Quote:
Originally Posted by shalym
So...if you're downloading with Kindle for PC, you must be using Kindle for PC to read, right? Because we've already established that you shouldn't be removing the DRM from a borrowed book.
I'm curious...all this talk about how Amazon is being unfair to authors because they only get paid when the book is read to at least 10%...how do Scribd and Oyster pay the author? Do they just get a flat rate every month for being included in the service? Do they get paid when someone borrows the book, whether the book is read or not?
Shari
|
SCRIBD works a bit differently and it's an important difference: We get paid a percentage of the list price if the reader only reads 10 percent, but once the reader goes past...I forget. 20 percent? We get paid the LIST PRICE minus SCRIBD and distributor cost. So for a 2.99 book, if the book is read, we'd make approximately 2 dollars. This is very approximate. If you want me to actually calculate a real book percentage I can go look it up, but that's ballpark.
If I'm in KU, I would get paid from a single pot of money that is distributed across ALL READS for the month. That pay rate is running about 1.35 per read right now. Popular authors who were pricing their book at 2.99 and up, were making more per book BEFORE KU. A 2.99 book that is purchased on Amazon, for example, would yield about 2 dollars for the author. Many popular authors price their books at 3.99 or more so they would make more for a sale. But the price of the book doesn't matter. If it's read on KU, each read right now is yielding about 1.35 because there is a capped pot of money and it gets divided across all reads (minus some bonus payouts that Amazon invented to try and keep the most popular authors--but there are very few bonus payouts.)
The problem, of course, is there is no real data that says the author would be SELLING each book being BORROWED. That is the author claim--that because of KU, people are borrowing instead of buying and their income is down.
Now it could be that people are just buying less, period. It could be that book sales have slowed down or that Amazon isn't providing indies with the same visibility that they have in the past. But the general thought pattern is that for some of those lends, the author would have had a sale--and a sale would have yielded some authors with a larger payout. Getting out of the program doesn't help an author because readers who are subscribed are going to look within KU for the most part in order to "get their subscription's worth."
SCRIBD bases their payout on list price, while Amazon bases it on the total amount of books borrowed during a month.