If you enjoy books, you might consider signing up for Amazon's Kindle Unlimited. It's a program that costs $10 per month and you can borrow up to 10 books from Amazon and keep them as long as you like. If you finish any of them (or if you try them and don't like them) you can return any if them and trade them for different books. You can do this as often as you like. It's a good deal if you like ebooks, since purchasing 2 or 3 ebooks can easily cost $10, and you don't need to commit to the plan for any amount of time--you can try it out for one month and then cancel anytime. I have Kindle Unlimited and I love it.
The only negative about Kindle Unlimited is that only some books participate (it's up to the author)--so you can choose from a lot of books-both indie and big time-but not all of them. For example, Pat Conroy has his books on Kindle Unlimited but Stephen King doesn't.
You may wonder, how do authors make money if these books are free? Amazon takes all the money earned from the program (from the $10/month fee) and divides it among the participating authors based not on how many books they sell but on how many pages purchasers read. Sometimes I make my books available on K.U. and sometimes I don't. I currently have all three of my books on K.U. which means the books have a regular price but are also available for free for Kindle Unlimited members. For the copies K.U. members have gotten, each day Amazon notes how many pages of these books were read and I currently get paid half a cent per page read. So a 200 page book that sells for whatever price ($3, $5, $10) can only earn $1 on this program and only if the reader reads the whole book. Whether or not it's a good deal for authors is something people aren't sure about, but it gets books to a wider audience, which is always a good thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment