Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Authors might do well from sales (less than 1% of them), but never from libraries. KU is essentially a subscription library and the incessant "Free on Kindle Unlimited" is dishonest for a subscription library. Our local library is free (unlike KU), yet no-one talks about free books, not even the Library, because they (paper, ebook, audio book or whatever) are only borrows. So the KU marketing is doubly dishonest and takes away from real sales of books, but it's automatic income for Amazon even if someone doesn't borrow and unlike other libraries they pay nothing up front. No wonder Archive Org thinks they should be able to run their Open Library (which pays nothing).
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Oddly, many of the authors I've chatted with use KU because the majority of their income came from KU. Some of them are now moving to wide since KU is not paying as much as it used to. Some have been burned by having their KU enrollment cancelled when their books were found on pirate sites and others have had their accounts dropped for no known reason.
Possible reasons for the dropping payments has been discussed to death but one popular theory is the mix of AI written content and AI driven clickfarms taking a larger chunk of the KU pie. Sadly, since Amazon does not release that data, those theories are not testable.
As for the local library being free? Last time I looked, the taxpayers pay for the majority of the local library expenses out of their tax payments in addition to donations and other income sources. TANSTAAFL.