Writing Update: January 2025
A new year update on the state of my books, and leaving Kindle Unlimited.
The God Sun is Now Wide!
The first bit of news I have for you is that my new cosmic horror sci-fi novelette, The God Sun, which came out on Amazon as an ebook in November of last year, is now available widely on other platforms. This means that it is now up for purchase from places such as Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and a whole host of other ebook stores that I’ve honestly never heard of. The book is also available on Kobo and is on the (non-exclusive) Kobo Plus subscription service.
As of the time of writing this blog post, my account with Google Play Books is under preliminary review, which could take a few more days. So keep an eye out on my socials for when that goes live!
It was always my intention to make this novelette widely available for those who may have different types of e-readers such as Nook, Kobo, reading through Google Play Books, or who still wanted to read on Kindle but didn’t want to further line Jeff’s pockets.
To achieve this, for the most part I signed up to Draft 2 Digital, which aggregates for a bunch of stores, making it easy for me to publish in those places. Google wasn’t an option there, so I had to go direct with them, and I chose to go direct with Kobo for their in-house promo benefits.
But rest assured that wherever you buy, you’ll still be supporting me as an indie author. You can find the full list of stores here by clicking on the “buy now” button.
Leaving Kindle Unlimited
I mentioned briefly in a previous blog post that I would be looking at taking the ebook versions of my books off of the Kindle Unlimited platform sometime in 2025. And the short story is that this is now complete.
As of writing this blog post, the memberships of all four books in The Augment Saga in KDP Select have been removed from the service. All four of the books had different end dates for their terms, one of which was as far away as March! So I got in touch with KDP Support and had them force the cancellation. I did mean to give some advanced warning for this, but they couldn’t simply adjust the end dates. It was either cancel them right away or wait, so I chose to cancel.
What does this all mean for you? What is Kindle Unlimited? What is KDP Select? Those are all very good questions. When an author sets up their books up on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)—the self publishing service for Amazon—we’re given the option of joining something called KDP Select. This confers extra benefits on the author, allowing us better royalty rates in certain territories, letting us set up Kindle Countdown Deals and run free promos, and also lets us put our books onto Kindle Unlimited all in exchange for a rolling 90-day exclusivity agreement. This means that if we sign up to KDP Select, we can’t sell our ebooks anywhere else except on Amazon. But Kindle Unlimited is supposed to cover for that. This is a Netflix-style monthly subscription service for readers allowing access to a library of books at no extra cost. Authors get paid per page read from this service.
In the past, Kindle Unlimited was a pretty good service with decent pay outs, and initially I had quite a few downloads, the page reads covering for any dry months without hard sales. But over the last couple of years with the influx of AI generated books and page-reading bots onto the service, the KENP (Kindle Edition Normalised Page Read) rate dropped significantly and the charts became flooded with AI slop. Kindle Unlimited ceased to be a good option for me as I wasn’t really getting any benefit out of staying exclusive to Amazon.
So I decided it was time to try something different. I’ve essentially used The God Sun as first step to get all the accounts set up with Kobo, Google and Draft 2 Digital so that I’ll be able to push the Augment Saga books wide pretty quickly. Then just like The God Sun they will be available on Kobo, Google, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books, Smashwords and a whole bunch of others, as well as being available in library services in the US like Hoopla and OverDrive.
And of course, they’ll still be available from Amazon, and the paperback situation will remain unchanged.
Works in Progress
Not much to report here from October. Progress continues on both Legacy of the Gods and the untitled Re-Emergence sequel. I replotted Legacy somewhat and I’m much happier with it, so I’ve flipped back to working on that. I have a feeling that I’ll be switching back and forth between writing the two books as I go, because I just can’t concentrate on one of them for a very long time. But progress is being made. It’s slow but steady. The fact that I still don’t have a working title for the Re-Emergence sequel is driving me up the wall, though.
That pretty much brings another writing update to an end. Keep watching this space and the socials for news about when my books finally go wide, or sign up to my newsletter (you get a free short story).
