Why I’m not doing Kindle Unlimited after all

Hi everyone! How about the eclipse yesterday? I’m sure you’re all sick of hearing about it, but I’m not sick of talking about it! 😀 I was in the path of totality and it was the absolute coolest thing I’ve ever seen. Photos don’t do it justice, but here are a couple that come close to capturing my view. It was AMAZING.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is to talk about Cheerleaders from Planet X. I mentioned in the live broadcast for the book trailer launch and in my newsletter and maybe a couple other places that I was planning on enrolling the book in Kindle Unlimited after release. However, some stuff changed that made me re-evaluate that. There have been issues with scammers manipulating the system for months, and now Amazon has given authors a 20% pay cut. These issues have weighed heavily on my mind, and as an author have made me wary of using the KU service despite its touted advantages.

After giving it some consideration, I decided to poll my readers. Between those results on Twitter and the results from the poll I took of my newsletter subscribers a few months ago, I’ve determined that very, very few of my readers are Kindle Unlimited subscribers. Because of that, it doesn’t make much sense to enroll the book in Kindle Unlimited—I think it makes more sense to have the book widely available. My other books are also wide and at this point I think it’s unlikely that I will include any future books in KU.

Therefore, I’ve updated my preorder to include other retailers besides Amazon. The book is live now at Kobo, and will be available shortly at iBooks, Barnes and Noble and Google Play. (You can bookmark this link to check on the status of these retailers!) The preorder price of $0.99 is effective at all retailers, and it will remain at $0.99 for about a week after release. 🙂

If you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber and were hoping to read the book on KU, please accept my apologies! I hope that the low preorder price will make it up to you. I’m also planning on running a $0.99 sale on Fourth World at the beginning of September, so if you’ve been wanting to read it, that will be a good time to grab a copy cheap.