The following post was originally published on 7/24/15 on dvmulligan.com.
In this post, further thoughts on the recent changes to the Kindle Unlimited pay structure and how indie authors can be part of the solution instead of adding to the problem.
Recently, I shared some information about why Kindle Unlimited is bad for authors. All authors should be upset by the pay structure rule changes. Consider the following math problem:
- Say you write a 200 page novel, which you are selling for $3.99.
- Every time someone buys it, you get 70%, or $2.66 per copy sold.
- You enroll in Kindle Select, which makes your book available for Amazon Prime Members to borrow and to Kindle Unlimited subscribers. For each Prime borrow, you get a share of the KDP Global Fund. Your share is based on the number of pages each borrower actually reads and the amount of money in the Global Fund that month. The amount in fund varies. Right now, authors are earning about half a cent per page read. So if your borrower reads all 200 pages of your book, you would earn 100 cents. That's right: You would earn $1.00.
- If that borrower had bought your book outright, whether or not she read a single word of it, you would have made $2.66, so you're losing $1.66.
My advice: Don't opt in to Kindle Select.
The best way to send Amazon the message that Indie Authors dislike these terms is to pull our books from the program.
As I noted in my last post, however, one group of authors is particularly upset about the changes, and yet they also seem reluctant to take their books out of the program. Namely I'm talking about authors of erotica.
Curious to find out why they were so vocally upset and yet so unwilling to just get out of Kindle Select, I did some digging, and my findings are interesting. It seems entrepreneurial authors have found some creative ways to game the system.
First, take a look at this week's Self-Published Best Sellers as compiled by GalleyCat.
8 out of 10 are clearly all about sex. Whether you want to call it "romance," "steamy romance," or "erotica," doesn't change the fact that just from the two sentence descriptions in this list, it is clear that these books are quite full of sex. Thank you, Fifty Shades of Grey, for helping authors everywhere realize how much money there is to be made in smut.
8 out of 10 are clearly all about sex. Whether you want to call it "romance," "steamy romance," or "erotica," doesn't change the fact that just from the two sentence descriptions in this list, it is clear that these books are quite full of sex. Thank you, Fifty Shades of Grey, for helping authors everywhere realize how much money there is to be made in smut.
Notice, too, that 6 of the 10 are part of Kindle Unlimited. Yes, there is money to be made in smut, but readers are getting it for free. (That $9.99 that is deducted from their credit card every month to subscribe to Kindle Unlimited doesn't even register in the brain. Most people probably don't even read their monthly bank statements. They probably forgot they even pay that fee. All that registers is, "Oooh! Free!")
Let's do some more noticing, shall we? The top seller is a whopping 765 pages long. Good grief. It's regular price is only $0.99, which means the author gets only about $0.30 per purchase, but if borrowers read the whole damn thing she'll be earning about $3.78 from Kindle Unlimited, which means for her, the program is totally worthwhile even under the new rules.
But, don't stop noticing things yet. On the author's profile page, I encounter something interesting: That book, with its 765 pages, has been published before, in 5 installments, each around 200 pages (I know 5 x 200 = 1,000, so somehow the page numbers don't match up. I can't explain that one. We'd have to ask the author to find out). So she would actually be better off if her borrowers got each one separately. That would add up to more pages read, more pennies in her pocket. Wow. She has really figured out how to capitalize. Hats off.
With this information, I kept sleuthing, and I came across this blog post from the Author Marketing Club about how one Indie Author earned $10,000 a month by writing erotica. $10,000! No wonder everyone's desperate to write this stuff!
Too impatient to listen to the podcast, I did what anyone would do. I skimmed the info on the site and then I checked out her Amazon page.
This author published "100 books" in a year, she says.
Um, no. She did not publish "100 books."
She published 100 items, most of which are only the length of a short story. Instead of collecting her short stories into a single book, she published them individually.
And under the old rules of Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Select borrows, this was HUGELY to her advantage, because it used to be that you got a set amount of money per borrow from Kindle Select, and a set amount for Kindle Unlimited once readers hit a certain amount of pages read.
That's right:
Her short stories were getting the same amount per borrow as full length novels.
But now, even if borrowers read her stories all the way through, if the story is only 20 pages, she's only getting about $0.10.
And she's not alone. There are hundreds of other writers who realized they could game the Kindle Unlimited system this way. And now they're upset because they've been found out and Amazon took steps to correct its system to prevent such easy earning.
I understand the impulse. If you've written a book, and you've worked hard to make it into a great product, and you've done all the marketing that everyone advises, and you still didn't see strong sales figures, of course you want to find a hack to find financial success with your writing. You followed the rules and it didn't work, so why not beat Amazon at its own game?
Except Amazon's game is evolving as we play it, and when it realized that authors were manipulating the system, it changed the system in a way that many authors, not just those who were causing the problem, are hurt by it.
Look, there are other problems with Kindle Unlimited, like the fact that traditionally published books get more money per borrow than indie books. This program isn't good for authors. That's all there is to it. Gaming the system doesn't make it better for authors, either.
For one thing, indie authors putting out dozens and dozens of short, lousy books a year give self-publishing a bad reputation among readers, and then readers are less interested in trying other books by indie authors. Ugh. I could go on, but enough is enough.
If you're dreaming of quitting your day job by writing erotica, all I can say is this: That author who managed to make $10,000 in one month by publishing 100 things in a year is making less than $500 a month right now (thank you, Kindle Spy, for that insight).
The bottom line is this: We have to act with self-respect and treat our work professionally. It's that simple.
If you're a writer, write, and love what you do. And if you have to keep your day job, think of all the material for your writing you're gathering by facing the work world every day.
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