What e-book lending taught a small press
Originally published in November 2012. Re-edited in 2026 with a note at the end.
In 2012 Amazon offered small publishers a trade: make a title exclusive to Kindle for ninety days and it could be borrowed free by Prime members, with the publisher paid from a monthly pool for every loan. For a press our size the arithmetic was interesting. A loan paid roughly what a sale paid, and a borrowed book was a book somebody actually opened.
We enrolled our titles and said so publicly, on the theory that discovery was our scarcest resource and exclusivity our cheapest currency. A reader who borrowed a novel for free and talked about it at work was worth more to us than a reader who never found it.
What we'd say now
The thesis held and the platform changed. Lending pools shrank per loan as more titles joined, exclusivity windows got longer, and "free" became the default expectation for a first look at anything. But the underlying lesson stayed true for everything we have published since, guides included: being findable is worth paying for, and the cheapest way to pay is often to give something away. Our gaming guides are free for the same reason the loans were.