Members of the Cast is under the Kindle Select program with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). This means that KDP has exclusive rights to the eBook version for 90 days. The plan has always been to remove the book on June 15 and let DraftToDigital list it. (It seems only fair, as I used their tools to develop both the electronic and print versions of the book.) Offering a book to other publishers other than Kindle is termed “Going Wide,” a future topic.
Removing the book from Kindle Select also removes it from Kindle Unlimited (KU). Currently, 2616 pages have been read under KU at $0.045 per page, netting $11.60 in royalties. I can live without the money, but what about exposure?
Initial sales of a book are most often from friends and relatives. “Getting Noticed” was an earlier blog topic that discusses my Book Launch. I can pretty much guarantee that friends and relatives did not read Members of the Cast on KU. Most early sales were print versions of the book.
The dream of publishing a book is that it will be well received, and readers will tell their friends, snowballing into a best seller. The worst fear is that the book is not enjoyed, and no one tells anyone about the book.
Members of the Cast only has 22 ratings on Amazon, but two are reviews are written by people I don’t know. Likewise, Good Reads has eight ratings and five reviews. One review is by a person I don’t know. The unknown is, how many of these ratings and reviews were the result of the Kindle Unlimited program?
It is worth noting that one author reported that leaving Kindle Select makes Amazon a little grumpy. They will let you re-join Kindle Select, but the author got a message saying that she would not be allowed to leave again because she left once.
Will Members of the Cast continue under its own power, or will it fade among the millions of other self-published books languishing on Amazon? What to do, what to do.
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