I was editing an article a few weeks ago, and there were some references to Kindle Unlimited and its various iterations. For the purposes of fact checking, I went looking for an article that summed everything up for me but failed to find anything. I did find some blogs and references that discussed specific changes from one version of KU to another, but nothing that really laid the entire history out all in one place. So I discussed it with Ginger and we decided it would be worth putting something together.

Of course, knowing how KU worked in the past doesn’t change how it works now, but there are probably some newer authors out there that are interested in reading about how the program evolved, and why. And for those of you that lived through it, you may still want to take a nostalgic trip down memory lane…

In 2014, Amazon introduced Kindle Unlimited – a kind of ‘Netflix for books’ which allowed subscribers to download and read as many books as they wanted for just $10 a month. The best part? This program also paid authors!

Six years later, however, the way authors got paid for participating in Kindle Unlimited has changed drastically – and over the course of those years, the way Amazon transformed the compensation model has dramatically altered the way authors approach being successful.

If you’ve heard talk on author forums about “KU 1.0” and its later iterations, but aren’t quite sure what the exact differences between them are, we’ve prepared a brief “cheat sheet” for you; which might help you better understand how this all started, and why it’s gotten to where it is right now.

The Introduction of Kindle Unlimited – KU 1.0

In 2014, Amazon introduced the now-familiar program called Kindle Unlimited. For $10, Amazon customers could subscribe to this program and have the option of ‘borrowing’ an unlimited number of books every month, as long as the authors of those books had made their titles exclusive to Amazon through the KDP Select program.

There were restrictions, of course. Readers could borrow a maximum of ten books at any one time – although downloading a new one for free was as easy as ‘returning’ a previously-borrowed title.

Authors, on the other hand, would receive a percentage of that month’s KDP Select Global Fund (I imagine it like it was a big pit of money that Jeff Bezos threw everybody’s monthly subscription into) based on the number of times their books were borrowed.

The fact that authors didn’t know how much they’d receive until after the fact was kind of a new thing – I’d describe it similarly to how pirates earned “pieces of eight” from the loot of each raid they’d participated in, but that makes it sound WAY cooler than it actually was!

Instead, it was more like a big communal pool that got divided up by collective subscription payments (minus Amazon’s percentage) divided by number of borrows.

The more books got borrowed each month, the smaller the share each author would receive – and with the fund starting off around $2.5 million in July 2014, this quickly lead to Amazon subsidizing the program with their own cash (for example, in August 2014, they paid $500,000 into the KDP Select Global Fund to keep author’s earnings higher.)

However, the increased number of Kindle Unlimited subscribers (or, more accurately, their subscription money) soon balanced that out and kept the payout for each book that was borrowed at roughly around $2 a title.

For indie authors, the downside was that being part of KDP Select meant that you had to pull all your books from other sites and vendors and make them exclusive to Amazon for a 90-day period, with the option to renew at the end. This meant you’d be sacrificing all the income you might get from Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and Smashwords.

However, the benefit was a super-easy way of getting a new revenue stream – generally higher than you’d receive by having your books ‘wide’ – plus access to exclusive promotional tools like a 5-day Free Promotion; in which you could give your book away for free (and rack up huge earnings thanks to the spike in visibility this lead to.)

The rumble of complaints

Within a few months of KDP Select being launched, some of the issues with the original program started to make themselves apparent. The biggest was the fact that KU 1.0 (as it later became known) paid all authors equally based on each individual book that was borrowed. That meant borrowing a 5,000 word erotic short story would pay as much as somebody borrowing a 150,000 epic fantasy saga.

This instantly changed the ecosystem on Amazon – with money-hungry authors turning their attention to short stories, novellas, and anything they could pump out quickly, and in volume. At this point in my own writing career, I was focusing on writing 10,000 word erotic novellas, so I saw my earnings reach a peak that I’d never experienced before. I was stoked!

But this was clearly unfair to authors offering novel-length books, since a 50,000 word novel takes a significantly longer time to write than a 5,000 word short story. It also saw the rise of a ton of scams. Click farms in India and China would create dozens of Amazon accounts and enroll in Kindle Unlimited, then borrow dozens of their own books to score an unfair share of the communal fund payout.

Amazon first responded by insisting that at least 10% of the book needed to be read before authors would be eligible for a payout on that borrow – but when that failed to correct the issue, they introduced something else entirely.

The birth of KU 2.0

In February of 2016, buckling under complaints from indie authors, Amazon introduced what they called KENPC v2.0. This was a totally new system for paying authors who participated in Kindle Unlimited – offering payouts based on the number of pages a borrower would read, instead of a flat percentage for each book offered.

With the number of Kindle Unlimited subscribers continuing to increase, this changed the playing field entirely. Suddenly, a 600-page epic fantasy novel would pay out five times what a 50-page erotic short would; meaning authors who focused on novels and longer books finally got a more equitable payout.

It also meant the churn of shorts slowly ceased, as money-hungry authors realized that the payout for a 50-page short was no longer worth the effort of writing them. Enterprising little buggers that they are, though, they soon found a new approach to maximizing their payouts.

Amazon’s system of determining payments was based on what they’d call the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC). This was how many pages they considered a book to be. Every page that was read from a borrowed book paid out roughly $0.005 cents to the author – so a 400-page book would pay out roughly $2 if it was read in its entirety. For authors who wrote novels, this was largely the same as they’d have received for a borrowed book under KU 1.0, and even more if their books were longer!

But two issues immediately arose. The first was how Amazon determined how many pages of a book had been read. It turned out to be as simple as the highest of the ‘last pages opened’ in a reader’s Kindle – meaning that readers who skipped straight to the last page of a 400-page novel would be paying their authors the same as a reader who diligently read each and every word.

The second issue was that authors didn’t have the same limitations as they did with a paperback version of their book, and could add as many additional pages after the end of the book to ‘stuff’ the number of pages each borrowed title ended up being calculated as.

This led to unscrupulous authors coming up with elaborate schemes to get readers to tap an anchor link which would immediately take them to the end of a book (sometimes an offer like “win a free Kindle!”)

