Kindle Unlimited: 8 Rare Strategies to Earn More $$$

Bella Rose Emmorey

book editor, rogue behaviorist, digital marketer, writer, brand builder, plant aunt, and cheese enthusiast.

Kindle Unlimited is well known by authors nowadays. But while you know about it, you might not be using it effectively…or strategically.
It’s more than just listing your book on Kindle. It’s more than just writing a book and exporting it as an ebook in the hopes of getting readers to consume your work.
Without strategy, using Kindle Unlimited won’t work to help you grow as an author.
With a strategy, it could mean the difference between perpetuating the "starving artist" stereotype or breaking out and earning a $ full-time living from your fiction$ . I’m sure you’re in the latter camp, right?
That’s why you clicked on this article.
So let’s get to it and help you understand Kindle Unlimited for what it actually is (and is not).
What is Kindle Unlimited?Kindle Unlimited is a program by Amazon in which you exclusively list the ebook version of your story on their platform. Meaning if your book is under the Kindle Unlimited umbrella, the digital version cannot appear anywhere else online.
Many authors who "go wide" with their book’s distribution will upload their books to places like Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and any other book distribution store or platform. Typically, this offers a wider audience and additional options for readers to purchase and read the book.
By being a part of Kindle Unlimited, you agree to only share the ebook to Amazon through the Kindle Unlimited library.
But this means you’re not paid per ebook sold, like many other book distributors. It’s a bit different of a system, though you will still make money.
The Kindle Unlimited Pay Structure for AuthorsInstead of being paid by $ selling your ebook$  individually, if your book is exclusively with Kindle Unlimited, you will be paid per page read. The way this works is a bit complex, and not as straightforward as it seems.
But it’s still worth it to many authors.
Here’s how Amazon describes how authors make money on Kindle Unlimited:
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Now here’s more of an understandable breakdown:
Every month, Amazon reports how much is in their KDP Select Global Fund. This revenue determines how much you’re actually paid per page read (KENPC). The more money in this fund, the more there is to divvy amongst authors.
Now, that might sound like it’s wildly inconsistent, and it does create some inconsistencies, especially when Amazon adjusts the policy on this. But for the most part, it’s fairly reliable because the KDP Select Global Fund is based on the Kindle Unlimited members who pay a monthly rate.
It’s subscription based, so even if some users aren’t reading many books on KU, they’re still supplying the fund with income that will be distributed amongst writers.
Do authors still make money from Kindle Unlimited?Yes. While authors aren’t being paid per unit sold, like they are with paperbacks or through other means of selling ebooks, they do still get paid. Kindle Unlimited is just a single avenue in which $ authors can get paid$ .
A lot of the draw of using Kindle Unlimited instead of listing your book elsewhere is that it does then appear in the library on Kindles. It’s basically another marketing avenue you don’t have to upkeep.
And the more people read your book through Kindle Unlimited, the higher it’ll be listed in the library that appears on people’s kindles.
Of course, as you can see above, you do need a significant amount of page reads per month in order to make a full-time living from Kindle Unlimited alone. Most authors who earn a significant amount per month are not doing so solely through KU.
But there is a lot of money to be made on Kindle Unlimited, as evidenced by these two authors:
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In this image, you can see the total pages read for the entire year of 2022 was more than 218 million. If we use $ this KENP calculator$ , it results in about $1,027,630.20 in royalties for the year.
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In a 6-month timeframe, this author made over $10,000 in royalties, with 80% of those coming from Kindle Unlimited.
Now how do these authors do it?
For the first author, the one who made over a million dollars in a year, did you notice how many books she has? There’s a strategy at play with both authors, so let’s take a look at what that is.
Strategies & Tips for Making the Most out of Kindle UnlimitedIf it wasn’t valuable, authors wouldn’t list their books here. Kindle Unlimited works, as long as you understand how it works and you shape your book strategy around it.
Because, as outlined in this blog post about $ starting a romance author career$ , your book strategy can shape your career, and income.
Here are Kindle Unlimited specific strategies you can use to earn more.
1. Plan ahead with seriesMultiple books.
That’s how authors are earning more on Kindle Unlimited.
It’s not a secret and there isn’t really a huge strategy behind it. The logic is pretty simple, and it’s based on how Kindle Unlimited works.
When a reader chooses an author’s book and finishes it, the next in the series will automatically populate as an option to download. It’s basic math. If one reader consumes 1000 page reads because you have a trilogy, that’s obviously going to result in more money than if they read only 300 from you.
If those 1000 pages are easily accessible because they’re in a series and auto-populate, it makes it a no-brainer for the reader to download and consume.
If we were to math it all out, let’s take a look at if 500 readers consumed either a trilogy or a single book:
500 readers x 1000 pages in the full trilogy = 500,000 pages (KENP) = $2,356.95
500 readers x 300 pages in a standalone = 15,000 pages (KENP) = $707.09
This difference in income is significant, despite marketing the same amount of readers to your books. Now amplify this by multiple series that are even connected to one another, and you continue to earn more money with the same amount of readers.
The marketing effort yields far more with Kindle Unlimited if you write series.
Obviously, your book has to be good. The reader will need to want to read the next book. This has a lot to do with writing for read-through, which is the strategy that gets readers to not only keep reading your book, but reading through to the next one as well.
2. Write for read-through"Read-through" is the term used to describe the ratio of readers who start and complete your book as well as the series. If you write for read-through, you employ specific techniques that are aimed at getting readers to keep flipping pages.
