Situation
I have a number of books out on Amazon. Exclusively on Amazon, forsaking potential sales via other outlets to take advantage of Kindle Unlimited.
Kindle Unlimited raised about 30% of my earnings until the recent crash in reported Amazon stats. Currently it stands at 17% for this month.
I had also been involved in publishing four charity anthologies, which had gone wide via Draft2Digital. That had been a deliberate choice because of the difficulties of separating the KENP payments for the collections from the estimated earnings of my personal books.
Was I doing the right thing? Were there opportunities I was missing? Was I maximising sales? Was I getting the best return on all the time spent on my book?
Method
Prompted by the chance to do an audio book, Google play have an AI engine that will turn out a ‘fair’ read that they will publish, I decided to experiment.
On October 1st, 2022 I published my latest book ‘The Madison Interview’ wide.
Amazon KDP
Google Play
Apple Books (iTunes)
Draft2Digital (remaining stores)
I added the audiobook version of The Madison Interview a few days later.
Results
So, what has happened 90 days later?
Amazon Sales 68
Google Play 0
Apple iTunes 0
D2D 1
Audio book 0
This lines up with the figures for the ‘In The Nudist Colony’ anthologies where sales via Amazon out earn the D2D sales by 10 to 1.
Conclusion
Sales via other outlets have not compensated for the loss of KENP earnings.
It was a mistake.
One I have not repeated with ’24 Bar Rest’ which has returned 17.5% of its earnings by way of pages read in its 5 days on sale.