When you combined all of these things together, ‘stuffing’ a title with additional pages – sometimes multiple, complete novels – to pad the number of pages to absurd proportions, adding in an enticing link at the front that navigated them to the final page, and even using click farms (whether officially hiring a company overseas to do it, or even just asking everyone asking their mailing list to borrow the book and scroll through to open the final page), the situation quickly became untenable.

To be clear, this isn’t a “mind your own business” type situation where author’s doing the right thing could just shrug and ignore those doing the wrong thing because it didn’t affect them. This did affect ALL authors, because not only did that author get paid for an unfair number of pages read, those fake page reads served to reduce the overall per page payout that every other got due to the fact that the payout is calculated by the total payout pool divided by the number of pages read that month.

For example, imagine In the most extreme case, an author with a short story or novella stuffed it with every other book they’d ever written (sometimes padding the KENP to 10,000 pages or more) and then had a link on the first page which navigated the reader right to the last page. With the tap of a finger, all those 10,000 pages would count as pages read that month, reducing the overall per page payout for everyone and sending that author a hefty and unearned $50 royalty without having read a single word.

That might sound ridiculous, but I’m not even exaggerating. I’ll confess that I took to including two or three “bonus” short stories in all my erotic shorts just to try and keep up; and even then it was depressing to see more and more books published that were ‘stuffed’ with backmatter. Some very respected and professional authors even took to doing this out of desperation, and it seemed it would become the new normal until readers started to complain.

And BOY did they complain. On Amazon and YouTube, readers and reviewers started to target and ‘call out’ authors for “stuffing” their books, and lobbied Amazon until the giant eventually had to concede defeat and introduced the next era of their Kindle Unlimited Program.

Introducing KU 3.0

In August of 2017, Amazon introduced KENPC 3.0, which was a different way to calculate page-reads and provide some sort of protection for authors who just wanted to write good books, instead of trying to stuff their releases with as much additional content as possible.

The first significant change was a blanket ban on “stuffing” books – with the rule being that back matter and “bonus content” could take up no more than 10% of the book’s length. While this was difficult to enforce, it was bolstered by a blanket limit of 3,000 pages per book; meaning an author would only receive payment for the first 3,000 pages of a published book, making ‘stuffing’ much less effective.

Nevertheless, 3,000 pages still provides a $15 royalty, so Amazon also introduced a ban on hotlinking inside the book – anything which would drive a reader right from the first page to the last to trigger the maximum payout per book. None of these systems were perfect, but they did dramatically reduce the scammy nature of what KU 2.0 had become; and started to help authors realize that consistency and quality were the standards to aspire to – not short term schemes like padding page counts or tricking readers.

For most of us indie authors, the introduction of KU 3.0 did little to impact our earnings. However, it wiped the slate clean for many less scrupulous authors, and that slowly saw the payout for each page read normalize from a low of $0.0042 in June 2017 back to the $0.005 range.

As of today, KENPC 3.0 remains the standard to which Amazon operates; and most authors who’ve lived to see all three iterations agree that it is the most equitable. Obviously, it’s far from perfect – and other changes at Amazon have impacted the benefit of being part of Kindle Unlimited – but it’s definitely better than how things started if you’re an author focused on writing good books instead of just making easy money.

What can we learn from the evolution of Kindle Unlimited?

The biggest thing I learned by witnessing the messy birth and growth of KU is that quality remains the one constant. The authors who’ve survived and thrived through the evolution of this program have been the ones who focused on giving readers the best customer experience they could. That was always Amazon’s goal as well – and I think there’s fairly good alignment between the two now.

To succeed in Kindle Unlimited, it helps to be writing in a genre that has a lot of Kindle Unlimited subscribers – romance being the most obvious. It also helps to write novel-length books or longer, since a full read-through of a book will pay out somewhat similarly to an actual purchase. Writing in a series also helps, since getting a reader hooked on Book One will hopefully lead to them reading through the entire series.

That being said, there are some cracks in the system that are starting to widen. Amazon’s insistence on populating more of a book’s product page with advertising means that some of the key benefits of keeping your books in KDP Select are being negated. A 5-day Free Promotion, for example, used to guarantee me thousands of book sales in the months that followed. Now, paying to promote my ‘free’ book barely gives a return on investment at all.

This means it’s no longer such a ‘no brainer’ to be part of KDP Select, since you can now often earn more than you could with the program if you ‘go wide’ and put your books for sale on Apple books or Kobo. There really aren’t the same sort of benefits to the program as in the past; and it looks like Amazon isn’t doing much to address that.

Although, in their defense, why should they? The introduction of Kindle Unlimited and the generous initial payouts (often subsidized by Amazon themselves) led many authors to go ‘all in’ with KU, and even now there’s a reluctance to pull your books and ‘go wide.’

I know these days, I’m probably leaving some money on the table by keeping my books in Kindle Unlimited – but the convenience of only having to deal with one vendor, rather than host books on multiple websites, means I don’t feel the pressure to pull them. In some ways, we all got catfished by Amazon with the initial appeal of this program; and now they’re slowly squeezing us for more and more each month.

Will this remain the future for Kindle Unlimited? Or with the introduction of Kindle Vella and other forms of reading options, will the program eventually go away? Only time will tell – and that time is definitely approaching!

For the moment, I’m sticking with Kindle Unlimited – but I’d love to know your thoughts. Are you exclusive to Amazon? Were you ever? What is the benefit to you as an author? Or are you happier you went “wide”?

Let us know in the comments section below!

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The post A History of Kindle Unlimited appeared first on HiddenGemsBooks.

Now that the final book of my Radish series is fully published, I wanted to go over my latest numbers one last time so that others can use it as an example of how this platform works and performs.  Of course, every author’s experience will differ, but the more information you have about something you haven’t tried before, the better the decision you’ll be able to make as to whether you think it’ll be the right fit for you.  To help with that, I’ll also give some of my own thoughts on this whole experiment and which sort of authors or books I think it will benefit the most.

Not long ago I began an experiment with Radish Fiction by publishing an old 3-book romance series on their platform to see how it would do.  In part 1 of this article, I published the sales numbers and my analysis of how books 1 and 2 fared, and now that book 3 has completed publishing, I’m going to continue my analysis with that.

