Elf Queen 3 Weekly Update 4/23 | Kindle Unlimited

Hello, my bookish friends! It’s JM Kearl for another update. I know a lot of you have been waiting for signed hardbacks in my etsy shop, and I said April, and as promised my copies arrived this week!

There is a limited number.

Some of them came damaged as I expected but only a few this time. But expect only about 20-22 copies of BBTEQ and about the same number for LLTEQ, and they sell fast. I’ll send an email when I post them to the shop.

I promised character art reveal and here it is! @_alex_oxy on Instagram did such a wonderful job on these two! I love it and I hope you do too!

Prints of the new art will be available to purchase soon! I’m waiting for them to arrive. I think I’ll wait to list the signed copies until the prints get here so that if you order a signed copy and want a print too, I can package them in the same box.

I’m so close to finishing Fate Calls the Elf Queen, (the first-ish draft)! I’m probably about 90% finished! Which is fantastic. I still haven’t decided on a release date. I was hoping for early summer but it looks like it’s going to be late summer because of the schedule with a new editor.

You know I like to put out my best work and if I rush the edit, (we’re talking story structure, character development, plot holes, and much more than just looking for typos or grammar) it won’t be my best, and you readers deserve the best!

But the good news is while it’s with the editor, I’ll be writing book 4 and I’m hoping to get a good chunk of book 4 written before I publish book 3 and then I can release it in a faster time frame!

Obviously if something changes, my readers will be the first to know!

Kindle Unlimited

Do authors make more in kindle unlimited or purchasing the book?

This is a question I get asked and the answer is different for everyone but for most of us we get paid more when you purchase the book. for reference authors get 70% royalties of the price of the book, and Amazon takes 30%. In KU authors get paid per page read, so the longer the book the more we make (if the person reads the entire thing) and the rate changes every month. This month the KU rate was the lowest it’s ever been which means for the same book we get paid less.

Many of us authors speculate it’s because there was a boycott of KU on tiktok, a way to “punish” Amazon but it ONLY hurts authors. Amazon doesn’t care. I’m not sure why this group wanted to punish Amazon to begin with but I know it was a thing.

If the rate keeps going down it won’t be sustainable for most authors to be in the program. So if you have a KU subscription keep reading there! I personally think there’s peaks and valleys as always, and it will rise again, so I’m not worried about it but I know other authors are.

Now, having said that we get paid more when you purchase the book, I make about 70% of my income from KU readers. I like the program, I know it’s helpful for readers to be able to read a lot of books for a low monthly price.

As for me, I know there are people who will take a chance on my book that might otherwise not if they can “try it” in KU without having to purchase it. It removes the risk barrier. There’s no hesitation in borrowing a book but there might be in purchasing, and that’s why I think the program is great for both authors and readers!

And many people say they read my book in KU and then get the physical copy because they enjoyed it so much, and if they didn’t have KU maybe they’d have never read it and fell in love with the Elf Queen series.

There are drawbacks, like Amazon’s exclusivity clause; this means that we cannot have our ebook in any other store, the Zon only. So when people pirate our books it puts us at risk from being eliminated from the program, which sucks considering we don’t want people pirating our books either.

Side note, we do not get paid when you reread, only the first time through. which makes sense considering if you purchase it, we only get paid for the one time!

That’s it for this week. Thanks for being patient with me. I know so many of you are waiting for book 3!

Have an enchanting week!

JM

(picture is of Switzerland which is inspiration for the landscape in Palenor!)