Episode 284: Why is WIZARD-ASSASSIN in Kindle Unlimited?

In this week's episode, I explain my reasoning for putting my new book WIZARD-ASSASSIN in Kindle Unlimited, even though the majority of my books are wide and will remain so. I also examine the phenomenon of British Christmas chocolate boxes.

This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Frostborn series at my Payhip store:

FROST25

The coupon code is valid through January 12, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we’ve got you covered!

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and British Christmas Chocolate Boxes

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 284 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 1st, 2025 and today we are discussing why Wizard-Assassin is in Kindle Unlimited. We'll also talk a bit about British Christmas chocolate boxes, something I just learned about recently. We will also have a Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing and publishing projects.

But first off, Happy New Year to everyone. I hope you had an enjoyable Christmas and New Year's holiday, whatever form that may take for you and I hope that 2026 turns out to be a great year.

Now, let's move on to Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off all the ebooks in the Frostborn series at my Payhip store. That code is FROST25. And as always, the coupon code and links to my store will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through January the 12th, 2026, so if you need a new ebook series to dig into this snowy winter, we have got you covered.

Now an update on my current writing and publishing projects. I said I wanted to take the week off between Christmas and New Year's and I mostly did. Played a lot of video games, saw a lot of family, ate a lot of good food, but I do get a bit bored. So I did get some work in and I'm currently at 35,000 words of Blade of Storms, which will be the third book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. I think the book's going to end up about 100,000 words or so, maybe a little more, maybe a little less, so that means I'm about 35% of the way through the rough draft. So that's good progress and it's back to full speed now that the New Year's and Christmas holidays are over. I am also 5,000 words into Cloak of Summoning, which will be the 14th Cloak Mage book. I'm hoping that Blade of Storms will be out in January and Cloak of Summoning will be out in February.

In audiobook news, Brad Wills is working on recording Blade of Shadows, the second book in the Blades of Ruin series and Leanne Woodward has signed up to record Wizard-Assassin, the fifth book in the Half-Elven Thief series, and she's hoping to start work on that in March, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing projects.

And now for a brief digression into the subject of British Christmas chocolate boxes. Now, I'm grateful for all my readers, but I am surprised by how many UK readers I have. Mathematically, it is surprising because based upon which statistics you read, the UK has about 25 to 20% of the total population of the United States.

So do you think that the UK book sales would be only about 20% of my US sales, but that isn't the case? In December of 2025, the US made up about 58% of my sales, but the UK did 34. I think the reason for that is that fantasy is generally a more popular genre in the UK than it is in the US. Like numerically speaking, the US probably has more fantasy readers because of the larger population, but the UK population's overall percentage of fantasy readers seems higher. Of course, maybe I'm completely wrong since the US and the UK are very different places, even if they both speak English.

Anyway, that was a long-winded introduction of saying that before I started self-publishing in 2011, I knew practically nothing about the contemporary UK. I couldn't have told you if the UK was on the Euro or the Pound. However, in the 15 years since, I've absorbed a fair few facts by osmosis. One of them is Christmas chocolate boxes. I didn't know about this until recently, but apparently Christmas chocolate boxes are very popular in parts of the UK, with frequent debates about the best brand, quality, et cetera and this has been a tradition going back almost to the 1930s and the 1940s.

Now, this was only an abstract fact I knew for a while, but a nice person got me a Quality Street chocolate box for Christmas. That's the brand name, if you're not familiar with it, Quality Street, which I suppose is better than Cheap Street. It was pretty good. There are apparently great debates about which chocolate ones are best, but honestly, I think I like the red cherry flavored ones the best. I know not everyone feels this way, but I do like that sort of artificial cherry taste that it has and that sometimes turns up in other things. So all in all, it was pretty tasty and [an] interesting way of experiencing a different culture.

00:04:28 Main Topic: Why is the Half-Elven Thief Series in Kindle Unlimited?

Now onto our main topic this week: why is the Half-Elven Thief Series in Kindle Unlimited? Now with the release of Wizard-Assassin recently, the fifth book in that series, a few people wrote in to ask why Half-Elven Thief was in Kindle Unlimited (KU) and not wide and on all the other ebook stores.

Short answer: business of publishing reasons. The “too long; didn't read” answer: of my three unfinished series, I determined that one of them needs to be in Kindle Unlimited and Half-Elven Thief drew the short straw, so to speak. What I've realized over the years I've been self-publishing is that if you have a new book that does well in Kindle Unlimited, Amazon puts its thumb on the scale for the book in a big, big way. More eyeballs get on the book. It stays higher in the rankings for a lot longer than it would otherwise, and therefore more people read and buy it. More people get email or app notifications about it. A new Kindle Unlimited book that does well even has a halo effect on the rest of my backlist, even for books that are not in Kindle Unlimited. Blade of Flames and Blade of Shadows had their best days in a couple of weeks in the days after Wizard-Assassin came out and even Stealth & Spells Online got a boost.