I highly recommend reading part 1 first if you haven’t already done so, as this part will make a lot more sense if that’s fresh in your mind.  And it’s especially important if you aren’t already familiar with Radish and how it works, as my initial article described all of those details that no one wants me to have to go through again (especially me).  But I’ll do my best to mention the past data and analysis when relevant here, especially where it’s useful as a comparison.

That being said, there are a few things I’ll go over again quickly, for context.

A Quick Recap

For this experiment, I used a previously published 3 book romance series that sold well on Amazon back when it was initially released. For the Radish model, I chose to make these books a single story separated into seasons (1 book per season) using their Wait-to-Unlock pricing model.  Because book 1 is permafree on other sites, I had to make it free on Radish as well. The other two books published at a rate of 1 episode (basically a chapter) each day, the final 6 published episodes are pay only, and the rest are set to a 2 hour wait to unlock time. 

(If all of that sounds like gibberish to you, I again recommend having a quick read of part 1 before you continue – final warning!)

I should also note that my main analysis will be on data that is a couple of weeks old at this point, as I captured it shortly after book 3 was complete. I’m doing this on purpose, because my initial analysis was done when book 2 had recently completed so it gives a fairer comparison.  However, after that I’ll quickly go over the most recent data to determine if it changes any of my conclusions.

Data Set 1 – Reference

For reference, I’m including the data breakdown image from part 1 since it’ll be easy to compare against without having to flip back and forth between blogs.  I’ll refer to this spreadsheet as Data Set 1.

Data Set 2 Breakdown (as of July 28)

As I mentioned, I’ll mainly be analyzing the numbers taken shortly after book 3 was fully published (which was about a month after Data Set 1), and then briefly look at the difference in the numbers now, approximately 2 weeks later.  I’ve had to expand the spreadsheet a bit to include book 3 numbers and calculations, but aside from changing the headers of the columns at the top to match the Radish terminology, it’s largely the same.  I’ll refer to this spreadsheet as Data Set 2.

The top section are the raw numbers across all 3 books. This shows how many episodes each has, how many of those episodes are published (all of them, making this column a bit redundant now, but it was useful during my daily tracking), how many views each episode has had (how many times it was read), and how many coins the books have earned.

Below that is the section I use to attempt to break those numbers down into meaningful data, which I’ll go over in detail, and then finally you can see the totals. 

I’ve expanded the totals section to break the amounts down both by book and overall, but you’ll also notice that it’s repeated 3 times. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean I earned 3 times as much, I just wanted to show the difference in earnings based on the monthly difference in coin value – but more on that later.

Assumptions, Numbers and Analysis

Like last time, most of my analysis is just calculated from the raw numbers that Radish provides, with some assumptions having to be made due to lack of more detailed data. For instance, I make the assumption that each reader reads all chapters/episodes. I know that’s not correct, but it’s good enough to draw the conclusions I need. Sure, for the purposes of understanding read through and whether your book is interesting, it’s great to know whether it’s 1 person reading the entire book cover to cover vs a bunch of people reading part of it before giving up, but in terms of how many full copies of the books I’m giving away or are getting purchased, that distinction is less important. It’s also similar to how many KU readers try to calculate how many borrows a book has based on page reads.

Total Book Readers and Read Through

With that in mind, where you see Book # Readers in the table above, those are calculated by dividing the episode views of those books by the number of chapters published for them.  For example, in Data Set 1, the first book had 413 readers but now in Data Set 2, book 1 is up to 751 readers.

While it’s interesting and useful to have the estimate of how many people have read each book, the real purpose of it here is to estimate the read through percentages.

Having an idea of the read through numbers of your own series or catalog is essential to improving as an author because it not only gives you an idea of how sticky your books are, but also provides you with a roadmap of where you need to focus on next to grow as an author. (I’d love to go into this topic in much greater detail as it’s so important and not always given enough attention, but it’s a topic that really deserves a post of its own, so I’ll add that to my todo list.)

Determining read through can get complicated (and is never perfect), but the good news is that it’s far easier to do on a series than on completely discrete books. That’s because MOST readers prefer to read a series starting on book 1. Even when each book in the series can technically be read as a stand-alone, if given the chance, I would wager that the VAST majority of readers would still start at the beginning.  That doesn’t mean that they will continue after that first book, or that they’ll read all the books in the series, but for the most part they will typically start at the beginning and read the books in order.

In this case, where I only have this 3-book series up for sale and book 1 is free, it’s even more important to have a strong read through percentage, otherwise I wouldn’t earn any money at all.  If we run with the assumption that readers are starting on book 1 and reading in order, I can calculate read through for each book by simply dividing one book’s reader count by the previous one.

When you look at those numbers in Data Set 2 (and compared against Data Set 1), the book 1 to 2 read through is interesting for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s very high, close to 100%!  That’s a fantastic read through, as it means almost everyone that reads book 1 is reading book 2. However, as I noted near the end of my original blog, there’s a much less fantastic explanation for why this is likely the case. 

Essentially, because of Radish’s Wait-to-Unlock model, any reader patient enough can read all or most of a book for free. When it comes to a series, then, unless the reader hates book 1, there is little reason for them not to continue reading.  Still, if we look at this from more of a glass half full perspective, it’s gratifying to see such a high percentage of people are spending their time (if not their money) continuing on with the series.  After all, there are plenty of other free books for them to move over to, which I assume most would do if they hated book 1.

The other thing I found initially surprising about that 95% read through rate was how much of a jump it was from my last analysis, when it was only 59%.  Book 2 was fully published when I ran those numbers, but only had been for a day or two, so my first thought was that people were just catching up over time.

That may be part of it, but I think there’s a much more likely (and again, negative from an author’s point of view) explanation.

With the Wait-to-Unlock model, the author chooses a set number of chapters to be permanently pay at the end of the “story”. Because of the way I set things up, this means that when I ran the numbers right after book 2, the final 6 chapters were still pay only.  Only over time, as new chapters for book 3 were published, did they revert to the Wait-to-Unlock/free model.  Thus, my assumption here is that a large part of the difference between the two percentages were simply readers “waiting” for those pay only chapters to become free. Once the dam broke, so to speak, they flooded in to finish the book.

