From several authors I have had contact with, KU was a good place to be until Amazon did a algorithm reset. Quite a few authors mentioned that this had affected their income, one mentioning a 75% drop in their income after the reset. One newsletter I received had the following to say:
Quote:
Long story short, for the majority of my career the vast majority of my income came through Kindle Unlimited. The way that worked wasn't all that complicated, but it took a lot of effort. Basically, Amazon "favors" new books. During the first few days after launch, if I could spend a bunch on marketing and send a bunch of sales to my books (hence why a lot of books have a few days at 99c after launch) I'd get Amazon's attention and their algorithm would start sending love my way.
In other words, they'd start recommending my books to other people. It worked brilliantly, because if I succeeded with my launch, that meant I didn't have to constantly spend a lot of money on advertising. Amazon did the work for me.
Well, there was a glitch at Amazon back in August and it impacted a lot of authors. Basically, they "reset" their algorithm data on a large number of e-books in the system. From what I've been able to tell, the glitch impacted several titles in my catalogue. It may have impacted every book I've ever launched...
I didn't even learn about this until recently. Another author shared with me the information Amazon gave him, since he was affected. It made sense... because in the months since (as people who already had my books on their KU shelves finished reading) people stopped adding my books to their shelves...
... meaning my income took a huge hit. We're talking a reduction of 50% over each of the last two months.
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In some ways, this has been good for me since more than a few authors I read went wide and since Kobo Plus does not require exclusivity, many of their books are now in Kobo Plus.