Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
I mean...Amazon populates it's program from Amazon authors. You aren't getting Patterson, King or any big name authors.
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Not to be nitpicky, but KINDLE UNLIMITED includes tradpubbed authors other than APub's authors. Rowling among them.
A lot of small press authors, including occasional best sellers, also show up. The reason is twofold: some books Amazon contracts and pays for outside the per-page payouts (Rowling), often at full wholesale; others sign up as promos, instead of doing permafree or $0.99 sales.
KU is at heart a promotion mechanism that pays a reduced price instead of charging. So putting in the first book in a series often results in full price sales for the sequels. In a market with over 5 million active titles there is value in playing in a smaller venue.
That is the reason for the lack of big name authors, who don't need to be discovered. It's a feature, not a bug. Amazon *salts* the KU catalog with a few recognizable names as context for trial users and new subscribers but the idea is to prop up the visibility of non-big names, not send more readers to authors everybody knows anyway.
Amazon isn't doing this out of kindness, they're doing it because there is money in feeding the habits of readers whose apetite for books is bigger than their budget. It is the same logic why some streaming services (Hulu, CW, Peacock, CBSAA, etc) offer both ad-supported and Ad-free tiers. Some people are willing to pay full price, even for stuff of unknown quality, while others will only sample the material if there is no downside. The value to subscribers isn't just in the books they finish but also in the bullets tbey dodge, books tbat appear promising but fail to deliver. Publishing has a long history of three-chapter wonders.
That is why most books on Amazon have LOOK INSIDE and downladable free samples, to give buyers an indication of what the book is like.
How much money Amazon makes off KU is up in the air but after five years of increasing payouts it is clear there is profit there. They are paying out over $300M a year so they have to be netting at least that much. Possibly much more. It might be a billion dollar business by now.
That's a few million subscribers, no matter how you guesstimate it.
Enough to entice Kobo and others to try to muscle in And for the bigger publishers to take notice.
So the rumor that the randy penguin is looking to start their own service isn't totally unlikely, especially if they really are focusing on audio.
Relying just on print distribution isn't growing their business any and they've intentionally capped ebook sales to protect print so tbey need to muster real some growth somewhere. Which is these moves by the penguin come in.
BTW, here's a more reliable source:
https://thenewpublishingstandard.com...unch-imminent/