If this is the case, we should see some similar numbers with book 3 and, in fact, we do.  The read through between books 1 and 3 and books 2 to 3 are virtually identical at 53% and 55%, and very similar to the 59% we saw when book 2 had its final chapters locked down for pay only, just as book 3 does now (and will continue to have going forward, now that the entire series is published).

What will be interesting to see is whether that number continues to climb over time.  If all of those readers are strictly free only, they may never pay and that number may barely change.  However, my hope is that at least some of the readers will be curious enough to find out how it all ends to spend a few of their coins to finish it off.

Book Sales/Giveaway Equivalents

As Radish charges 3 coins per episode, I calculate how many of each book’s episodes were purchased by dividing the coins earned for that book by 3.  But as I explained in part 1, due to how Radish’s Wait-to-Unlock model works, it’s very unlikely that anyone is ever paying for all of the episodes in your book. At best, some readers are paying for some chapters, but it’s virtually impossible to really separate readers into true and discrete payer vs freeloader categories. 

So instead, I decided to break things down into sale or giveaway “equivalents”, which simply means that I divide the number of episodes that were paid for by the number of chapters in that book, and that gives me the number of full book reads that were paid for. Everything else becomes a free giveaway.

Last time, book 2 had 20 sale equivalents (I was paid for 20 full copies of the book) and this time that number has increased to 35.  That’s a 75% increase which sounds great, right?

As usual, numbers can be deceiving which is why you have to often look a little bit deeper for the truth.  You’ll notice that the Sale Equivalents rows have percentages in their 3^rd columns.  This value signifies the percentage of books sold vs given away (and vice versa for the Giveaway Equivalents rows). And if you look at both data sets, you’ll see the same disturbing thing that I saw. To get that increase in sales, I had to give away a much higher number of books. Initially, of all of the book 2 equivalents read, I was only being paid for 8% of them, and I thought that was bad!  This time around, although the number of books I sold went up by 75%, as a percentage of the total books being read, it is now under 5%.  That’s almost a 40% drop!

Book 2 sales increased by 75%, but now make up less than 5% of the total books read.

The situation isn’t much better for book 3.  I made 28 sale equivalents, but had to give away 368 copies to do it, putting my sales percentage at just over 7%.

As I mentioned in part 1, this is the true “cost” of this model, and depending on your situation, that may be too high.  For a book you are trying to sell, you shouldn’t be only paid for 5 out of every hundred people that read it.

In general though, there isn’t much else to note about this section, the book 3 numbers look largely as expected, similar to how book 2 looked in Data Set 1.

Earnings

Which brings us to the final section of the spreadsheet, the coin values and earnings.

This time around I had to make a couple of slight adjustments to this section.

First, I had to break the earnings down by book now that I had data for more than one of them.  The only real surprise here is that book 2 and book 3 both earned almost the exact same amount. I mean, the fact that they are almost the exact same is just a coincidence, but that book 3 has already caught up to book 2 is surprising. Could be that because of the final 6 chapters being pay only now, and with no other books coming there is no incentive to wait, those that want to finish up the series are doing so right away. Also, book 3 has more overall episodes than book 2, so there are more opportunities to spend coins.  If those are the reasons, I would expect book 3 to continue to outpace book 2 and soon be earning more.

I sold more books in total, so my overall earnings went up (regardless of which row you look at, the differences between them are minimal, but I’ll get to why I repeated them shortly).

In fact, depending on which row you look at, my earnings increased by between 228 – 250%.  That’s not too bad from a raw numbers perspective, given that I only published 1 more book. But again, whether it’s worth it really depends on how all those giveaways factor into your thinking. And quite honestly, $150 bucks for a 3 book series across more than 2 months isn’t really that exciting, even though it was fairly simple to set up and I haven’t had to spend any money advertising or put any extra effort or thought into it (aside from writing these articles).

But how did they fare against my Amazon earnings?

If you recall, these books are still for sale on Amazon, but as I haven’t touched them (or the rest of my catalog) in years, they earn very little. Still, they’re noteworthy as a point of comparison.

For the period between the two data sets, the entire series earned $35.35 on Amazon, but even if I use the lowest coin value row as comparison, Radish earned $95.06 (this month’s $136.61 minus last month’s $41.55).  That means Radish earned about 169% more in the same time frame!

But remember, a great many free copies had to be given away to earn that. 

How many? 

Well, book 1 is permafree on Amazon, and during this time period I gave out 178 copies of that book.

During the same time period on Radish, I gave away 338 copies of book 1. Fair enough, it’s meant to be free so that’s not a problem. 

But here’s the thing.  I’m not giving any copies of book 2 or 3 away on Amazon, they’re books I would like to be paid for.  But due to Radish’s Wait-to-Unlock model I’ve had to give away another 456 copies of book 2 and 368 copies of book 3.

I gave away 178 copies of book 1 to earn $35.35 on Amazon, but had to give away 1162 copies of the entire series to earn $95.06 on Radish.

That about sums that up, so take from it what you will.

The second adjustment I had to make to this section was in repeating the earnings row three times, and I did that for two reasons.

First, because despite the fact that there are 3 totals shown, none of them are completely accurate.

That’s because, like KU page reads, the Radish coin value fluctuates from month to month. As I didn’t keep track of how many coins were earned per calendar month, I really have no idea how many were earned under which rate, so the true earning is probably closer to an average of the 3 lines than any one line in particular. But as the numbers are so similar, I don’t think it really matters which one we focus on.

The second reason I wanted to show all 3 was to be clear on one of the biggest gripes Radish authors have about the new payment model, which, when laid out like this, looks very similar to the historical fluctuation and eventual drop of the KU page reads value.

When Amazon first introduced KU page reads, the first month had the highest payout value, and then the price slowly fell to its eventual stabilizing point, where it now hovers around, with minor fluctuations month by month. Radish has only had this pricing model for 3 months, but it’s already trending the same way. It’s too soon to tell if the payout rate has yet hit its bottom, but if it continues to mirror Amazon, then it still has a way to go.

