Authors See Income Dive After Joining Kindle Unlimited

Posted on December 29, 2014

Is the bloom off the rose for authors who signed up for Kindle Unlimited? David Streitfeld wrote a piece for The New York Times describing how unhappy many self published authors are with Amazon.com's subscription ebook service.

The Kindle Unlimited subscription service charges readers $9.99 a month to be able to read unlimited ebooks that are part of Kindle Unlimited. Holly Ward, who writes under the name H.M. Ward, had 11 titles on The New York Times bestseller list last year and has sold more than four million books turned down major publishers so she could have total control over her work. She is one of Amazon's bestselling authors and was initially reluctant to sign up for the service. But her rep talked her into it. Unfortunately, it's been a total disaster for her.

In a post entitled "KU Crushed My Sales :(" on the KU boards she wrote, "I had my serials in it for 60 days and lost approx 75% of my income. Thats counting borrows and bonuses. :o My sales dropped like a stone. The number of borrows was higher than sales. They didn't compliment each other, as expected."

Ms. Ward noted that the cut included her entire backlist, not just her titles that are on Kindle Unlimited. She had originally planned to try out the service for 90 days, but says she must pull out of the service for financial reasons. she has a child in the hospital for long term care and relies on the income to pay substantial medical bills. After pulling her titles from Kindle Unlimited, she sayss he is now back at only 50% of the income she was making before she joined the program.

Ms. Ward is quite happy with Amazon, but she thinks the company needs to change the way the system works. She suggests a flat rate be paid to authors for books that are borrowed and suggests giving subscribers a way to subscribe to a particular author. Many readers buy every book by their favorite author and her suggestion does make sense. Other authors chimed in, reporting similar drops in income since joining the program.

In his article Streitfeld points out that the past few years have really been a golden age of sorts for authors with big followings who have moved to Amazon.com. A number of new authors who were quick to embrace Amazon's self-publishing platform quickly gained huge followings. But the explosion in the number of books being self-published has changed the formula. There are now more than 3 million self-published books available for Kindle. It's become incredibly difficult to cut through the noise to showcase a new book. Readers complain about the quality and lack of editing on many of the titles.

Amazon's Kindle Unlimited service is like Spotify for books. Taylor Swift made headlines when she recently pulled all her of her music from Spotify saying that she deserved to be paid fairly for her work. That was not happening under Spotify's subscription service model, so she left. If enough authors pull their works from Kindle Unlimited, Amazon will have to rethink the model and fine tune it so authors get paid fairly.