When you think “Kindle Unlimited”, you probably think “small press and indie publishers”.
That may be about to change.
Harper Collins has recently decided to test the waters in Amazon’s subscription service. The Big Five publisher will enroll several thousand of its backlist titles into Kindle Unlimited in the UK and Australia on an experimental basis.
In and of itself, this doesn’t really mean much. A big publisher like HC owns the rights to thousands of books, after all–some of which barely sell.
The indie publishing community is presently divided about the costs and benefits of Kindle Unlimited. I don’t look for New York publishing houses to embrace KU in a major way anytime soon. If a book is capable of selling, they want to sell it, not enroll in it in Amazon’s per-page payment system.
Not that I’m against the Big Five jumping into KU, mind you. If Harper Collins, Penguin, and the other major publishers were to make Kindle Unlimited a regular part of their strategy, they might be successful in negotiating an end to the exclusivity clause of the program.