Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
There is a price point I won't borrow - and that is each time a free book in KU looks interesting. Instead of borrowing, I purchase it. Is that screwing the author as well? There shouldn't be so many different especially different price options.
It also depends who reads the books - my wife's PW probably goes through 15 or more KU books each months. I don't have that much time to read, and usually the books I borrow tend to be longer per book. So my authors get screwed since they are in the minority compared to my wife's authors. But they get screwed too, because we are well below the $1.35 that Amazon has through our $9.99 subscription. But I guess it evens out, as many books my wife borrows are series with many smallish books - but then the author gets much less per book, but still more per series. Unless, of course, we are infact typical KU subscribers and every author gets a lot less than the $1.35 per read.
In a way the authors do not get lost sales from us - if it wasn't for KU, they would get paid even less. Per read it is less, but a lot more is read when you never have to worry about spending too much - already budgeted ahead of time.
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It's a smaller ecosystem where some authors have a chance to be noticed, so I agree, it's quite possible they would not see the equivalent "sales" without it. For a popular author they may be seeing less sales than before and seeing borrows instead of purchases. But they made the decision to opt in. I think largely the expectation was that amazon's ability to market and get books in front of readers would be enough to ensure enough lends to make up any difference or to at least keep momentum going. I'm not sure Amazon did a lot to help the authors in the program. They may, in fact, be getting no special visibility.
It's tough to decide where to place books--which retailer will I partner well with, which one is too big to care, how do I reach readers? When KU came out as exclusive, I was pretty bummed because it's another lost op for me. I don't want to give up SCRIBD and Kobo and Apple and Smashwords...and there is never any guarantee on any platform. In the past, I didn't want to play Amazon's "Freebie" game. I think that cost me visibility. There's never one right answer and the game is always changing.