Six months ago I removed The Unbound Man from non-Amazon ebook retailers and enrolled it in KDP Select to try out the promotional tools and the (then quite new) Kindle Unlimited program.

Three months ago, after a successful promotion and some encouraging Kindle Unlimited sales, I extended the experiment for a further ninety days, largely to see if the KU performance would continue.

Now, with that second period of ninety days almost over, I’m bringing the experiment to a close. In the next few days The Unbound Man will drop out of KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited, and will begin to reappear on Kobo, iBooks, and elsewhere.

The reasons are pretty straightforward. I was never particularly happy with giving Amazon exclusive rights to ebook sales (as I elaborated on in some detail in that first post). Nonetheless, if KU sales had continued to show some momentum, that might have been enough to make me think about extending the arrangement for another three months. But that simply hasn’t happened. At this point I’m in a position of excluding all non-Amazon platforms for the sake of a handful of KU sales, and that’s simply not worth it — on any level.

So the experiment ends. It’s a disappointing conclusion, but not an unsuccessful one. The goal was to discover what KDP Select had to offer, and that’s been achieved. Now I can begin to explore some non-Amazon alternatives, starting with the other main ebook retailers.

So if you’re a KU reader who hasn’t yet picked up The Unbound Man, get it while you can! Soon it will be gone from that program — though it will of course remain available on Amazon as an ordinary purchasable title.

And if you’re a non-Amazon ebook reader, thank you for your patience. The Unbound Man will soon be available at your preferred retailed once more. I hope you’ll check it out!