January is the best month to enroll in Amazon KDP

Look closely at the chart above:

Every year you will see a jump in January. January 2015, January 2016, and January 2017.

And it keeps seeing that jump every year.

eg. The KDP Select Global Fund for January 2019 is $24.7 million.

I don't know what it was in January 2018 (I deleted that old email), but you can guess it followed the same pattern.

Note - If you don't know what I am talking about, let me explain. Amazon Kindle offers a service called Kindle Unlimited, which allows users to pay $9.99 per month and they can read as many ebooks as they want (mostly from indie authors and small press publishers). Most of that money then goes into the KDP Fund which then pays authors based upon the number of pages people read. Usually people get paid about 0.5 cents per page. So if 5 people read your 400 page book, so 2000 pages total, in one month, you get paid an extra $10 for that month. It might not sound like much, but it is also useful to the authors so they can boost their popularity, get more reviews, promote their work via word-of-mouth, etc.

Now there are a number of reasons why the KDP Fund is constantly fluctuating.

1. More people keep joining Kindle Unlimited every year.
2. The influx of new readers every year means that in order to maintain that 0.5 cents per page payment system, they need to increase the fund.
3. Reading ebooks is mostly a thing for young people. But as each year passes by reading ebooks on your phone / tablet is becoming more acceptable.
4. Smartphones / tablets are also increasing in popularity overseas. KDP Select is a global fund, for all languages. So as more people join internationally, the more Amazon needs to raise the fund total.

For indie fantasy writers like myself (see my Amazon Author page for Charles Moffat) being in the KDP Select program is an opportunity to get my books seen by more people. Currently I have 10+ books on Amazon Kindle and I am studying the best ways to market them.

Marketing my books, sadly, is an annoyance to me.

I would love to be able to just have my books available to people, word-of-mouth spawns sales, and I don't have to do any marketing... or marketing research... and so forth.

I would much rather spend my time writing fantasy books or reading fantasy books.

But that isn't the way the system works. You either market your work, or you don't get sales.

So the biggest benefit of KDP Select is that it does a bunch of the marketing for me, as people reading your book on Kindle Unlimited counts as sales, even if they did not pay for the book.

Which means more time for me to focus on my writing.

But one question remains.

Should I be allowing my books to be in the KDP Select program constantly? Or just a few months per year? And if so, which months?

Since being in the program is a minimum of 90 days (and renews every 90 days unless you remember to turn off auto renewal), one could in theory only join for January/February/March. That in theory would be the best 3 months of the year to join.

Or... you could leave the books on there constantly.

Or if you have 10 or more books like I do, you could rotate how often your books are on there, and which books are being rotated on there.

So for myself, I am going to try experimenting with different options and strategies and see what works. Whatever does end up working for me however might not work for everyone however. Different authors might have very different target audiences.

And now back to writing fantasy... instead of writing about marketing fantasy.