Quote:
Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
Shrug. I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I don't really know. So long as Amazon requires exclusivity it's a deal killer for me as an author.
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I've been arguing for a while that people are misreading KU and badly.
KU is not intended as a substitute for discrete sales. That would be stupid of Amazon. KU is intended as a substitute for free. Especially permafree.
Think in terms of commitment: there are millions of unread ebooks cluttering ereaders and reader collections because at some point they were free and caught the reader's eye. No commitment needed. (A discrete sale needs more than a passing fancy; it requires a commitment of cold cash, often after sampling--for free--up to 10% of the title.)
A good thing, the visibility from FREE!.
But because FREE! requires zero commitment, there is also zero pressure to follow through. At some point, the downloads may be sampled, or not. If sampled, they might lead to sales of other titles, or not. If they do, the price of the visibility and future sales is one full sale. Not a bad deal, generally... but...
Amazon doesn't really like free ebooks. They tolerate them but discourage them. (30% of zero is zero, after all.) KU is their answer to permafree.
With KU, Amazon addresses the commitment issue with the 10 book checkout cap. Subscribers have to sample the book and judge it to free up the slot for another checkout. And, since subscribers have to pay to get into KU, they want to sample as many titles, preferably to completion, as possible.
Amazon bills KU as a discovery tool for readers.
That means it is a marketing tool for authors.
It is meant to provide a visibility boost to titles in KU by getting heavy readers (willing to pay the subscription fee) to sample the author's wares. And generate a trickle of revenue from the sampling, which is something that FREE! doesn't do.
One way KU boosts visibility is through a simple numbers game: KU features 800K titles while the full Kindle catalog runs 3.2M. So, just by being in KU a title gets a booster seat before an audience of avid readers. And, since BPHs don't play that game, there are few mass market "brand" authors standing in front.
What is the value of that?
Well, that is up to each author/publisher to decide.
Amazon lets *them* decide how badly they want that boost, 90 days at a time.
They don't demand a life of copyright commitment.
They don't demand a non-compete or that all the titles from the author go into KU.
They don't demand anything more than 90 days exclusivity for each title featured on KU.
Again, it is up to each author to decide.
Seems to me, a viable strategy is to use KU the way BAEN used their free library: to use select titles from their catalog to expose readers to their brand and their authors. Loss leaders, if you will, but paid ones. Putting in the full catalog may not be a good idea (or it might be, for some) but rotating titles through it? Might result in a net gain...
Sure beats permafree, no?
I find this to be an interesting experiment.
It doesn't fit my reading habits but it so annoys Amazon foes it is worth tracking just to see the culture clash.
And it's already produced some interesting side effects.
I expect the second year to be worth watching.