Quote:
Originally Posted by conan50
I think Amazon is pushing authors hard into KU, and as someone mentioned, it may not always be a good deal as they change the amount of money in that pool at their discretion.
Just to be clear, with the changes regarding payments, an author with a 500 page novel in KU is better off than the author with 150 page novel?
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No, not necessarily. It all depends on how the reader reads and how the author was pricing. If that 500 page book was priced and sold decently at 3.99 or 5.99 the author makes less in KU than a sale. If a reader in the old program clicked and read 10 percent, the author would be paid based on the list price. The shorter stuff was making money in the old system because if the reader read past a certain point (10 percent) they were paid for the whole book. So by splitting up a single book, the author could get 2 plus 2 plus 2 as the reader tried to finish one book! This was annoying for readers (an authors because they had to redo books). Authors started doing it because they were used to pulling in 3 and 4 dollars for a book and suddenly they were making 2 even for long, popular books. By splitting it in two or three portions, they made the original 4 or even 6. Amazon had no choice but to put a stop to that method.
Tigger, yes, I agree with your points and there are many authors willing to just deal with Amazon. It's easier. It's faster. And if the books sell well enough the authors may be curious about a broader base, but not willing to risk it.
There are many reasons for this. A couple of examples: You can do very well with smashwords/apple --IF you qualify for their promo ops. Those who do are selling very well and have no incentive to go with just Amazon.
You can do quite well with kobo IF you qualify for their promo ops. But you have to know the rules, how to get in the promos and you have to work to qualify. While you are doing all that, you could just be selling on Amazon and building your base there. SOME promo ops fail. Kobo has done a lot of different promos and some of them have flopped completely. For an author, this can mean taking sales that are normally 60 to 100 or more on a channel per month and reducing them to 10 due to lack of visibility. The next promo might work and your sales go back up. Sometimes Kobo does more than one promo a month. Sometimes your books may not qualify for a particular promo so you have to do your own advertising (and that is very difficult to be effective. Ad places are very particular and most want prices of free or 99 cents--and that means you have to lower on all channels, which has headaches of its own. It also means you make zero money or very little and have to hope for "forward sales" of others in the series. This works for some books and not for others).
Ad places are becoming less and less effective partly because there are so many of them. Ads have also gone up in price.
This is all part of the usual business gyrations and people jockey for position.