A few months ago I wrote a post detailing the results of an experiment to remove a single pen name from Kindle Unlimited. The preliminary results of that experiment showed that I was actually making more money on Amazon. Not to mention all the added income I could have by publishing those books wide on other platforms like Google Play!
But as we all know, a one month experiment doesn’t mean a whole lot since what we’re looking for is long term results. Earning more for one month is bad if it costs us long term earnings. So today I’m here to provide a follow up.
Here’s what that pen name’s earnings look like after 5 months
Overall, earnings are up 45% when compared with the period just before the experiment started! Paid downloads are up a whopping 122% and pages read have almost fully disappeared (as expected).
Here’s what that same time period looks like for all of my pen names
As you can see, earnings were fairly static.
Before we make a solid conclusion, I think it’s important that we look at yearly trends. In general, my book sales tend to increase by quite a bit come winter since people are cooped up inside most of the day. Let’s dig a little deeper…
Here’s the pen name’s year over year difference
Wow! Can you tell when I started pulling this pen name’s books from Kindle Unlimited? (Yup, I unchecked auto-renew on all of them at the end of July.)
Here’s the year over year for all of my pen names
Yikes! Looks like I’m actually down 14% from 2017 when all authors are considered. I consider this fair though since I don’t publish anymore and my overall trend is in the negative direction.
Conclusion
I think it’s safe to say that pulling that pen name out of Kindle Unlimited has had a net positive result on Amazon. This doesn’t even include the additional income I could start earning by publishing these books wide on all other platforms.
As mentioned in the initial post, your results may vary. This post is meant only as proof to other authors that Kindle Unlimited is not for everyone and that some experimentation could lead you towards a large increase in your earnings. If you want an easy way to run experiments like this one, please checkout datasprout. It’s what I used to take all of these screenshots and easily see the outcome of my little experiment.