You may be wondering why, so I wanted to be absolutely transparent with you. Kindle Unlimited is amazing. It’s cheaper for the fact that if you pay $13ish dollars you can borrow 20 books and exchange another 20 whenever you want. You’re not tied down to just one book or one work and you can have this constantly revolving door of titles to enjoy. With inflation and everything else happening in the world, that seems like the best deal possible and for a long time I thought that as well.
But here’s the flip side of all of that. There are apps that will give you free books legally. Overdrive and Libby will give you the ability to borrow up to five books for free as long as you have a library card. iBooks has free books, which is what I used to read books for quite some time. There’s websites and other apps to read books online for free as well and retailers who have better and more frequent promotions for freebies and discounts.
Authors are paid on Kindle Unlimited for a standard rate per page read of $0.0045 and must be exclusive to that platform for their ebooks. There are so many places I’m missing out on for the price of that exclusivity and between that and the reoccurring issues I’ve had with Amazon since July, my trust in them is fractured.
This may be a temporary move. Come the end of next year, I may find that with enough books, exposure, and listening to my readers opinions, that Kindle Unlimited was my best bet. But, I won’t know until I try and give it an honest shot.
I’ll be sure to remind you prior to the move and keep you up to date with what retailers my books are on and where you can find them.