Latest Numbers (as of Aug 11) and Weird stuff

Before I wrap this up, I wanted to very quickly show the latest Radish numbers, which were taken a couple of days from publication of this article, or about 2 weeks after book 3 was completely published.

For the most part, things have continued to progress as expected, but there are a couple of surprises.

As I had hoped, the read through rate for books 2-3 continues to climb, but hasn’t yet gotten as high as I would like.  Could be not as many of the freebie readers are choosing to pay for those final 6 chapters after all, or it could just be that not enough time has elapsed.  After all, the difference between those other two data sets was around a month or so.

One eye opener is the book 1-2 read through rate, which has surpassed 100%!  That could mean that there are at least some readers that are reading book 2 but not book 1.  Or it could be that some people skipped episodes in book 1.  That may seem odd, but it would track with some strange numbers I noticed when I looked at the per episode views.  I didn’t drill into that level for these articles as it just becomes far more complicated and with very little extra value, but this one issue is definitely worth mentioning.

For instance, episode 27 of book 1 (the last chapter of the free book) had 1163 views, but episode 26 only had 696 views.  Are THAT many people skipping to the end to see how things turn out?  But it gets even stranger, because it’s not like there was this eventual decline chapter by chapter, leading to 696 and then that big jump to 1163.  Aside from that big jump, the overall trend seems reasonable, but the individual numbers make little sense.  A few examples: 

• Episode 15: 851 views
• Episode 16: 782 views
• Episode 17: 750 views
• Episode 18: 821 views
• Episode 19: 797 views
• Episode 20: 923 views

And for fun, I charted the entire book 1 as a line graph, which I think illustrates the issue a lot better.

I mean, are people really just randomly reading chapters or, perhaps more likely, does Radish have some view tracking issues?  Impossible to say, but very strange.

Overall though, the numbers are continuing to climb, and as expected, book 3 is now outpacing book 2 from an earnings perspective.  What wasn’t expected, though, was that it’s doing so simply because it’s longer.  In the last couple weeks, book 3 picked up 7 more sale equivalents, but book 2 picked up 8. But since book 3 has 7 extra episodes, it’s pulling in more money.

Conclusion and Recommendations

It may seem surprising given how often I mentioned it, but to be completely honest, giving away all of those free copies doesn’t really bother me, although I still think it’ll be (justifiably) a big deal for many others.

In my case, I’m using books that have already had their day in the sun, and they’ve been languishing for years.  I’m not planning on doing anything else with them, and so giving away a bunch of free copies to get an extra couple hundred bucks isn’t really a big deal.  But that definitely won’t be everyone’s feeling on the matter, and if these were new books, I would feel completely differently.

In fact, because of this, I would never actually recommend using Radish to anyone for their new books. I think it’s fine as an alternative source of income to use on your back catalog – but I don’t really see a path to big success. There is just no easy way to reliably market your books to their audience, and thus discoverability on the platform remains an issue. 

And because of all the free giveaways, I wouldn’t even recommend using it for a new book as part of a wide strategy, as I would worry about the dilution all of those free copies would have on the broader market – thus hurting your sales elsewhere.  I have no actual data to back this up, but I have a feeling that the percentage of Radish readers that also read on other platforms is likely very high, which is why I would fear that dilution.

In my opinion, as it stands now, Radish only seems like a good option for older, back catalog material that you aren’t planning on doing anything else with anyway.

Of course, your experience may differ, so if you have anything to add to the discussion, please leave your comments below, or feel free to email me.

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The post My Radish Experiment – Part 2 appeared first on HiddenGemsBooks.

A little over a month ago I decided to experiment with the Radish Fiction reading app, using a 3-book romance series that I wrote years ago as the guinea pig. The reading app model is a fairly new one, but with even Amazon getting into the game with Vella, it seems like the model may be sticking around for a while.  Radish looks to be one of the biggest players, so I thought it was worth walking through to see what the process was like from an author perspective. I’ve been providing regular updates to the authors on my weekly newsletter, but now that I’ve started to get some results, a bigger more detailed analysis is warranted.  I’m calling this Part 1, though, as not all of the data is in yet so I’m sure there will be at least one more future update.

What is Radish and how does it work?

Fiction Apps have been around for a while, but it seems like authors have only recently begun to start looking at them  more seriously as an alternative revenue source.

In general, the idea is to sell books in chunks via an app, with readers paying on more of a chapter-by-chapter basis, rather than for the entire book all at once. It’s the television series model applied to books, where each new “episode” is released on a set schedule (daily, weekly, etc) in an attempt at hooking readers into having to return to the platform in order to catch each new episode’s release. Depending on the payment model you choose, they can view those new episodes for free by waiting or pay to unlock them sooner, although you can alter those details in many different ways – not only in terms of how long they have to wait or how many episodes they can view for free, but by making the whole thing free or the whole thing pay only.

Radish Terminology

Because of this model, Radish uses different terminology than authors are used to, so it’s worth quickly running through a few of the key terms to explain what they roughly equate to in the book world and how they differ.

Payment

In terms of payment, the Radish model uses coins, with readers buying them from Radish and then spending them to unlock the next episode of the book (if it’s available/published). The price to unlock an episode is about 3 coins.

If you’re familiar with Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, you may notice a few similarities here. While KU readers pay one price that allows them to borrow unlimited books that are enrolled in the program, authors only get paid based on the number of pages that actually get read. That means that even though your entire book is sent to a KU borrower, if they only read the first 10 pages of your book, you only get paid for those 10 pages.

With Radish, readers aren’t getting your full book at once, but they are paying per episode (depending on your model) which means that like KU, you may end up only getting paid for part of a book.

Another similarity comes from a very recently introduced change to the Radish payout model, where they went from a fixed coin value (of roughly 4 cents) to one that fluctuates month by month, much like Amazon’s page read value.  Essentially they are calculating coin payout price by dividing overall coin income by number of coins spent. If all customers paid a fixed price per coin, the payout amount wouldn’t change, but because Radish now wants to account for all of the discounts and free coin giveaways that they use for promotion, the overall coin pool is being increased even as the overall coin income becomes decreased (or at best, stays the same), which leads to a much lower coin value under this new model (in May, authors were paid 2.5 cents per coin). In defense of this, Radish claims that it evens out because more coins are available to be spent on episodes, but all of the authors I’ve spoken to have reported a drastic decrease in their Radish earnings under this new model.

