Monthly Archives: March 2025

Otherwise known as being lazy.

Results so far

It’s a couple of weeks since all my books were out of KU and I switched off Amazon ads. The only marketing I’ve done since then is to make two novellas perma-free (Amazon has now price-matched), and available on my website, and I’ve sent out an email to my subscribers telling them this. The graph shows my earnings (i.e. royalties) for the last 90 days. Blue is earnings for pages read in Kindle Unlimited, red is readers buying ebooks, and grey is from paperbacks.

Continue reading →

As mentioned in a previous post, one advantage of being ‘wide’ is that platforms other than Amazon allow you to set books at £0/$0 etc.

I wrote a prequel to the Marstone Series (A Question of Duty) with the intention of offering that free for the few days in each 3 month period that Amazon allows for books in KU. I didn’t do this very often, as to get the book noticed, advertising the offer has to be done very close to the date of the offer. With permafree, I can run things like BookBub ads (the bit at the bottom of the daily BB email, if you subscribe to that) and it doesn’t matter when a reader sees the ad. I can also highlight the book as free on my website. So one obvious choice was to set this prequel story as free. I also made Saving Meg free – this is an 18,000 word standalone novella.

Continue reading →

This is what I did – but it is not necessarily the best way of doing it!

• First, deselect the auto-renew for Kindle Unlimited for each book. This means the book will be out of KU at the end of its current 3-month period. * Authors beware! For several books, I checked the day after it was supposed to be freed, only to find it was still in KU but with a little notice saying I had 48 hours to cancel – sneaky! And annoying.

Continue reading →

There are several advantages (or potential advantages, as some depend on how much effort I put into marketing) of going wide, to counter the immediate drop in income from KU page reads.

Continue reading →

An alternative title might be ‘how to drastically reduce your writing income’ – at least, that is what it feels like at the moment. This post (or posts) will be mostly of interest to other authors, but also any readers who are interested in some of what goes on behind the scenes in addition to writing. I’m posting these mainly for myself, as a record of my thoughts during the ‘adventure’. (Beware, a bit of politics in this post)

Background: When I first started publishing, I put my books into Kindle Unlimited, as this seemed the best way to get new readers. Readers who subscribe to KU can effectively read books in the scheme free (ignoring the monthly subscription), and so are more likely to take a chance on new authors. When I also started advertising on Amazon, this paid off and my readership gradually grew. However in recent years, my success with Amazon ads has reduced, and even when I put a new book out, the increase in sales tails off rapidly.

Continue reading →