The artificial Kindle Unlimited Aristocracy
In 2007, Amazon introduced the Kindle ereader and blew up the face of book publishing. Suddenly anybody could publish a book in electronic format, and it was easy to find and read. Books ranged from 99 cents to $2.99, because people liked to read a lot of books and they liked them cheap. The next ten or so years were a gold rush of people shoveling out whatever weird stories were on their hard drives and making bank. Hugh Howey did very well with Wool, which is now a TV series called Silo, just as an example.
In July of 2014, Amazon rolled out a service called Kindle Unlimited.
For just 7.99 a month, readers could read as many books as they could cram into their eyeballs. Authors were heavily encouraged to enroll, promised money per page read and additional bonuses for top earners. Authors signed up in droves. Readers signed up in droves. The average income from the subscribers was parceled out to authors through something called the Kindle Unlimited Pool.
This fluctuated every month. Authors won big or lost big, depending on the payout of the pool that month.
It was addictive. It was fun. You could get rich or go broke paying for advertising. But it came with a big fat catch:
Your books had to be published exclusively on Amazon to enroll in Kindle Unlimited.
Other online bookstores popped up, of course. Apple, Barnes and Noble, Google, Kobo, everybody had a competing ereading device and their own stores. But their sales were lower than the Amazon juggernaut, where you could buy a book, a pack of diapers, new jeans, and your kid’s birthday present all at once, with free shipping. Amazon just had more customers, period. That was where the money was.
And then, slowly, ever so slowly, Amazon began to decline. Their corporate overlords got greedy and began to increase the charges to merchants. The secondary market of used items began to get flooded with third-world countries offering fake and inferior items. The algorithms stopped working, or got gamed, and had to be reworked. They began pushing advertising to their merchants, who bought into it whole-hog. Now listings are flooded with Sponsored Items that may or may not have anything to do with the item searched for.
Kindle Unlimited was no exception. Scammers would scrape whole sections of Wikipedia, slam it into a “book”, then hire people to click and click and click on every page of these fake books to skyrocket their rankings. Then, each month, they would clean up the bonuses awarded to the top earners. This was well-known and talked about on kboards.com every month. But Amazon didn’t care, aside from maybe banning an account now and then. Now we have AI-generated books, so I imagine it’s even worse.
But Kindle Unlimited had another effect on the ebook market. Because, you see, all these authors and gurus pass around advice like narcotics. None of it is beneficial to customers, only authors. “Pad out your book,” they advise. “Have a book that is only 100 pages and then stick three or four chapters of other books in the back matter. If people page through them rapidly, that still counts as clicks!”
More advice: “Write a series of five books as fast as you can and release them as fast as you can. They don’t have to be good, you just have to put them in a hot genre and give it a good cover. People skim through it and you make money!”
And then comes my very favorite:
“Set book one to .99 or 2.99. Make sure it ends on a cliffhanger. Then price the other books in series at 5.99 and up. BUT … if the book is in Kindle Unlimited, the readers don’t have to pay that price tag at all, you just get the page clicks!”
What quickly happened was the rise of the Kindle Unlimited aristocracy. A huge corner of the market can’t afford to buy an ebook at 5.99 or 8.99 or 12.99. They’d rather just buy a paperback at that price. And since ebooks are primarily used to discover books and authors (Amazon makes it clear that buying an ebook is buying a LICENSE to that ebook, and they can take it away from you whenever they want), what you wind up buying is nothing. 6.99 is a lot of money to spend on nothing.
This forces the heavy readers into Kindle Unlimited. They can’t afford 50+ books a month at 5.99 a book. But they can afford 7.99 a month (11.99 in 2025 dollars).
So now you have readers who are the Haves and the Have Nots. Sometimes a person just wants to try out a series, or pick up a cool story that catches their eye. But it’s 6 or 7 or 8 bucks, and they also have bills to pay. 3 bucks used to be considered expensive for an ebook. But prices are creeping upward, because the authors are just as bloodthirsty as their Amazon masters. None of it is customer-serving. And the higher the prices get on the nothing-ebooks, the more people are forced into subscription services … or reduced to browsing the libraries. But because so many books are exclusive to Amazon, only a fraction of authors bother publishing on all bookstores, including libraries.
Very few authors ever think about their readers, except as paypigs who will cough up to read the next installment of My Billionaire Alien Dragon Prince. And that’s an unhealthy business mindset. Where will it end? I don’t know, but the decline will continue until the next train comes down the tracks. Then KU and the authors who built their careers on it will collapse.