This ultimately results in more pages read, which earns you more income through Kindle Unlimited.
You can break this down into writing for read-through on an individual book basis, as well as a series.
Let’s take a look at some tips for each.
Read-Through in the Book:
Pose questions early on
Focus on great characters
Hint at future conflict
Use quicker pacing
Don’t end a chapter during slow pacing
End chapters on a cliffhanger and use chapter breaks instead of a traditional chapter structure
Read-Through in the Series:
Hint at characters to come in future books
Leave some questions open-ended in the first book
Craft a plot with a lot of opportunity to expand
Draw out romantic relationships so they don’t come together until early in book 2
End on a cliffhanger
If you’re writing well and are able to construct interesting, engaging plots readers are curious about, most of this is natural. Where it often differs for Kindle Unlimited is in one specific tactic: the cliffhanger.
Remember, though, that you’ll want your book description to declare that the book will end on a cliffhanger if it does. Otherwise, you risk angering readers who will avoid reading the rest of your series out of spite.
Here’s an example of what that often looks like in book descriptions on Amazon:
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3. Cowrite with other authorsReaders don’t ever just read one author and call it quits on reading after that.
Meaning, there are authors out there who already have a fan base of your ideal reader—those who read the same type of books that you’re writing. Instead of maintaining this weird ideology that authors are competing with one another, you can instead get with reality and support one another.
Cowriting a book allows you both to gain more readers—and money—by writing a book or series together.
This example below is clear evidence as to why this works, especially after one of the authors gains major popularity in a series, the way Raven Kennedy did with her Plated Prisoners series.
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If you go to each author’s page and sort by popularity, you can see that for Ivy Asher, this book cowritten with Raven Kennedy is among her most popular, with the amount of reviews (and therefore we can assume sales) far outweighing that of the other popular books of hers with over 7,000 compared to over 300.
Whereas with Raven Kennedy, her most popular book has over 35,000 reviews, a significant increase over the 7,000 reviews of Ivy Asher’s popular book.
This is why it works. When one author "wins," the other will too. It’s also logical that some authors who love Raven Kennedy would seek other work by her, and eventually see what else Ivy Asher has written.
4. Publish consistentlyYou’ll want to create a $ book publishing schedule$  to make the most of Kindle Unlimited. As mentioned earlier, the amount of books you have published matters. But it almost matters more to have the series published rapidly or all at once.
Otherwise, you risk readers moving on to another author and forgetting about the unread books in that series.
This is especially true for avid Kindle Unlimited readers.
A great way to do this is to plan it out and track your goal in a writing software like NovelPad.
This way, you do the work once, set up the goal, and don’t have to think about anything other that meeting your word count in the story. You’ll also have the motivation of those dopamine hits when you reach your daily goals.
Like this:
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5. Use promotional dollars strategically Ads do tend to work, but you’ll actually find more success running ads on Facebook than through Amazon. However, if you do run ads on Amazon and are in Kindle Unlimited, they’ll likely reward you for spending with them.
You’ll just want to make sure you’re setting up your ads well and reviewing the data.
Only keep spending on ads that early you money back, preferably in a 3/1 ration of revenue to ad spend. You want at least 30% return on adspend in order to continue funding ads.
Using these strategically would look like:
Running ads to book 1 in a completed series
Paying close attention to metrics like the click rate, download, and pages read
Adjusting the ad audience if people are clicking but not downloading
Ads can work really well to get new readers invested in your book. Make sure your book strategy is in place so those readers can keep reading your books and increasing your pages read (KENP) through Kindle Unlimited.
If you do not have a series complete yet, then create a reader magnet to at least grow your email list to promote future books when they’re available on Kindle Unlimited.
6. Utilize free daysI’m always for authors being paid for their work, but I’m also for authors humbling themselves when they have an "unproven" book in the eyes of new readers. If your book has zero reviews and is the first in a series, you’ll want to schedule a free promotion on Amazon.
This lists your book for free so readers can test you out as an author. If your book is in KDP Select (Kindle Unlimited), you can only utilize this for 5 days, so make sure to plan wisely and push a lot of marketing toward your book at this time.
The benefit of this can be significant. If enough readers download, you can get a lot of readers to the first book in your series, while the next ones they will have to create a Kindle Unlimited account in order to read, which will increase your KENP, and therefore, your income.
You can learn how to $ set up a free promotion on Amazon here$ .
7. Write to marketTo maximize your earnings, write in a genre and with tropes that are highly desired. Writing to market is the idea of writing specific books with certain plots, character dynamics, and tropes in the hopes of capitalizing on highly consumed genres.
I won't go into too much detail here, because this $ blog post about writing to market$  has all the details you’d need to do this.
8. Add a review promptAt the end of each book or the series, make sure you’re leaving a note with a link to review the book. On Kindle devices, the option to review should pop up automatically, but not all readers will take action.
If you leave a line after "THE END" asking for a review, it can increase the chances they do review.
Reviews matter. It’s a metric Amazon (and therefore the Kindle Unlimited library) uses to recommend books to readers. Good ratings will encourage readers to download and read the book. So make sure you’re putting effort into getting reviews!

Kindle Unlimited is a great way to earn a significant amount of money…if you’re dedicated and smart about it. While you limit book sales from other markets, KU can offer enough to overshadow what you’d earn there if you follow these tips.