Indie Author: Thoughts on Kindle Unlimited

When I first published my book, I spent a lot of time researching and debating with myself what would be the best place to publish. I initially thought going wide would be the best choice for me because nearly every site I ran across that talked about Kindle Unlimited made it sound like it was really only beneficial to authors with multiple books. One of the things I never really saw mentioned was the fact that if you don’t go Kindle Unlimited with Amazon, you can’t take advantage of their advertising.

When I wasn’t getting any sales on any platform besides Amazon, I decided to just try going the Unlimited route and see what happened because I wanted to be able to at least see what having access to that kind of advertising would do for me, if anything. It definitely wasn’t going to harm sales that weren’t happening.

I have now been running a very low budget ad on Amazon for about a week now and in that time, I’ve nearly doubled the total number of sales I’d gotten since I released my book. In the grand scheme of things, those are still some pretty small numbers, but my sales are paying for my ad which make this test run more than worth it. It is also ridiculously exciting to see my book selling.

I had planned on only running this ad for about a week and a half because I had a specific amount I wanted to spend on this test run. Seeing how well it is doing so far, I’m going to extend it until the end of September. The really cool thing about how these ads work is that you can pick where you want to be placed, I’m going with a targeted ad in my specific genre, as well as how much you want to spend per day. You can also make adjustments on the fly if you see something isn’t working for you, including changing the end date.

So far, I’m extremely pleased with this option. Especially the fact that I can do a really inexpensive ad (initial budget for this test run was $60) that looks like it will pay for itself if the current trend continues. A lot of other advertising options I’ve looked into are hundreds, if not over a thousand dollars. For someone with a book in a tiny genre and only one, those options just aren’t feasible for me.

With the results I’ve seen so far, this is something I would highly recommend for any indie author looking to get their book seen and improve their rankings on Amazon.

Oh… it also helps that you get paid for those KU reads as well. It looks like I’ve only gotten a couple so far, but considering I’ve JUST started this, I’d say that isn’t doing too bad.