There is a cashier at a nearby grocery store where I regularly shop. She is an avid reader of my books.
This woman (I’ll call her Beverly) is probably in her mid-forties. Like me, she has spent most of her life in Ohio.
Beverly subscribes to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, and she reads most of my books through KU.
The other day, I asked Beverly if she did much reading on non-Amazon platforms such as Apple Books, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo.
Beverly gave me a perplexed look.
“Why?” she asked, honestly surprised by the question. (She had never even heard of Kobo—or, at best, was only vaguely aware that it existed.)
I grew up in an era when the retail book market was wonderfully distributed and diverse. We had Waldenbooks and B. Dalton in the local mall. There were independent bookstores throughout the eastern Cincinnati suburbs where I lived. There were also at least two bookstores serving the University of Cincinnati, which I attended in the late 1980s.
When the brick-and-mortar superstores Borders and Barnes & Noble came to Cincinnati in the 1990s, the retail book market consolidated somewhat—but not all that much. There were still no online book sales, and the market was large enough to support multiple retailers.
That’s the way I prefer things to be. But as is so often the case in the twenty-first century, I find myself out of step with the times.
A few months ago, I took a handful of my ebook titles wide, meaning that I removed them from Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program (which requires exclusivity) and made them available through Google Play, Apple Books, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.
This past week, I decided to remove those books from wide distribution and place them back into Kindle Unlimited. That decision was based on sales data, as well as further analysis of broader market trends. One factor was the overwhelming cost competitiveness of Amazon’s Kindle devices.
As a result, seven of my titles will be returning to Kindle Unlimited. This process should be complete by the end of the month. It is taking longer than I expected because several of Kobo’s international bookseller partners have been slow to delist the titles, and I cannot enroll them in Kindle Unlimited until they have been fully removed from those sites.
These are the titles that will be returning to KU over the coming weeks. You can find all of them on my Amazon author page:
- The Consultant
- No Sure Thing
- 12 Hours of Halloween
- Revolutionary Ghosts
- Hay Moon and Other Stories
- Eleven Miles of Night
- Involuntary Deeds
-ET