Nicki’s Readers
As of November 1, 2023, according to Amazon, millions of pages of Nicki’s books have been read by Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
And on Facebook, her books have been seen over 3,000,000 times.
So I naturally dug deeper into the data to see what I could glean about those readers.
First is the Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscribers:
Here’s a brief description of the Kindle Unlimited program. The program costs $11.99 per month. And for that price users can read as many books as they want per month from the titles enrolled in the KU program (but they can only have a maximum of 20 KU books on their Kindle at a time). I estimate there are over 4,000,000 titles enrolled so that’s a lot of books to chose from.
Estimates are that there are somewhere around 5 million KU subscribers. That’s an estimate because Amazon doesn’t release the official subscriber number.
As a marketer here’s where the data gets interesting to me.
About 27% of KU subscribers read 1-5 books per month. 30% read 6-10 books per month and 25% read 11-20 books per month. Personally I don’t know where they get the time but they are avid readers!
Here’s something most people don’t know. When a KU subscriber leaves a book review, it does NOT count as a verified review. That’s because the person did not actually “purchase” the book. The review shows up but does not show as unverified. That is frustrating for me as Nicki’s marketing guy because reviews are important and prospective readers place importance in the “Verified” tag. Moving on…
The most popular genre for KU readers is Romance, then Fantasy and then Mystery.
More interesting to me is that NON-KU readers read more Horror (so I need to figure out where the non-KU readers are hiding). The why of the Horror KU reader quirk is not known (except to Amazon), but in studying the Horror genre, I speculate that Horror readers tend to stay with well known authors (Stephen King, anyone). When I look at the top 100 books in each genre about 90% of Romance books are in KU. About 75% of books in the Mystery/Thriller genre are in KU.
There are more and more authors pulling their books out of KU because they can make about 50% more money when they sell a book direct. That’s because Amazon pays about .004 CENTS royalty for each page read by a KU subscriber. And no, that is
not a typo. So if a KU reader reads 100 pages of one of Nicki’s books on their Kindle, Nicki’s royalty is 40 CENTS. With that in mind you can probably see why so many KU
authors write series. Writing for a living is tough (unless you are a very well known author).
Making .004 cents per page read and having to pay for cover design, editing, advertising, Shopify, email list host and website expenses, plus a lot more, is not easy.
This is shocking to me. 99.4% of all authors earn LESS than $1000 per month. And that’s why you see so many authors write 1 book and they give up. It’s common for a person to think “If I write a good book, I’m set”. Yeah, not so much. Nobody can find your book among the hundreds of thousands of books added to Amazon every few months. It may be great but unless you spend a LOT of money as a newly published author, you are not going to be noticed.
You must keep plugging away and never quit…just like Nicki. And you must have the talent to write great books… just like Nicki.
She makes my job easier because she is a great writer. I didn’t say she makes my job easy. It’s still a tough gig but I like it and her readers love her books. Win, win.
Thank you for being a fan.