Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
By now the system has been running long enough to stabilize and, odd scammer aside, the balance of value seems to satisfy all the involved parties. Readers find new voices, willing authors get paid to publicize their wares and often find fans, and Amazon gets a *major* competitive advantage and (probably) a fair bit of change. It's not AWS money but if they're dishing out at a rate of $300M per year after four years they must be happy. I suspect 1.5M exclusives ought to be bringing in a few bucks along the way.
So don't worry, be happy!  |
I've seen enough postings from authors who have removed their books from KU due to the effect that various scams have had on their income. When Amazon lets you know that your books have had more checkouts from KU and the pages read have gone up but your payment has dropped, you might begin to suspect that Amazon is being gamed successfully.
Admittedly, these posts are from the recipe/cooking genre for me and the romance genre for my wife, other genres may not be suffering to the same degree but since KU is a single pot, it is likely affecting other genres.
For us, using KU to locate new authors became a crap shoot with loaded dice. Too many reviews that had at best a distant relationship with the books being reviewed and too many author recommendations based on
you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours without regard for the quality of the books being recommended. Yes, finding authors you are familiar with was fairly easy but that wasn't why we tried KU -- we were looking for new authors. I wasn't expecting
The Joy of Cooking or
The Theory and Practice of Good Cooking but I was finding too many books that made
How Long Do I Cook a 3-Minute Egg look like
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.