Kindle Unlimited and Indie Authors

If you’ve glanced at the world of publishing news, you know that the US Department of Justice is suing to stop the merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. I haven’t paid close attention to it, since I’m not published by either company and nor is that likely to happen, but it’s been amusing to watch various unsavory facts about traditional publishing bubble to the surface in the depositions.

What was interesting to me was that someone worked out that Amazon paid over $250 million dollars in Kindle Unlimited page reads to authors for the first half of 2022.

People have interpreted this fact in numerous ways, but I think this proves my favorite interpretation – that it’s better to self-publish than to waste years trying to find a traditional publisher only to get screwed.

A while back there was one of those interminably tedious Twitter threads where an author claimed that traditional publishing was biased against her identity group the most. As you might guess, nearly all the replies were arguments saying “no, traditional publishing is the most biased against MY identity group, you insensitive clod!” and an endless circular argument about which group was the most disfavored by traditional publishing. As I glanced at this thread, I realized I was watching the parable of the blind men describing the elephant play out in real time. Everyone on that thread was, essentially, correct. They were all describing – from their perspective – a system that wasn’t fair to writers, regardless of their identity groups.

In some ways, traditional publishing is basically a zombie legacy industry. It used to be more vibrant and distributed, with hundreds of different publishers in the US back in the 70s and the 80s, but then they all got bought up. For a while there were the Big Six publishers, now there are only the Big Five, and one of them is trying to buy the others to become the Big Four. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the Big Five aren’t independent companies, but subsidiaries owned by massive international conglomerates. The conglomerates don’t really care what their publishing divisions do, so long as they turn a profit and don’t break the law in such a way that they end up in federal court, like the price-fixing lawsuit from about twelve years ago. In such a massive organization, the concerns of an individual writer are basically meaningless and more profitable to simply ignore. Indeed, you occasionally see stories about big sellers like Dean Koontz writing for one of Amazon’s imprints because he was unhappy with his publisher, and Jim Butcher recently self-published a Dresden Files novella on Kindle Unlimited (it was excellent, in my opinion.) If big sellers like Dean Koontz and Jim Butcher aren’t happy with the way things are going in traditional publishing, think how dissatisfied writers with less clout must be.

Like this recent article about Barnes & Noble cutting back on the amount of middle-grade hardcovers it will orders. Critics said it would hit underrepresented authors the most. The CEO of B&N pointed out that the store winds up returning about 80% of its middle grade hardcovers, so the decision is a necessary business one since there’s no point in ordering a bunch of hardcovers that aren’t going to sell. This seems to be one of those arguments where both sides are correct and have a point. The authors are right to be worried that B&N is cutting back on hardcovers, but the CEO of B&N is also right to point out that ordering a bunch of hardcovers that won’t sell anyway won’t do the authors very much good.

It’s not fair to the writers, though.

There is no such thing as perfect fairness in this fallen world, and nor will there ever be.

But here’s the thing – Kindle Unlimited is a lot closer to actual fairness than anything traditional publishing ever did. Like, there are valid criticisms to be made of Kindle Unlimited. But you don’t need to network to use it. You don’t need to convince an editor or an agent to like you. You don’t have to deal with the creaking decrepit infrastructure of legacy publishing. And Kindle Unlimited doesn’t care about your identity group. You can use it to publish your book, and then you’re on a level playing field with every other writer.

Granted, this can lead to discovering a hard truth – that no one actually wants to buy or read your book – but this in itself can be a valuable education. If you want your book to sell, you also have to learn digital entrepreneurship – how to set up a website, a mailing list, and how to contract with freelancers to make book covers, how to format your book, and so forth. This can be scary and hard for many people (indeed, it can be scary and hard sometimes even with experience), and that’s probably why many writers want to get traditionally published – they want someone to take care off all that business stuff for them. But life doesn’t work that way. And think of all the professional athletes, actors, and musicians who had someone to Take Care off all the business stuff for them only to wind up penniless.

No, it’s better to have your hands on the wheel.

If you don’t want to mess with Kindle Unlimited and don’t like Amazon, there are still lots of ways to self-publish now – all the other storefronts like Apple Books and Google Play, Kickstarter, Patreon, or the various reading and serialization apps like Radish. There are lots of different ways to do it, depending on what you want and what you are comfortable doing.

Either way, traditional publishing or self-publishing, it’s a lot of hard work. The different, the vital difference, is that when you self-publish you’re working for yourself. You also learn useful skills in the realm of digital entrepreneurship that are applicable to other areas. If you traditionally publish, you mostly learn how to write query letters to agents who will probably ignore them. And even if you succeed, you’re basically working for your agent and a giant international conglomerate, and they own your book for the life of the copyright. (Or you’ll be like Chuck Palahniuk, and your agent will steal all your money.)

So, I bluntly think self-publishing is much better for writers than traditionally publishing, and if you’re unhappy with traditional publishing, you should stop writing query letters to agents and start learning to self-publish. David Gaughran’s LET’S GET DIGITAL and Joanna Penn’s SUCCESSFUL SELF PUBLISHING are both free in ebook and excellent places to start.

-JM