Do most LitRPG Readers use Kindle Unlimited?

Just trying to understand where most of the audience is. I listen to the LitRPG Podcast religiously and Ramon always mentions KU, so I was curious as to whether or not KU is where everyone is at.

As an author, KU is killing a lot of us financially (not me, personally, since I don't use KU, but a lot of authors in general). The payouts are minuscule -- less than half a cent per page read, last I checked. Additionally, KU has been a recent hotbed for scammers selling giant books riddled with gibberish. As a result, authors have been pulling all of their books out of KU and selling them at other places (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) in addition to Amazon (because if a book is in KU, it means that it's only available exclusively on Amazon).

So I'm curious to know if the majority of LitRPG readers only use KU to get their 'free' books, or do they also buy books from Amazon and/or other places?

 

Both, and you kinda have to do KU with LitRPG because the quality spectrum is iffy.

 

I primarily go with KU. I'd never be able to afford my reading habit otherwise.

I do buy a few, up to my Amazon allowance of $50/month, but once that's gone it's solely KU - and you've gotta have at least something on KU that I enjoyed if I'm gonna be spending my limited budget on the rest of your stuff.

Even so, though, consider the split here. For a 100 page novel you'd be getting between 40 and 50 cents per reader. If you sell it at $2.99 (fair price for a 100 page novella, imo), you'd get $2.09 per sale.

So that said, you'd need 5 or 6 KU readers to read your book to equal out the one copy that you'd sell. Which doesn't seem unreasonable, all things considered, because KU readers are far more likely to pick up books from new authors than people who actually have to spend money. I've no hard data on that, but it passes my gut check. There's also a set of folks who, like me, will purchase a book they've read on KU for free if we liked it enough.

KU is the ultimate way for eBook readers to vote with our wallets. I'm guessing the metrics you get as authors tells you pretty much exactly what people who don't like it think, since we'd be abandoning it partway through. That way, you get a far more accurate picture of how people are taking to your writing than the rather limited system of starred reviews since most people will only take the time to leave a review if they either love something or hate something.

And in neither of those cases is the feedback generally constructive or helpful.

 

And you get more KU sales than traditional sales, yeah?

I think the Russian authors have it pretty well figured out. Like your average every day heroin dealer, your first hit is free - the rest, you've gotta pay for. I piss and moan about that with both KU and Smashwords, but it is pretty damn effective as a sales ploy.

 

That seems odd. You'd think they'd want their content creators to have accurate analytics.

 

As a reader and a writer I use KU. Currently KU last gave out .0038 cents a page I think. Which is pretty bad, but it does allow more eyes on your books which hopefully means more people will want to read more of your books. Having had over 1 Mil pages read before from my books, it can still add up to a nice little chunk of change.
As a reader Ku is super helpful. If I start to read a book and I just can't finish it I can drop it without having to think about having paid for it. The author gets a little something for my attempt as well.
My books selling for under $5 means it doesn't hurt me as much to have them on KU. if I was trying to sell them for more then the low value of KU would hurt me more.

 

With KU do you get paid for people borrowing it a second time and rereading it?

 

Damn. 0.0038 cents per page is shite. That's not even beer money, but if you want to price your 500 page books at $2.99 instead of a more reasonable $4.99, at least you're only losing 20 cents or so for a KU reader to go cover to cover versus someone buying it outright.

 

Isn't it usually about 400 words per page standard? That's what they use for research papers in colleges as a quick and dirty estimate. For partial pages they count 10 words per line.

 

Here is another thing that I didn't see mentioned. By going KU we also get 70% royalty from a digital sale as opposed to umm 30% I think.

 

Well because we're talking about ereader 'pages' (the screen and font size), this is probably a different case.

 

I've noticed a lot of books that are in KU tend to have larger line spacing. I guess a sneaky way to get those page counts in, but I assume that Amazon already nipped that in the bud after 3.0.

 

Anything up to $2.98 you get 30% of, $2.99 and up you get 70% of, I think. I was reading up on it earlier when I was trying to put up numbers.