Why My Books Aren’t in Kindle Unlimited (KU)

Warning: this might get a little rant-y, but I promise there will be no swearing in this post.

All of my ebooks are currently available in Kobo Plus (Kobo’s subscription library). So why aren’t they in Kindle Unlimited (Amazon’s subscription library)?

Here’s the short answer: Because, as an indie author, if I enroll my ebooks in KU, I cannot offer the ebook on any other retailer, including public libraries.

(Ebooks from the big publishers can be in KU and also available elsewhere. Is that fair? Not really, but that’s life.)

But it gets worse! When pirate sites steal my KU ebook and sell it (yes, that’s a thing), Amazon can then accuse me of violating my exclusivity contract and permanently shut down my entire publishing account. Let me repeat that: if someone steals my ebook from KU and copies it to a pirate site, Amazon can punish me, the author, by closing my account.

Amazon knows these pirate sites exist; they have bots that constantly go out and look at the contents. But instead of helping authors get their ebooks removed from the pirate sites, Amazon punishes the author.

And since Amazon pays 90 days after sales/page-reads, shutting down my account means they also won’t pay me for the last three months of sales and page-reads. Yes, you can fight account closures, but it takes a lot of time and energy. Amazon just laid off 18,000 people, including a large chunk of their customer service. And if you get them to reverse their decision, there’s no guarantee it won’t happen again next week.

So that’s why my books aren’t in Kindle Unlimited. It’s just not worth the aggravation. But Kobo Plus doesn’t have the same exclusivity clause — I can have my ebooks in Kobo Plus and still sell them on Amazon, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, etc.

I’d rather spend my time writing instead of fighting with Amazon bots!