So I’m limiting my distribution to The Kindle. The main reason being that Amazon has the Kindle Direct Publishing program, which has some perks and benefits, but requires you to be exclusive with Amazon. I’ve spent the last six months or so on a bunch of different platforms, and honestly, Amazon is the only one I see any real results from.
Now they’ve got this Amazon Unlimited thing, which is kind of like Netflix, but for ebooks. Authors can opt into the program, and I can’t really see a downside to it. Especially for me. My understanding is that in that program, an author gets credit for that book having been read once the person who downloads it browses through the first 10%. Since my stories are all relatively short, and there’s a bunch of them, the math seems to be in my favor.
Another reason to get onboard with the Unlimited program is that I believe my main obstacle in reaching an audience is the stigma of vampire stories. I mean, I get it, the market’s saturated and it’s very hard to convince people to read a new vampire series. What I need to do is convince people that I’ve got something different to offer (which I do) and the way to do that is to get as many eyes on it as possible. So even if I don’t make much money from the Unlimited program, just getting those new readers (who may then recommend it to someone else, or leave a review) is worth it.
So yeah, tonight I’m taking Bloodletting down from all distributors other than Amazon. Honestly, that’s a bit of a relief anyway. It was a little stressful having all of these different platforms to keep track of. If everything is in Amazon, then I know that whatever version is online is the one everyone has.
I’ll give it a shot and see how it does. It’s really all going to depend on how well Amazon Unlimited performs. It could be a massive flop, and we’re back to square one. But whatever. If that happens, then I haven’t really lost anything.