The first reports are filtering in on the switch from checkout-based payouts to page-read payouts.
The Digital Reader Blog has a summary with some analysis:
http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/0...-read-in-july/
Several authors have shared their experience and or numbers but two stand out for different reasons:
Konrath:
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2015/0...d-numbers.html
Quote:
My assessment:
Under KU 1.0, Amazon was rewarding writers for enrolling in KDP Select. Amazon wanted as many titles as possible, to build their Kindle Unlimited catalog. Shorts are easier and faster to write than novels, so Amazon rewarded short stories by paying authors much higher for shorter works, way out of proportion with novels and with the paper short story market, in order to get more titles into KU so it appealed to more subscribers.
Under KU 2.0, Amazon is rewarding writers for being good writers. Amazon wants writers to hook readers for longer than 10% of the ebook. Amazon wants good, meaty novels, which my numbers point to readers liking more than shorts.
My takeaway:
Under KU 1.0, I should have written a hundred short stories and made a fortune. Amazon was paying ten times more per word for shorts than they paid for novels. There was no incentive to write well, or to engage readers. The main incentive was to put out a lot of shorts and hook the reader for 10% of the length of the story.
Under KU 2.0, I'm continuing to do what all professional fiction writers have done throughout history; write novels. It's what readers want. With the rare exceptions of a few authors, no one made a living selling shorts. There was a brief moment, during KU 1.0, where shorts were valuable. Their market value has now dropped. Novels are going to earn writers more money. But they have to be good novels.
That said, shorts are still worth more than they were in the legacy paper world. I got $0.075 cents per word writing for EQMM. I got $0.5 cents a word for writing Whiskey Sour. In other words, as a professional mystery writer, I made about seven cents a word selling to a top short story market, and fifty cents a word selling to a top mystery novel market.
Under KU 2.0, I make the same per word/per page whether I write mysteries, or novels. And I like that a lot.
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(He clearly means he makes the same whether it is a short story or a novel.)
Howey:
http://www.hughhowey.com/kindle-unlimited-knockout/
Howey's long been concerned about KU exclusivity:
Quote:
I knew within a week that I’d made the right decision to join KU. My KU ebooks saw an immediate boost in ranking. Not only were the page-reads mounting, but the sales of those ebooks were also on the rise! My overall income doubled, even with the loss of the other retail outlets, and I’m reaching more readers. This is like advertising that I get paid for, and advertising that leads to more paid sales. The only cost is exclusivity.
I’ve written at length about exclusivity, but I’ll sum up here what might seem paradoxical at first: You can sometimes reach more readers by making your products available with fewer vendors. By concentrating sales in one location, sales rank gets a boost and more reader reviews are compiled in a single place. This means more visibility and more word-of-mouth sales. It can also mean more readers.
If you were an author and you had to choose between 1,000,000 sales to readers in the state of Illinois and 100,000 sales to readers all around the world, which would you take? Arbitrary designations of where readers come from are just that: arbitrary. The total number of readers is what should matter. This is especially true considering the fact that Kindle ebooks can be read on practically anything that has a screen. More and more readers are moving to cell phones for their consumption, and even Apple devices can read Kindle ebooks. What’s more, I don’t put DRM on my works, so they can be downloaded, converted, and read as epubs or PDFs. By concentrating my works in a single place, I’m not making them unavailable to anyone; I’m just amplifying the signal of all those purchases and reader reactions. It’s a funnel, not a sieve.
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He also points out:
Quote:
What is the collapse of Nook doing for the adoption of ebooks? Barnes and Noble goes back and forth on whether or not they’re going to support their own device. That causes those who bought a Nook to become wary of committing to buying more digital books. And what about Apple’s refusal to make iTunes a web-based store rather than an application? This makes sharing links and buying ebooks more difficult across devices. And let’s not even start on B&N’s storefront. Or Google’s hubris when it comes to dealing with authors.
Indiscriminate business partnerships does not move the industry forward, and making my ebooks available at places that don’t provide the best reader experience does not help my career. When I saw that KU was going to help me reach more readers —and more than make up lost income from all other outlets combined — I was swayed.
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This... has happened before, in gaming consoles:
Early this Century, when Nintendo fumbled the GameCube generation and Dreamcast imploded, Sony was the only credible console player left standing and they ended up with an enormous amount of exclave-by-default games; not because they offered developers incentives to go PS2 exclusive but simply because the remaining platforms, the GameCube and late-arriving XBOX, didn't command enough market share to be worth the effort of porting.
It took billions of Microsoft money and a whole string of Sony missteps to restore long-term competitive balance to the market.
If current trends of Amazon excellence and competitor missteps continue we may end up with a similar market in ebooks.
Amazon provides at least two-thirds of the ebook sales revenue in the industry and now are adding an extra $100M a year in rental revenue.
If competitors don't get serious about competing we're likely going to see more "exclusives-by-default" joining the million titles already in KU.
Much more at the sources.