By Emilia Rose on August 13, 2022
If your books are in Kindle Unlimited (KU), you might think that you can’t start a subscription due to Amazon’s exclusivity terms. Today we’re going to break down all the reasons why you should consider starting a subscription alongside KU.
Multiple revenue streams
A subscription allows you to create another revenue stream for your business. If you’re making millions, hundreds of thousands, or even thousands of dollars in KU, you might not want to branch out, but what happens if Amazon terminates your account or removes one of your bestselling books? If you’re in 20booksto50k on Facebook, I’m sure you’ve heard the horror stories of accounts randomly being shut down. This is especially true for steamy romance authors.
Opening up a subscription is like branching out into audio or translations, but it is a much more stable income each month. You don’t have to solely depend on Amazon anymore and you have greater control of the content and your community.
It will add to your book’s release day.
If you release books through KU, release day is everything. You want your book to rank high and want it to receive hundreds of thousands of page reads the moment it drops. So, why would you even consider a subscription, if you want everyone to read on Amazon?
Because the income you receive from your subscription could let you spend more money on ads. Because the income you receive from your subscription might cover your bills for the month so you can focus on building hype around your book launch instead of stressing about how much money you need to make on launch to cover those expenses. Because if you do release early access to your stories through your subscription, you have access to your superfans who can act as beta readers and critique your work while paying you to do so.
Your biggest fans WANT to support you.
Some fans might not be able to support you monetarily monthly, but some can and will. K Webster started a subscription on Patreon this year and her biggest fans are paying her $200 per month for exclusive hardcover editions. At the time of this email, she has 78 monthly subscribers and is receiving about $7,800 per month from them, which averages to roughly $100 per subscriber.
You can also offer benefits at different price-points that appeal to different reader’s willigness to pay. 10% of your fans may be able to afford a $3 monthly subscription and 2% can afford a $50 monthly subscription. Instead of charging everyone the same price, you can have different tiers with different rewards, all while remaining exclusive to Kindle Unlimited.
3 Things You Should Know About Subscriptions as a Kindle Unlimited Author
- Due to KU’s exclusive terms, you can’t offer any book in ebook digital format as a subscriber reward that is already enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. You can however, offer early access to ebooks before they are released into Kindle Unlimited, serializing them, as you write.
- As long as you aren’t exclusive to Audible, you can also offer audiobooks as rewards and use a software like Bookfunnel to deliver them to your readers. If you are exclusive to Audible, you can release your audiobooks before you publish them to ACX to your subscribers.
- You can publish bonus epilogues, side stories, or any bonus content tied to stories you have in Kindle Unlimited to your subscription, as long as the content you are posting itself isn’t in Kindle Unlimited.
5 KU Authors with Subscriptions:
- Jason Anspach and Nick Cole: Military sci-fi authors of Galaxy’s Edge
- A.F. Kay: LitRPG Author with a name beautiful for their genre
- Nikki St. Crowe: steamy romance author with one of the breakout books of 2022
- Michael Chatfield: a podcast guest of ours! And mega best-selling LitRPG author
- Tonya Kappes: best-selling cozy mystery author