you from publishing your book on Amazon, but that is not the case. It means you are publishing on other platforms in addition to Amazon.

Why would anybody go wide with their book launch?

If Kindle Unlimited is so amazing and can pay you for letting people read your book for free, why would anybody do anything else? Well, the reasons are varied, but the main one deals with exclusivity. When you enroll in Kindle Unlimited, you agree that your book will not be available for purchase ANYWHERE else, including your own website. Enrollment periods last for 90 days, which means you are tied to the Amazon platform exclusively for three months.

That means your book will only be available on Amazon, and only available on Kindle Unlimited in the USA, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, India, China, Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, and Australia.

Since Amazon is over 80% of the ebook market, that doesn't sound so bad, right?

Maybe, except that Amazon is only 80% of the USA based market. In many other countries, it is not the most popular, and in some countries, it's not even second place. This is a problem if you want to have a global footprint with your books, since people in many other countries often don't even register Amazon as a viable option.

Additionally, some readers simply hate Amazon and won't deal with them, even in the USA, so you are alienating yourself from those readers by not giving them the option to purchase your books.

Are there other reasons not to choose Kindle Unlimited for your book launch?

Yes. Kindle Unlimited is a problem if you want to diversify your sources of income. Being overly reliant on one source of revenue can be disastrous if that source dries up. For a company to be truly resilient, they need to have many streams of income, and to never be overly reliant on any revenue source for the majority of their revenue. That way, when that income stream changes, and they will assuredly change, you won't face a catastrophe in your own business and risk everything you have built.

Think about it. What happens if Kindle Unlimited goes away tomorrow? Everybody who relies on it as their only source of income will take a massive hit, and have to build up their businesses on other sites from scratch. Most of them will not be able to do so, and risk having to abandon their careers altogether.

Of course, that's not very likely.

What is likely is to have Amazon flag your KDP Select account for "suspicious page reads" and refuse to pay you for page reads you accumulated. Yes, this happens to authors all the time, even ones who are running a legitimate business. When it does, they are not paid the money they were relying on to survive, often with tragic results.

Are there problems with going wide for your book launch?

Going wide is not without its problems. The first of them is that they have to directly compete with KDP Select authors. The biggest e-reader platform in the world, by a wide margin, is the Kindle, and the American market is still the biggest consumer of ebooks in the world. In 2018, 26% of Kindle users used Kindle Unlimited, and it is almost impossible to compete with free books. By not being enrolling in KDP Select, authors are alienating themselves from a fourth of the Amazon book market, which is a huge decline in your potential reach.

Depending on the week, 90-98% of indie books in the top 100 of most categories will be in Kindle Unlimited, which means you will likely never rank on Kindle if you do not enroll in KDP Select. Luckily, this is less of an issue when going wide, which we'll discuss later.

Additionally, placing your books on multiple platforms adds complexity to your life. Even if you use an aggregator like Draft2Digital or Smashwords which can place your book on dozens of platforms at once, you will still want to manually add your book to at least Amazon, Nook, iBooks, and Kobo in order to maximize the platform's author tools. For instance, you can only apply for Kobo deals if you upload your book directly to Kobo. If you use an aggregator platform, you are not taking advantage of a big part of the tools Kobo has set up to help authors be found by readers.

Which strategy do you choose for your book launch?

So, which should you choose? Well, that option comes down to personal taste. For people who are at the beginning of their careers, or who don't want to deal with the muss and fuss of many platforms, perhaps Kindle Unlimited is the right choice. However, if an author wants to have more than one revenue stream, is willing to become an expert at marketing, and wants a global reach, then they will likely want to go wide with their book launch.

Either way, you can expect that Kindle will account for 30-50% of all sales, with either Kindle Unlimited or wide sales accounting for the remainder. I know many people who make 70% of their income from Kindle Unlimited page reads, and many who make 70% from sales on platforms that are not Amazon.

This why there are two divergent book launch strategies, which we will talk about now. One is designed to maximize Amazon page reads. The other is to maximize sales on all platforms. They are polar opposite strategies, and the biggest mistake people make is using the wrong strategy for the book launch strategy they chose.

The Kindle Unlimited Book Launch Strategy