I have often wondered about the effectiveness of reader subscription services from an author’s point of view. It has always seemed to me to be a bit of a hit or miss affair, where there is a decent chance you end up earning significantly less than would be the case with sales. But it seems I might have been looking at things from the wrong angle.

You see, in order to generate a decent number of likely suspects there naturally needs to be something about the victim that attracts all this interest in the first place. Of course, you could approach this by having all the suspects driven by precisely the same motive, but that can hem you in as far as plot goes.

Over the last few months my income from reads on Kobo’s Kobo+ subscription offering has been twice as much as it has from book sales. Wow! And this is with Kobo+ available in only some market places. That is income I am very happy to receive.

Contemplating this some more, I have started to think that rather than viewing these reads as lost sales, I really ought to view them as extra readers gained. With these sorts of all-you-can-eat services having become increasingly popular it is very likely that readers have fallen into two distinct camps. There are those who buy and those you subscribe. Therefore, if I didn’t make my books available on Kobo+ then I would simply loose out on these subscriber readers altogether.

So there we go, I’ve got more readers and more income than I might otherwise have had. I’m happy and my readers are happy. It’s a win all round.

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