Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
Being a short story, essay, and poetry writer I prefer the old method.  Not that any of my books are at this point on KU etc. but it also seems this method is flawed in that it requires page tracking which is not going to work any better than counting 'book' sales. |
Why not?
How so?
Why isn't page tracking going to work?
Publishing has long paid by length and since Amazon is paying by a standard page metric they are in effect paying by the word. Only it is by words *read* rather than words published. Which makes sense because the only real constraint on KU consumption is "eyeball-hours", the amount of time the subscriber can spend reading in a given month. Payment is fixed, number of subscribers is fixed, and over the total subscriber base the average reading speed and time is going to be fixed. Amazon will thus be able to set the monthly payment pool at a satusfactory (for them) per word rate. And payout will be the same if the subscriber reads 30 10,000 word shorts or 4 75,000 word novels.
A lot of authors have been lobbying for this. Very publicly.
For example:
http://www.hughhowey.com/new-ku-payout-structure/
So Amazon took a new look at their system and changed it.
One notable change is that the old 10% threshold goes away. Now authors get paid even if the reader fails to reach the threshold. Conversely, the author only gets full pay for books that are read fully.
Which means books like THE GOLDFINCH are now poor candidates for KU.