I really don’t know yet. I enrolled all my books in KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited about a month ago — maybe it’s two months, I don’t know. But I did notice that, after day after day after day of zero pages read for Kindle, my novella THE CAVE (see it over there to your right?) all of a sudden had 318 pages read over the course of a couple of days. And my short story DEAD OR ALIVE (it’s not over there on the right, but it is part of THE STRIKER FILES, which is) had 50 pages read.
I looked, and THE CAVE has a KENPC (Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count) of 166, as opposed to its stated length of 88 pages. DEAD OR ALIVE has a KENPC of 56.
Now, that doesn’t sound like much, but basically it’s two full reads of the novella and one full read of the short story. For me, that’s fine. Those sales would have earned me 35% of $0.99, which is little over a buck. The KU reads paid me more than that; a bit less than two bucks.
(Yeah, that’s the sort of life-changing money I’m earning right now from my writing. 🙂 )
Couple that with a few purchases of THE CAVE, one of DIE 6, and one of my non-fiction DOING DISNEY quasi-guidebook, I’ll have done okay. Maybe I’ll sell a couple of copies of my new one, THE INN, when it comes out. Crossing fingers. (Watch this space for announcements.)
The way I see it, the more people who grab my stories and read them, the better chance I have of actually getting noticed.
And that’s the state of the state right now.
*****
Hi Scott,
I have to go back a month to see pages read on KU. About half my ebooks are on Smashwords too, and there the borrowing is a wee bit more active. I think I said this before (maybe not here?), but reading piecemeal seems to be more popular for individually wrapped short stories and novellas.
In general, I can’t say that KU has done much for me, but I don’t have much action anywhere in my catalog. After so many ebooks, one would think that I’d be “discovered” by now. All I can say that’s positive is that readership of my blog is up, but that doesn’t seem to sell ebooks. Maybe I should channel Asimov and not write novels for a while? I can do pop science–I could write obituaries even–but that doesn’t mean they would be any good (a new genre, obituary thrillers?).
Let’s hope the situation improves for both of us!
r/Steve
Now that I wrote this article, I haven’t seen another borrow or page read of anything. Flat since the 19th. I got a sense that maybe, just maybe, a couple of people found me and liked the stories enough to keep reading (since the reads were all on THE CAVE and DEAD OR ALIVE) but no such luck. Or maybe I’m just being impatient.
I cannot understand why you are not selling more than you do. You’ve created a great world and some great memorable characters, and your stories are really well-put-together and plotted nicely. And you were in on the ground floor (or closer to it than I was) of the whole ereader explosion.
Maybe some non-fiction would be a good idea. Given the nature of your fiction, it could be a good way to cultivate some new readers.
Still hoping…