going wide in the age of kindle unlimited

You may have noticed my books are no longer in Kindle Unlimited.

I've been publishing so long that I was at the very start of my career when KU was rolled out. There were endless discussions behind the scenes amongst self-published authors like me about whether it was a safer bet to go wide long-term or to cash in on whatever money Bezos decided to divvy out that month.

(Did you know that authors are not privy to "internal numbers" like how many people are actually paying for KU subscriptions? Did you know Amazon tells authors how much the "pot" is that month that we all fight over and we are not given further details as to how Amazon arrived at that Squid-Game-like piggy bank dangling over our heads? Did you know that self-published authors unionizing at scale is one of my favorite fantasies?)

At the time KU began, like many authors, I needed the money that KU promised. The idea of cents per page read by readers like you was too enticing. And literally, being in KU that summer allowed me and my partner to get approved for an apartment. I don't regret it.

A lot of authors who had seen publishing through all of its ups and downs over decades of experience warned of going all-in on Amazon.

Now, a decade later, on the verge of publishing my next novel (finally!), I'm going wide with it and my back catalog. Quite simply, I don't want to play Amazon's game anymore.

I have literally zero idea how this will play out for me. But in a world where Amazon is facilitating the immolation of planet earth and funding genocides globally including in Palestine and Sudan, I d0n't have any interest in being an Amazon-only author.

I'll just say it: Kindle Unlimited is a capitalist scheme designed to turn authors against one another so we're fighting over fractions of a fraction of a fraction of a penny each month. Is the wide market any better? Probably not; Amazon has infected everything. But wide feels right to me at this moment in time.

I'll see you on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, bookshop.org, and maybe even your local library ebook catalog. Time will tell.