Series

I’ve been pondering an idea for a series again. I had a conversation last week about Kindle Unlimited that made me think. When I published First, I did so by casting a wide net with the eBook version. The deal is that you kind of have only two choices: 1) Place your book on Kindle Unlimited, which allows people to check it out like a library and you, as the author, get paid by number of pages read. The downside is that it’s exclusive. You can’t sell your eBook anywhere else; or 2) Sell your eBook everywhere, in which case it’s not available on KU. To be clear, it’s still available on Kindle as an eBook purchase, but not for check-out.

The reason I bring this up is because in last week’s conversation we talked about how a series is better for KU than one-off books. In the universe of KU, the author gets paid by how many pages a reader reads. It doesn’t really pay off, at least as I understand it, unless the book is part of a series where the reader can keep going and going and going. That makes sense to me and actually matches my own reading experience with KU. I’ve talked about it here before to some degree. In the couple of years I’ve had KU, I’ve read series of 20, 15, and now reading one where I”m on book nine. The series model makes sense. I put some brainstorming ideas in a document on Saturday and will be working on hashing those out.