Depending on size of book and number of chapters/episodes, on the surface it actually may seem like a full book read payout is similar between the two models.  For instance, if you had a 20 chapter, 300 page book that was read cover to cover under KU, you’d earn about $1.35 (assuming a page read rate of .0045). For that same book on Radish, a full cover to cover read would earn you $1.50 (20 episodes, 3 coins per episode at .025 each).

Unfortunately, though, under most of the Radish pricing models, I’d argue (and will explain why later) that it’s virtually impossible that you’d ever get paid the full amount for your book even when it is read from front to back, because some, if not all, of your chapters will be read for free. Only the Premium pricing model forces readers to pay for every episode, and that pricing model is not a popular choice among authors.

Radish Pricing Models

Speaking of which, there are a few different pricing models to choose from.

Premium – Readers must pay 3 coins for each episode. While this sounds great at first, most readers on Radish are used to getting at least some chapters for free and Radish doesn’t typically recommend using this unless you already have your own following of fans. None of the authors I spoke to were using this model.

Freemium – Readers have to pay 3 coins for each episode at first, but soon after publication each episode becomes completely free.

Free – This option means your book is completely free to everyone immediately, and is the only option you can use if your book is published free somewhere other than Radish, although it’s also used by new authors trying to build up a following.

Wait-to-Unlock – According to Radish, this model is the most popular and earns more coins than both Premium or Freemium, and from the authors I’ve spoken to, it is the common choice.  It’s sort of a blend between Premium and Freemium, allowing the author to specify a number of initial free chapters (i.e. the hook), a number of pay only chapters (always the final chapters currently published), and the ones in between being pay immediately or wait a specified time to unlock. I suppose because of the different variables, this option is only available by emailing Radish support with your desired settings and asking them to enable it on the backend.

For example, let’s say you have a story that is 30 episodes in length and you have set them to publish daily under the Wait-to-Unlock model. And let’s say you have a really good first few episodes that have a really strong cliffhanger type hook at the end of episode 4, and your book climax starts around episode 25.  In that case, you might decide to make the first 4 episodes free and have 6 episodes that are pay only. The rest are set as Wait-to-Unlock with whatever time increment you choose (Radish recommends an hour, most authors I spoke to choose a longer number).

I found it a bit confusing at first, especially the idea of the rolling final 6 pay only chapters. Essentially, this just means that as a book is publishing, it’s always the final 6 episodes that are published that are pay only, which changes day-by-day until the entire book is published.

So to go through the details using the example numbers outlined above, for the first 4 days, each episode publishes and is free because you chose the first 4 episodes to be always free.  On the fifth day when episode 5 publishes, anyone that wants to read it MUST pay 3 coins. Same for the next 5 days meaning that by day 10 when you have 10 episodes published, the first 4 are free and the next 6 are all pay only.  But on day 11, episode 5 now becomes Wait-to-Unlock, and episodes 6-11 are now pay only.  On day 12, episodes 5 and 6 are Wait-to-Unlock, and episodes 7-12 are pay only. And so on until the entire book is published, at which point episodes 1-4 are free, episodes 5-24 are Wait-to-Unlock, and episodes 25-30 are pay only.

Radish Experiment Details

For this experiment, I ended up posting a 3 book romance series (each stand-alone but interconnected) that I originally wrote and published years ago but haven’t touched since.  Like most of my old books, they’re still available for sale on Amazon and other sites, but as I haven’t published anything new on that pen name in a couple years or done any sort of marketing or promotion, they’re mainly languishing.

However, I specifically chose this series because it was a very strong seller back when it was originally released (earning in the low 6 figures on Amazon within the first year of release, according to Book Report), which was important because I wanted to give this experiment every advantage to succeed. If I had uploaded a dud, or even something new, it would be harder to draw many conclusions regarding how well Radish moves books. By using something that sold well, we at least know that any sales deficiencies are likely due to other reasons beyond book quality or overall desirability. For that reason I also used the original blurbs, titles and “general” cover design.

I say “general” cover design, because another Radish quirk is that you can’t have any writing on your cover. Radish overlays your title and penname onto the cover image as part of their overall app design, and because I didn’t have my original cover design files (or even remember who designed them in the first place), I had to have Nate remake them. Luckily he was able to find the same original cover model images, so what we ended up with was very close to the original.

Story Setup Choices

I chose to upload the series as a single story, but each book as a different season under the Wait-to-Unlock model. When I originally did this, though, my understanding of how Radish worked was more limited and I didn’t realize two key points:

1. As with Amazon, if a book is free elsewhere it must be listed free on Radish
2. A story can only have one pricing model regardless of seasons (i.e. you can’t have a different pricing model per season) and the settings apply to the story as a whole (not individually against each season)

The first point was only an issue because of the series I chose.  Since I no longer advertise or promote these, I’ve set book 1 as permafree everywhere to help drive sales to books 2 and 3.  This meant I had to also make book 1 free on Radish, but because of the second point, I couldn’t simply use the free pricing plan for season 1 and Wait-to-Unlock for the others. Worse, the Wait-to-Unlock settings apply to the entire story across seasons/books. This meant that in order to make season 1 free, I had to make AT LEAST the first 27 episodes free (the number of episodes in book 1).

I could have made more than that free – for example if I wanted the first 5 episodes of book 2 to be free, I could have set the first 32 episodes to be free – but that still would have meant no free episodes for book 3. Therefore I just left the free episodes at 27, used 6 chapters as my rolling pay only number, and set the wait time for the rest to 2 hours.

Since I had to make book 1 free, I published the entire season immediately, but set the remaining episodes (for seasons 2 and 3) to publish at a rate of 1 per day.

Note: At the time of me putting this article together, the entire season/book 2 was published but none of season/book 3, thus the following numbers and analysis are based on that. 

