Quote:
Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
I concur that sales dropped off severely in the last year. Many authors assume it is due to KU. I've no idea if that is the case, but this is the third fairly large romance site that has shut down (Elora Cave, Samhain and this one. Samhain was supposedly rescued at the last second, but I haven't checked that status.)
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KU is suspect number one in their steady decline.
But there is also the matter of generic epub relevance at retail.
And then there is the mindshare problem.
It takes a certain minimum market presence to be noticed by the mainstream and be able to grow with the market. In a year where it looks like sales have declined for everybody except Amazon maintaining that visibility has gotten a lot harder.
Worse, things have reached the point where (for many authors) the benefits of Kindle exclusivity, limited though they might be, outweigh the benefits of going wide. It's hard enough competing against the Kindle installed base at the reader level but when you add competing against KDP at the publisher level it gets doubly hard. When the catalog size disparity gets big enough, the readers just slowly fade away.
Even without KU, the 3-to-1 Kindle vs epub ratio makes getting notifed a lot harder for smaller players. Add in Apple's walled garden and Google, Kobo, and B&N and there isn't much left for non-walled garden players.
In fact, who is left, anyway?
Scribd?