Amazon Kindle Owners' Lending Library - Felicity Heaton - Paranormal Romances with PassionFelicity Heaton

It’s been a strange week so far, but an interesting one. My schedule has been all over the place due to factors beyond my control, but I’ve got things done somehow, and have managed to get Crave edited in second draft, as well as writing a whole bunch of guest posts for my Winter Warmers blog tour.

The highlight of my week was an email from a lovely lady at Amazon KDP asking if she could call me and discuss something “confidential”. Of course I said yes because curiosity is a weakness we all share with cats. When Amazon email you wanting to discuss something confidential and offering to call you whenever is good for you, how could you say no?

Being sworn to secrecy is always difficult for me but I somehow survived and at least I can talk about it now. The nice lady wanted to discuss the new Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. It’s something they’re adding for Amazon Prime customers and rather than it being Kindle users lending their books to each other, it acts more like a real library. There’s a $500,000 kitty for the month of December, and each time your book is borrowed from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, you get a share of that kitty. Say there are 100,000 downloaded books in that month, and your book was borrowed 1000 times, you get $5000 that month as payment for your book being in the library. Sounds great doesn’t it? They believe they’ll get a $6 million kitty for the whole of 2012, so retaining that $500,000 a month.

Of course, there’s always a flip side to everything. In order to be a part of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, your book has to be exclusive to Amazon for 90 days. Yep, you read that right. Amazon wants your book exclusively for three months… a quarter of a year… and if you forget to opt your book out near the end of those 90 days, it gets enrolled again.

There are added incentives to lure us indie authors into going along with our books being unavailable elsewhere for those 90 days, such as the fact that it will still be available for sale on all the Amazon Kindle Stores worldwide so you’ll continue to make money on it as you would normally too, and you get 5 days where you can have a free promotion on your book. You get to choose the days via the new look KDP, and can select either 5 consecutive days or non-consecutive. I’m interested to see whether they will promote those free books somehow so customers know about them, or whether they’ll just be free and only people who come across your book will know about it, or those you promote it to yourself.

The part I liked most about being asked by Amazon to enrol my books in the scheme was reading this on the blogs today:

Amazon says “31 of the top 50 KDP authors have already enrolled 129 titles.”

Yes, I was rather pleased to see that I had made enough progress with my life as a writer that I am considered one of the top 50 KDP authors. I shouldn’t really be surprised considering that I have sold over 110,000 books on Amazon this year as Felicity Heaton and F E Heaton, but it was nice to see it there spelled out for me. I had wondered why Amazon had chosen to contact me. Now I know.

I was honest when speaking to the lady and told her that I wouldn’t enrol any of my current releases in the library because it is the run up to the biggest retail week of the year and I’ve been working hard to promote my books over the past few weeks and get them into prime position for the Christmas period. Plus, as I said to her, I once tried to get Barnes and Noble, via Smashwords, to remove my books back when they were heavily discounting and causing me problems on Amazon, and several emails and four months later and they were still for sale on B&N. She did say that Amazon would give a two week grace period during which the author would have to remove their books, or make a very obvious effort to do so.

90 days is a very long time to have your book exclusively on one retail site. Okay, Amazon is the biggest, and the thought of getting a nice slice of the kitty plus the regular royalties for sales of the book is very alluring, but I do think it’s a long time to have your book in just one place.

Also, if you remove your books for sale on websites like Barnes and Noble, Apple iBookstore, Sony Reader Store, Kobo Books, etc then you’re going to lose rankings on those sites, as well as reviews most likely. You’re basically killing your previous marketing efforts for that book on those sites, and resetting everything. You’ll have to work doubly hard to get your book up the rankings again, and get reviews back. Of course, I’m sure Amazon knows this. The lure of a share of that pot will likely tempt people into giving it a go though.

Let’s do the math. Rather than opting one of my current releases in, I asked if I could add a new book to the site. The lady said yes so I added a book to the site before the deadline and supplied the ASIN for that book to Amazon. The book is a fantasy romance short story entitled The Night by Felicity Heaton. You can see it on Amazon.com here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Night-ebook/dp/B006IWCR5A/

When you look at the Amazon book listing page, like you see when you search for a book title, it shows like this:

So people can immediately see that the book is available free if you’re a member of Amazon Prime. That should entice people for a start.

I’m selling the book for $0.99. That means I get around $0.35 per sale. If a Christmas miracle were to happen and the book is borrowed 1000 times, and only 100,000 books are borrowed in total from the library, then I get $5000 from the library kitty.

How many $0.99 books would I need to sell to get that in normal sales? Around 14285 books.

So, if the book you’re enrolling in the library is only $0.99, it makes a little financial sense to enrol it in the library like I have and see what happens. Even a $2.99 on 70% royalty option would have to sell close to 2500 books to make the same money as a book lent 1000 times. Plus, let’s be honest, you’re more likely to get someone reading your book for free from a library than paying for it. People love free stuff.

Is it worth not having your book on all the other retailers for 90 days? I’m not sure. I guess it depends on how many you think you can sell on those sites during that period. In reality, most of us would be likely to shift on average around 600 copies a month of a $0.99 book on Amazon. I have managed to do more than 3000 of a $0.99 in a month before though. Still, it’s not the 14000 I would have to sell to make $5k. In my personal experience, sales across all other sites are substantially lower than I get on Amazon. On average totalling around 200 a month across the other sites for a $0.99 book. Lose those 200 sales and risk gaining more money through the lending library? It’s a hard call. Since I can’t enrol in Pubit because I’m not American, I don’t make that many sales through B&N. Apple is my second biggest revenue source. Even then Amazon dwarfs it.

Still, I don’t think I would rush out and remove my books from other retailers. I am tempted to use the Amazon Kindle Owners’ Lending Library in a different manner though. I often work quite a way in advance on my releases but in 2012 I’m aiming to have them completed a few months before the advertised release date. I could do a soft launch on Amazon a little over 90 days prior to the book’s release, enrol it in the library for those 90 days, and offer it exclusively on Amazon until the official release date. Promotion wise, it would have to be very minimal until the official launch, but the book should sell some copies without me crooning about it all the time or touring the blogs with it. I just don’t know how readers would react to it. Would they be annoyed that they can’t get the book at Sony or Kobo or Apple or B&N or my own website for those 90 days? Most likely. Would Amazon users feel a little privileged because they could? Most likely too. Would I do it? It depends on how readers feel really. I’m not about to start alienating my readers to gain a few extra dollars. A lot of it would depend on the opinion of my readers and on how well my initial book in the library performs. Do I think Barnes and Noble, Apple and other retailers are going to be miffed? Absolutely!

Read more about the Amazon Kindle Owners’ Lending Library: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000739811