When I first started out in my writing career 11 years ago, I was a traditionally published author, meaning that a publishing house, WILD ROSE PRESS, published my first books. After that, I signed with Kensington/Lyrical Press, Limitless Press, and Magnolia Press at varying times. In all that time I felt safe and secure, knowing a publishing house had my back with editing, copyrighting, and distribution.
But there were and are drawbacks to being a traditionally published author without a big name in the industry. No advertising dollars get thrown toward your book, so you have to do all the marketing by yourself. The bigger names get the advertising bucks. You don’t get any kind of advance on your work, so you can go years with no royalty income. You have no say in your cover art. You can’t pick your editor and have to hope they have the same vision as you do for the book. Many times this is not the case. The biggest drawback to me is the time it takes from first view by an editor to actually getting your book into print and into the hands of readers. With some houses, it can take up to two years.
A lot can happen to a person in two years, no? So that time frame started proving prohibitive for me, and I made the brave ( foolish?) decision to go the indie author route and began self-publishing my books.
Drawbacks: same as with trad pubbing in the marketing department: I have to do everything and pay for everything. I have to pay for editing, cover design, and formatting. I’ll tell the truth and say I learned to do all those things myself so I could cut down on costs.
Better outcome: Independent publishing schedule means I can get my books in front of readers faster.
Best outcome: all the royalites ( such as they are) are mine. I don’t have to split with agents, publishers, ect.
One of the things my publishers never did was put my books in Kindle Unlimited, the subscription service of KDP/Amazon. The reason is because so little money is made for the publishers, even less for the author, with most of the money going directly to Amazon in the way of subscriptions from readers. So when I went indie, I put all my indie books into this service. I figured it was a good way to get my books and name in front of readers who ordinarily wouldn’t know who I was, what I wrote, or in what genre. If they didn’t have to pay, independently for my book, they just might want to read it more since I was an unknown author to them. This was the entire premise behind the KU subscription platform for me: get my books in front of readers who didn’t go searching for my books or name, independently.
It is safe to say I never made a killing in KU. I never even got to 100,000 page reads in total for all my books, which is a benchmark for writers. I had my books in KU for almost 6 years and never picked up any traction. Then, Amazon decided to change the rules of KU and allow readers to share digital copies among themselves with no reimbursement to the author.
So people could now read our book with no financial recompense to the author.
Can you say: HELL TO THE NO??!
Before this rule went into effect, I pulled all my books out of KU and did what we writers call “Go wide,” which in effect means I put all my books into Draft 2 Digital, where the service published them to Barnes and Nobel, Kobo, Smashwords, a few other divisions and libraries, like Hoopla and Overlook.
The amount of money I now make by going wide isn’t even comparable to what I was ( or wasn’t!) making in KU, so it was a wise publishing decision for me.
Is it a pain the neck to have to manage all these different publishing divisions all by myself? Yup.
Is it a time suck to get all the books formatted correctly and uploaded into the system without problems? Yup.
One of the drawbacks to D2D is that once you upload you can only make changes to your manuscript every 30 days. So if you find a typo and submit a new manuscript and then find another one, you have to wait 3 months. In KDp you can do it endlessly.
Is it worth it in the end to be a discoverable author on more than just amazon? YUPYUPYUPYUPYUP!
So, for me, pulling out of KU was the right thing to do. Maybe it isn’t for every author, and that’s okay. But for me? It was totally the right thing to do and I have zero regrets having done it.
If you are an author, I would like to hear your thoughts about KU and whether or not you utilize the service. Or if you don’t, why you don’t.
If you are a reader, I would like to know if you subscribe to KU, why, and if you feel it is worth the expense to you – or if it isn’t.
I don’t regret my decision to pull out of KU in the least.
Peggy Jaeger, Author 