Kindle Unlimited

I'm sure many of you have heard all about Kindle Unlimited recently. Amazon's new subscription service that allows you to borrow as many books as you want for $9.99 a month.

It sounds like quite a deal right? Based on waht I'm about to say I probably shouldn't be advertising for them like this!

But here's the deal. I'm not going to be enrolling my books in Kindle Unlimited. Please please, put down your pitchforks and hear me out.

Most of my books are sold at Amazon, this is true. I assume most of you reading this have bought my books through Amazon. Heck, the sidebar buy links on this very website take you to Amazon. But, I have a significant amount of readers that buy my books at Apple, Barnes and Noble, Google, All Romance EBooks and Kobo.

If I were to enroll in KDP Select and utilize the Kindle Unlimited program then that would cut all those readers out. Your books have to be exclusive to Amazon to utilize this program. If I did this I would be denying a large portion of my readership access to The Bucklin Wolves series which is in full swing.

They've all started reading the story of the Bucklin Wolves and enjoying Rowan/Eva's life together as well as wondering what the stories for the other characters hold. If I enrolled my future books into KDP Select I'd be essentially telling those readers I didn't care about them finishing the story. That's not me, I write my stories for everyone to enjoy, not just people with a Kindle or Kindle App.

I hope you all understand.

The Bucklin Wolves series will take us through to the end of the year. After that I may experiment with different paranormal creatures (I love me some demons and angels), longer books and I may even decide to write a Kindle only story at that time to utilize Kindle Unlimited. But I absolutely WILL NOT pull the rug out from under my readers that have discovered The Bucklin Wolves through a store other than Amazon.

And as always the first novel of every serial, that is widely distributed, will be 0.99 until the second book comes out and then it will be free. This will never change, no matter how successful I am and no matter how long the books are.
I don't care if I start writing 350,000 word Tom Clancy lenght novels. The first in any serial or series will be 0.99 until the second book is released, then it will be FREE.

This is for my readers to discover me and have a low risk/high reward structure. My writing isn't for everybody and I'd hate for you to pay for the first book in a series or serial and hate it and be out any money, even if it's only 0.99.

Now as you noticed I put the caveat "that is widely distributed". That's because Amazon will not let you set a book to free forever if you are a member of KDP Select.

I don't know if many of you know this but Amazon has no "free" setting. The lowest you can price your book is 0.99.

So how do I get my novels free? By setting them to free at B&N, Apple, Google, etc. Then Amazon will price match it to free. That's how Lost Alpha Part 1 and Taken By The Wolf Part 1 became free by Amazon price matching it to those other retailers.

Obviously if it's not on other retailers then there's no way to make it permanetly free at Amazon.

But again, right now I have no KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited plans. In the future if demand is high for me to join the program I may experiment with an Amazon exclusive serial, but it damn sure won't be The Bucklin Wolves.

Thank you for understanding,

J Ryan

*PS* As always my inbox is open at jessicaryanbooks@gmail.com. If you have any questions or wnat to discuss this post in more detail privately feel free to shoot me an e-mail. Or if you would like to have a public discussion then post a comment.