And of course, the price for this buffet of algorithmic bounty from Amazon is that a Kindle Unlimited book must be exclusive to Amazon. Now, a lot of writers get really mad about this fact, but the truth is that this is how retail works and in fact is how retail has always worked. Like for example, let's say you go to Walmart, Target, Costco, Tesco, or some other big box store and see a big display of Tide detergent towards the front of the store and near the registers. It's partially there because the store thinks it will sell, but it's mostly there because Procter & Gamble paid big bucks to have Tide detergents featured at the front of the store. This is even frequently true when the big box stores send out emails with discounts and coupons for this and that, though there is more of an algorithmic component to that than in traditional brick and mortar retail, since it's very often the case that, for example, from Target, no two customers will get identical offers.

Now, admittedly, compared to the kind of draconian contracts between a big box store and an industrial conglomerate like Procter & Gamble, Kindle Unlimited by comparison is relatively mild. Amazon doesn't charge anything for it, and the term is only three months if you want to take your book out of it. The exclusivity requirement is probably anti-competitive, but the US government can't even rouse itself to do something very popular like changing Daylight Savings Time, so there's no way it will address a more complicated and more obscure issue like ebook exclusivity anytime soon. Of course, traditionally in US antitrust law, you only get in trouble for raising consumer prices and Kindle Unlimited is objectively a very good deal for heavy readers. And for that matter, exclusivity is fairly common in retail arrangements, which is why you occasionally see things like special edition holiday themed body wash available only at Target or something like that. Or in the book world, this happens as well, which is why Barnes & Noble sometimes has B&N exclusive hardback editions of various books. So that's just the reality of Kindle Unlimited since the program settled into more or less its current form around 2015 or so.

To deal with it, indie writers typically settle on one of four strategies. #1: they go all in on Kindle Unlimited. #2: they ignore Kindle Unlimited, perhaps as a point of ethics and protest of Amazon. #3: they split the difference with Patreon, and #4: they split the difference with publishing windows.

Strategy #1's big, big drawback is that book revenue becomes entirely dependent on Amazon, and Amazon's algorithms occasionally go berserk and start banning accounts at random. A smaller but still significant drawback is that you cut yourself out of every market that Amazon doesn't address, which means if your Amazon sales tank, there's no fallback position.

Strategy #2 is much more viable across the long term, and I did it for a lot of years, but it does mean you are operating under a permanent handicap on Amazon, which remains the largest bookseller in the US and the UK. The most successful example I've seen in strategy #3 is with indie author Lindsay Buroker, who first offers her books to her Patreon subscribers and then puts the series on Kindle Unlimited. Once the series is complete, she takes them out of KU and puts them on all the other retailers and starts a new series that is first up on Patreon and then on Kindle Unlimited. I've thought about doing something like this myself, but I'm not ready to commit to the extra work Patreon would require and the Andomhaim and Cloak Mage books have such large audiences built up on the other retailers that switching them to KU would be a massive rug pull for people.

With strategy #4, the publishing windows, the indie author makes the book available on all retailers for the first week and then switches them over to Kindle Unlimited. I think that approach has serious drawbacks, especially since you don't have the opportunity to build up an audience long term on the other retailers. An overlooked factor in a lot of indie publishing strategies is the long-term effects that build up over time. Part of the reason my books do well on, for example, Kobo is because I've had the majority of them on Kobo for the last 14 years, and so they have 14 years worth of reviews accumulated around them.

So with all that in mind, in late 2023 and early 2024, I settled on strategy #5, which plays to the fact that I'm pretty fast as a writer. Namely, I will start a new series unconnected to everything else I've written and put that in Kindle Unlimited. Once it's finished, I will take it out of KU and put it all on all the other retailers and start a new series for Kindle Unlimited. Honestly, this has worked out pretty well so far. In 2024, the Half-Elven Thief series did well enough that it paid for my health insurance in 2024, which as we know, is no small feat. It didn't do as well for the first 11 and a half months of 2025 for the obvious reason that I didn't publish any new books in the series in that time. I had too many unfinished series and needed to wrap some of them up first, which was a separate, self-inflicted problem I've talked about in other episodes. But Wizard-Assassin did really well, as I mentioned above. So moving forward, that's my publishing strategy, and it will have three prongs.

#1: Only three unfinished series at any one time. #2: Two of those series will be available on all platforms, and #3: One of those three series will be on Kindle Unlimited. So when Half-Elven Thief is finished at nine books, which will probably be in 2027, I will take it out of KU and put it on all the other retailers. One rule for my Kindle Unlimited series: it will always have to be something new and unconnected to anything I've previously written. No Andomhaim books will be in Kindle Unlimited since Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, Dragonskull, The Shield War, and Blades of Ruin have always been wide. Likewise, Cloak Mage is staying wide. If I ever go back to the Silent Order universe for a new science fiction series, that will also be wide.

So that is the longer answer for why Wizard Assassin was in Kindle Unlimited. And as always, thanks for reading. I am tentatively hoping Dragon-Mage, the sixth book in the Half-Elven Thief series, will come out in April or possibly May, depending on how the next few months go. And once again, thanks for reading the Half-Elven Thief series and all my other books, and there would be no point in writing all these books if you guys didn't want to read them.

So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found it useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. And if you enjoyed the podcast, it would be very helpful if you were to please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.