Data Breakdown

Radish does provide some data and insight, but it’s fairly limited and thus I’ve had to make some estimations, guesses and assumptions to derive something meaningful out of it, but I’ll explain.  First, here’s a screenshot of the spreadsheet I’m using to track and analyze my raw data and results.

At the top is the raw data – the number of episodes in total and published so far per book/season, how many episode views (reads) each has had, and how many coins were earned.  Remember that as book 1 is free and book 3 is not yet published, only book 2 has earned coins so far.  The yellow(ish) cells are the ones I manually edit from my Radish dashboard whenever I want to update this spreadsheet.

Assumptions and Numbers

Everything below the raw data section is calculated, and this is where I try to make some sense of the data, and also where I have to make some assumptions.  The big assumption is the idea that each reader reads all chapters, which I KNOW is not correct, but given that I can’t get a breakdown, I think it’s the best way to simplify things. Besides, for most purposes it doesn’t really matter whether it’s 1 person reading the book in total or 2 people reading half the book each. It’s also the same assumption many KU authors use to try and guesstimate the number of borrows a book has (total page reads divided by number of pages in the book).

Book Readers

So that means that where you see 413 Book 1 Readers, that calculation is simply number of total episode views of book 1 divided by the number of chapters published for book 1. Similar with the Book 2 Readers.

Read Through Bk 1 – 2

While the books are written to be stand-alone, I think it’s a reasonable assumption to assume most people are starting on book 1 and then reading book 2 (especially since book 1 is free). That means that if we divide book 2 readers by book 1 readers we get the % of people that continued on to read book 2 after reading book 1. Obviously you want a really high number here, as it means your series is really sticky, keeping people hooked from book to book.  If I had a 59% read through on Amazon I’d be ecstatic, as that’s very high. On Radish, it’s not as impressive as it seems, but I’ll explain why shortly.

Book 2 Episodes Purchased

When someone buys an episode on Radish, it costs roughly 3 coins, thus to find out how many episodes were purchased I simply divided the coins earned for that book by 3.

Book 2 Sale/Giveaway Equivalents

The Radish model is trickier than KU when it comes to figuring out how many people are really paying for the book.  With KU, someone either borrows the book or they don’t, and then from those borrows they read all or part of the book.  Hopefully most read all of it, but even from those that read part of it you still get paid for whatever they DO read.

With Radish’s Wait-to-Unlock model, it’s possible that a reader can read most (if not all) of your books for free if they’re patient enough (with the exception of the final pay only chapters), and it’s very likely that NO ONE is paying for the full book.  That’s because with each chapter unlocking after a certain amount of time (2 hours in my case), unless they’re reading it in a single sitting (and paying to unlock each episode immediately), just putting the book down to do something else or when you go to sleep means the next chapter will be unlocked for free upon return.

For that reason, trying to separate the readers into payers vs freeloaders on the whole is pretty much impossible as the pool of readers is likely made up of a whole bunch of people that just paid for a few chapters.  So instead, I decided to just break it down by sale or giveaway “equivalents”.  That is, chapters paid for (541) divided by number of chapters (27) gives us the equivalent of 20 full paid book reads.

If we consider 243 as the total full copies of book 2 read, that means the remaining 223 copies were read for free. As a percentage, that means only about 8% of books were paid for, and almost 92% were given away.

Now you see why I’m not so impressed with the 59% read-through number. I don’t have any hard data to back it up, but I’m willing to bet that read-through on a series is much higher when the books are free.

Analysis

As you can see in the green box, when calculated at the rate of last month’s coin value, so far the series has earned $41.55.  A far cry from what it earned on Amazon when it was first released, but despite my attempts at keeping things as similar as possible, it’s actually very hard to draw fair comparisons here.

For one, I’m doing no advertising on these books and I wouldn’t even know how to advertise them if I wanted to.  I honestly have no idea how the discoverability really works with Radish beyond people just searching through lists and preset keywords via the app.  When I originally released this series years ago, I spent lots of money on advertising.

Another factor is that so far I’m only earning on book 2, and the final chapter of book 2 was only published yesterday.  Readers still need time to get caught up.  And then once book 3 is in the mix and the whole series is published, maybe that’ll lead to more readers coming on board (not having to wait a day between episodes for those that like to binge).

In fact, a more accurate comparison might be to compare what the books are earning on Amazon right now, when they haven’t been advertised in years and have very little organic discoverability.

From that perspective, things get more interesting. 

In the last 30 days, the entire series has only earned $33.82 on Amazon, which means Radish has actually earned 23% more in the same time frame.

But we can narrow things down even further, because only book 2 is actually for sale on Radish (book 1 is free and book 3 is not yet published), which means I should be comparing the Radish results ONLY against the book 2 Amazon results.

As it turns out, book 2 has only earned $15.83 in the last month on Amazon, which means Radish is actually earning me 162% more than Amazon!

Does that mean we should all dump Amazon and run over to Radish?

Of course not…  keep in mind that this is a very small sample size and still very small numbers. I have no info on what sort of long tail any sales will have, if the numbers will increase if I added more books to the pen name, how book 3 will do, etc.

But aside from that, there’s one other important factor to take into consideration – the importance of which may vary between author to author.

In order to earn these 20 sales, I had to give away 223 copies of book 2.

It’s one thing to use a book 1 permafree strategy to drive sales of later books in a series (as I’m doing on both sites – and for those curious, Amazon gave away 316 free copies of book 1 vs Radish’s 413 in the last month), but it’s quite another to be giving away hundreds of copies of a book that you really want to get paid for (book 2), just so that you can get a few sales out of it as well.

I think for many authors, that issue alone may be a deal breaker.

That’s it for now, but once I have the numbers in for book 3 I’ll be back with part 2 of my Radish experiment. In the meantime, f you have any questions feel free to email me or post them in the comments below. And that includes if you think any of my calculations are off, or if you disagree with any of my analysis!

