tl;dr:
- Amazon’s strict exclusivity rules for Kindle Unlimited, and…
- … a promise I made to readers many years ago.
Hey, friends! As fall approaches, I hope you’re getting ready for what I like to think of as “reading season”: a good cup of coffee, a comfortable chair, and an engaging book.
There are so many options when it comes to where you get that book from, and periodically people ask me “why aren’t the Alex Pendragon books available in Kindle Unlimited?” The subscription-based reading service has been a huge success for Amazon, and I know a lot of avid readers – especially in romance and erotica, the sort of stories I usually write – get most, if not all, of their books through it.
But my books aren’t in KU. So what gives?
The big challenge with Kindle Unlimited – for someone releasing books, whether a self-publishing indie or a more traditional publisher – is that Amazon demands exclusivity. If I want to have an ebook included in the all-you-can-eat KU subscription, I have to agree not to release that ebook anywhere else.
No direct sales, no Apple Books/Kobo/Smashwords. And Amazon does check, and writers can lose their accounts if they’re found to be sneakily offering ebooks through other stores.
To have an ebook included in the all-you-can-eat KU subscription, you agree not to release that ebook anywhere else.
The calculation you have to make, as a writer, is how much of your audience is on Kindle – and KU specifically – versus how much is outside of the Amazon ecosystem. I’ve experimented with KU before, with a handful of titles, and did get a decent amount of interest (for authors in KU, how much you get paid is based on how many pages are read in any one month) but I also got plenty of people asking if they could get those books from another store, or buy them from me direct. I could only do that by pulling the ebooks from KU (though you could still buy them from Amazon outright).
One of the reasons I feel strongly about offering books in multiple stores is because there’s definitely value in actually owning your ebooks. When you “buy” a Kindle book from Amazon, you’re actually buying a license to read it: Amazon reserves the right to revoke that license later on, and your ebook might disappear! And Amazon isn’t the only store that sells ebook licenses not ebooks themselves, it’s just the best-known.
That’s why I know a lot of my readers prefer to have a copy of the story as an ePub/PDF: something they can download, save to their computer, and not have suddenly revoked. If you buy my stories from itchio, for example, you get them in ePub/PDF format. It’s slightly less streamlined, getting them onto your Kindle or other reader, but the flip side is the reassurance that Amazon isn’t going to magically vanish your book at some point.
How likely is it that Amazon – or any of the other ebook vendors – will actually do that? That’s impossible to predict, but there’s no denying that queer media – art, books, movies, songs, and more – is under attack these days. Plenty of people (including people in power, like politicians) would love to push LGBTQ+ people back into the closet, where they can be safely ignored.
Censoring stories about queer love (or queer lust) is part and parcel of that strategy. One day, ebook stores could decide that it’s simply easier just to add some of the topics I write about to their “prohibited content” list.
Honestly, I’d love to offer books in Kindle Unlimited. There are a ton of people there looking for stories like mine, and I know avid readers can be turned off buy a per-book price model. It sucks that Amazon’s policies are so restrictive, and it doesn’t have to be that way: Kobo Plus, the Kobo version of KU, doesn’t demand exclusivity – my books are available for those with a Kobo Plus subscription! The good news is that Amazon recently softened its stance so that KU ebooks can at least be offered through libraries, but that still doesn’t mean you can download the actual ebook file and make a backup somewhere for safe keeping.
Anyway, that’s the (far longer than I intended it to be – oops!) explanation. I’m really sorry if you’re disappointed not to find stories like “All That History” and “Farmed Out” in KU, but I hope you can at least understand my reasons for that decision. Happy reading!