What is Kindle Unlimited, and what it means for your translated book

Kindle Unlimited is Amazon's monthly subscription: the reader pays once a month and reads ebooks from a large catalog, without buying each book separately. An independent author gets into that catalog through KDP (Amazon's self-publishing platform), in a program called KDP Select, and the price is exclusivity. For 90 days, the ebook version of your book is sold only on Amazon. The print and audio editions stay free.

If you're publishing your book in a new language, you'll have to decide on this for each language separately. Here's what you need to know to decide.

What is Kindle Unlimited, in two minutes

Picture a library you pay for by the month. The reader doesn't buy a book. They "borrow" it to their Kindle, read it and return it. They have no reason to wonder whether the book is worth the price, because they already paid for the subscription.

That changes how readers behave. Kindle Unlimited subscribers are willing to try authors they don't know, because it costs them nothing extra. For a new author, in a language where nobody has heard of them yet, that's a real advantage.

What KDP Select is, and what you commit to

Start with the program itself. According to the program's help page, it's free, it runs for 90 days, and it's for ebooks only. A book enrolled in it goes into Kindle Unlimited automatically.

The commitment is exclusivity. According to the enrollment page, while the book is enrolled, the ebook can be distributed only through KDP and through public libraries. That means no other ebook stores, and no selling it on your own website.

Two details that are easy to miss:

• Enrollment renews on its own. Every 90 days it renews automatically, unless you turned off the renewal.
• The cancellation window is short. You can cancel within three days of the start of an enrollment period. After that, you're in until the 90 days are up.

What stays free

The exclusivity only covers the ebook version. The same help page says outright that you can keep distributing the print book, the audiobook and other formats anywhere.

So you can have the ebook in Kindle Unlimited and at the same time sell the print book in bookstores and the audiobook on any platform. We wrote about the different formats in ebook, print or audiobook.

How you get paid

Not by copies sold. Amazon splits a shared fund between all the books in the program, according to how many pages readers read in each one.

In practice, a book that readers start and abandon earns little. A book that readers finish, and then move on to your next one, earns more. And that brings us back to translation. A translation that reads easily, with dialogue that sounds natural and names that don't change halfway through, is a translation readers finish.

A translated book: in or out

There's no single answer, because every translated edition is a separate ebook and you decide on each one separately. A few questions that help:

Where do readers in this language buy ebooks? In some languages and countries, lots of readers also buy from other stores, like Kobo or Apple Books. If your audience is there, exclusivity to Amazon shuts the door on them. We wrote about the other stores in where to sell a book besides Amazon.

Are you a new author in this language? If nobody knows you yet, subscribers' willingness to try a book "for free" can be the easiest way to reach your first readers.

Do you have more books? Kindle Unlimited works especially well for series, because a reader who finishes one book moves straight on to the next without paying again.

Do you want to try it? 90 days isn't forever. You can enroll for one period, see what happens, and turn off the renewal if it doesn't work.

What to do now

If your translated book isn't out yet, there's no need to decide today. The decision comes when you upload the ebook to KDP, and you can also enroll later.

What is worth doing now is finding out where readers in the language you chose actually buy books. That's the question that settles it, and the answer differs from language to language. More questions are collected in our frequently asked questions.