Quote:
Originally Posted by ebusinesstutor
A membership like this isn't meant to replace ebook sales, rather it is meant to provide an additional revenue stream for authors more like a library.
|
And, as the fahrenheit folks posited, serve as a promotional vehicle for author brand-building as well as fine-grained consumer habit tracking. That last item, the data collection, is something that normally *costs* suppliers money to acquire, yet tradpub still whines that they don't get it for free from Amazon when they turned down the chance to get it and be paid while getting it.
The anecdata coming out from a great many (though obviously not all) KU author-publishers is that KU raises their visibility (something recently admitted by Smashwords), increases their sales in the Kindle stores, and *pays* them on top of it. Of course they like it!
The proof of KUs viability is the steady increase in its catalog size. And a good portion of that viability comes from the fact that the BPHs are *not* in KU. Amazon bills KU as a way for readers to discover new favorite authors, risk free, not as a way to read King or Roberts or Patterson on the cheap. (Readers already know who they are, anyway.) The few tradpub titles they seed KU with are just a minor sprinkling for trial users.
Indies and selfpubs is *exactly* who Amazon wants in KU.
"It's not a defect, it's a feature."