Alternatives to Kindle Unlimited for readers and writers

Amazon is a big player, but they're not the only player

The TL/DR of this article is: if you like the idea of subscribing to an all-you-can-read ebook service, but you don’t want to give your money to Amazon, there are currently two other places you can get my brand of filthy, filthy smut: Kobo Plus and Everand. The offerings are a little different from what I have on Amazon, but the stories are just as hot. You can also buy many of my books the old fashioned way from other retailers, like Barnes & Noble and Smashwords. And if you really want to stick it to the man, you can buy many of my books directly from me at a steep discount, including a growing collection of exclusive stories.

Read on for more ruminations on the state of ebook subscriptions and the challenges of working with Amazon …

Every time I send out a newsletter promotion about a title in Kindle Unlimited, I get a few people unsubscribing from my mailing list with messages like, “I hate Amazon” or “I won’t deal with Amazon” or “why are you on Amazon?”.

Sigh.

I will say, first, that I absolutely understand and agree with the criticisms of Amazon. In my personal book buying practice, I avoid Amazon. I’m lucky to live within walking or biking distance of four independent booksellers (one general, one geared toward the political, and two of the best science fiction shops in the world), so that’s where my book money usually goes. If I need an ebook, I usually hit up Barnes & Noble. For my audio book enjoyment, I subscribe to Libro.fm, who give a share of my subscription to one of my local stores. I do use Kindle Unlimited, though primarily for keeping an eye on the trends in my writing market (my KU recommendations are filthy).

Above and beyond its horrible labor practices, questionable environmental impact, and history of crushing smaller competitors, Amazon is a prime example of enshittification. As Amazon’s market share has increased, its value offered to customers has decreased. What was once a company geared toward selling goods (originally books) is now a company geared toward selling advertisements and infrastructure services, with the sale of products (including books) taking up a smaller and smaller share of its income each year. And yet it remains the massive player in online retail, and one that you ignore at your peril if you’re trying to sell anything electronically:

If you are a seller, you have to be on Amazon, otherwise no one will find your stuff and that means they won’t buy it. This is called a monopsony, the obscure inverse of monopoly, where a buyer has power over sellers.

“How monopoly enshittified Amazon”, Cory Doctorow

In the erotica space, Amazon can be challenging to work with. The list of “taboo” subject matter that they’ll ban or block is squishy and ill-defined, which leads to either self-censorship or surprise book bans. They will make it harder to find some books through search, based on cover and blurb content, with no clear explanations (I have one book, The Night of the Storm, that ended up in the “dungeon” after a cover change, and I’ve yet to spring it free despite several attempts to clean up the cover). The rules are enforced inconsistently, with some obvious violations of Amazon’s standards offered up to consumers and other authors getting disproportionate attention from Amazon’s internal censors. Other retailers, like Smashwords, are much easier to work with in these respects, largely because they give shoppers control over whether they’re presented general or taboo erotic content; Amazon gives its customers no similar control. There are a lot of frustrations involved in working with Amazon as an independent author.

All the same, in my little retail game — selling dirty stories for fun and profit — Amazon is by far the biggest player, largely through their Kindle Unlimited (“KU”) program. Through KU, readers get access to Amazon’s massive library of ebooks (provided those ebooks are exclusively on Amazon) for a single monthly fee, and can read as many as their eyes can consume for no additional cost. For writers, we get paid a fraction of a penny for each page read; the fraction varies according to how many readers are subscribed to the program — in January, the payment was about $0.004 for each page read. My stories average about 96 pages, so I get roughly 38 cents if someone finishes one of my little books. (This Written Word Media article is one of the clearest I’ve found on explaining the program.)

This isn’t a bad deal for readers, and while it’s not a great deal for writers (the typical royalty for a $2.99 ebook sale is usually between $1 and $2), it’s not horrible, largely because Amazon is delivering a massive pool of potential readers with minimal friction for them to keep reading. That’s why series are so prevalent in the KU marketplace: once someone has started reading a title, your chances of keeping them around increase if you’ve got something similar for them to grab as soon as they’re done. I’m sure that the majority of my KU readers would be unlikely to buy one of my books for full price, at least not without sampling it first, so I think of my KU participation as partially a marketing as well as sales effort. With the ubiquity of the Kindle device, which integrates seamlessly with KU but not so with other platforms, authors are presented with “an offer that’s too good to refuse” in much the way a mob protection racket is a great deal considering the alternatives …

The thing that really sticks in my craw about the program is the exclusivity. For a book to be in Kindle Unlimited, it can’t be available anyplace but Amazon. Amazon does make up about 60% of my sales, but every time I put a story into KU, I’m forgoing a chance for it to sell on a different platform, too. I keep about half of my stories in KU, and about half available on other platforms (including my Payhip direct sales store), so as not to be locked into a single seller.

While Kindle Unlimited is the biggest player in this reader subscription model, it’s not the only player. Two platforms where you can find Cornelia Quick stories also offer subscription services for readers.

The one that’s most like KU is the Kobo Plus program. The Kobo is an e-reader device similar to the Kindle, and it pairs well with the Kobo e-reader store. One of the nice things for authors is that the Kobo Plus program isn’t exclusive: I can have a book in Kobo Plus, but also available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and my own storefront. Kobo pays per minute read rather than per page read, though with a similar pool model to Amazon’s. And like Amazon, you can also buy books whether you’re enrolled in the Kobo Plus program or not.

The other is Everand, a spin off of Scribd. Everand is entirely a subscription service, with a range of books, periodicals, and other publications available for a monthly subscription. You can’t buy the books in the Everand storefront, and authors are paid through their distributor (I use Draft 2 Digital) based on the book’s list price and the percentage of the book read.

Neither Kobo Plus nor Everand has nearly the size of readership as KU, and therein lies the rub: combined, these two platforms have made up less than 1% of my revenue since I started this gig. If I want to get my work in front of the largest number of eyes (and I do), then I need to make Amazon and Kindle Unlimited a part of my strategy. But I can do it thoughtfully and deliberately, in ways that maintain my independence and provide off-roads from the KU platform should it decline, and on-roads to new platforms as they emerge.

Want a cheap and easy way to support me? Buy one of my books directly on Payhip: most are just $1, some come with spicier covers than Amazon and Smashwords permit, and you get discounts when you buy more than one.