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Most self-published authors sell their book on one or more of the traditional online eBook stores like Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc. Lately, however, a new option has emerged that is worth looking into, at least for those not tied to a long term exclusivity agreement. You may not have heard of Fiction Apps, or if you have, you may have brushed them off believing that they only exist to give books away for free and can’t be used to earn real money from your novels.  Times have changed, though, with new apps emerging and gaining popularity among both readers and silicon valley. NY Times and USA Today bestselling author Krista Lakes uses them, and she’s here to let us know why it’s time for authors to start taking these apps seriously, and what some of the options are. I think I’ll be experimenting with one of them in the near future myself!

For many authors, the question of whether or not to go wide rests on only two factors:

1. How many readers will I lose from Amazon by taking my books out of Kindle Unlimited
2. How many readers will I gain from the other big retailers by listing them there?

Usually, when considering other retailers, only a few names come to mind. Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo are the heaviest hitters in eBooks. Google is usually a single-percentage add-on. All the places that Smashwords and Draft2Digital distribute to are usually worth checking the box to get that distribution.

But there’s a new set of platforms that are making some authors a lot of money, and they’re called fiction apps.

You may have gotten an ad for one of these before. Usually, it has a picture of a beautiful pregnant woman and then the first chapter of a book. It’s usually something that hooks you and makes you click the “read more.” Or maybe it’s one of the graphical ones. A handsome man stands next to a heavily pregnant woman and asks her how it’s going. Two options pop up: “Make small talk” or “Tell him the baby is his.”

Sound familiar? I know many of my most popular romance books use the secret baby trope. And while my books cost money to read, these apps seem to be free! But somebody’s got to be writing for them, right?

Do they get paid? Can I get paid? Is it worth it?

What are fiction apps?

The term “fiction app” refers to any of the various apps popping up in the Apple or Google app stores which deliver content on a more “pay-per-chapter” basis, rather than selling the whole eBook at once. Some of these apps, like Radish or Goodnovel, simply offer new chapters in a linear way. Others, like Episodes or Sana Stories, feature branching storylines. All these apps try to give enough free content away to entice the customer into buying more of the paid content.

Which fiction apps are worth writing for?

I am going to focus on Radish Fiction here, because it is the only app that I have really experimented with publishing on, but I will list some more apps and their possible issues below.

Radish Fiction

By far the most lucrative for romance authors, Radish Fiction recently got a $60m funding round from some venture capitalists. How did they convince Silicon Valley that they were worth so much? Because they’re making money – over a million dollars a month. The first three chapters of every story is free (much like Amazon’s “Look Inside”) and after that, the author can select how much more they want to be free, whether the next chapter will be locked for a number of hours, and whether any of the final chapters will only be available to purchase with coins. Their contract is also the best in the business. With a slick-looking app, regular promotions for authors, and a great support team, they’re poised to be the leader in this industry.

Genres: Romance, though they do have a horror section as well.

Format: Text only

Royalties: They pay 12.6 cents per chapter read if the chapter is bought with coins. While not a percentage, it works out to roughly 35%. They pay quarterly, about ten days after the end of the quarter.

Time to upload: Since every chapter must be copy and pasted separately, a thirty chapter book takes me roughly thirty minutes to upload.

Things to know: Radish does not allow any text on covers, so you’ll have to use stock photos or just take the title off your existing cover if you can do that.

Contractual issues: Stories that are free elsewhere can not be charged for on Radish. Stories must remain on the app until six months after the last chapter is released.

How to apply: Go to http://radishfiction.com/writer.html. Note that they are selective about who they pick to write on their app, but my suggestion is to share your sales figures and hope for the best!

Facebook groups dedicated to Radish books:

• Radish Fiction (for readers/writers)
• Radish Readers and Authors Lounge

Dreame

Genres: Any

Format: Text only

Royalties: Apparently, if you go through Streetlib, you get a much better deal. I don’t know what the difference is, though. They pay quarterly.

Time to upload: If submitted through Streetlib, the book is chopped up for you, meaning the only time spent is uploading your cover, blurb, and ebook file. However, if the book never seems to show up on the Dreame app, you have to email Streetlib to hurry the process along.

Contractual issues: Even with the better contract through Streetlib, it is difficult to get books taken down from the app.

How to apply: Simply submit the book through Streetlib and select Dreame as a retailer.

Goodnovel

Genres: Romance

Format: Text only

Royalties: Based on chapters read. Paid quarterly

Time to upload: Like Radish, you have to copy/paste every chapter, so expect to take some time on this for every book.

Contractual issues: First of all, you have to upload at least 15000 words of a book to their website without a contract. I know that that’s stressful, but that’s how they’ve decided to do things. Then, you can ask them for a contract. The first contract they send is very bad for the author. However, they are willing to negotiate on basically every term. Do not give up any rights you are not comfortable giving up, like film, TV, or audiobook rights. Even after negotiating with them, they will insist on a term of five years. You’re not exclusive to them during that time, but just know that you won’t be able to return that book to Kindle Unlimited for that long. There’s some red flags there, so proceed at your own risk!

How to apply: Start here https://www.goodnovel.com/writer_benefit

Sana Stories

Genres: Romance

Format: Interactive text

Royalties: 25% of subscription revenue

Time to upload: This one will take you a while. Like a choose-your-own-adventure book, you have to write both sides of every choice the reader is able to make. Of course, you can make one branch end, or have both branches meet up at a common point, but it can be a lot of work.

Contractual issues: None so far, but they’re a new app, so I hope that everything goes well with them.

How to apply: Start here https://www.sanastories.com/sana-writing-tool

Conclusion

One thing to remember is that when considering writing for any fiction app, it is very important for you to look over their contract and make sure that there is a way for you to exit and that you’re not giving up any rights that they don’t need. Some of these apps are hosted in foreign countries, and enforcing your legal rights might be more trouble there. Do your diligence!

For me, it’s a no-brainer to split my time between writing and uploading new books to these fiction apps. Since I left Kindle Unlimited, my Amazon income has been reduced, and even re-submitting books to KU hasn’t changed that. These fiction apps are definitely outperforming Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo for me. I think that they might represent the future of reading, and I’m excited to be on the ground floor! And if you want to see reviews on more of these fiction apps in the future, or if you’ve tried them and want to share your experience with them, let us know in the comments below!

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