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Originally Posted by Cinisajoy
You bring up an interesting point.
Are these authors leaving Amazon or just KU? If just KU, then it really doesn't hurt Amazon.
The bigger and more important question is are readers leaving KU?
I wonder if the author payout has anything to do with the number of paid subscriptions.
Could less subscriptions mean less per page payout?
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Good questions. There are many issues. I doubt many authors are actually leaving Amazon completely. Let's face it, they would be cutting off their nose to spite there face. But anecdotally more authors are starting to take their books out of KU, for various reasons including these scams. No doubt falling payouts are one of these reasons. Smart authors should always be re-evaluating whether their books should be in KU from month to month.
Losing authors from KU does hurt Amazon indirectly. Combined with more and more scammers books cluttering up the catalogue I expect it will lead to fewer subscriptions and therefore less money for Amazon if left unchecked. There is obviously some relationship between payouts and subscription revenue, but so far as I am aware we have no real idea how Amazon calculates the Pool. It is a measure of Amazon's success and the trust many place in it that it has so many books in it whilst having total discretion over how much it pays out each month. No transparency whatsoever. No formulas. No audits. How long will that trust remain whilst Amazon tolerates the present farce?
Also, whilst the scammers are making their money mainly from KU, their continued manipulation of the charts does carry over to KDP books and Amazon's business in general. The stories of Amazon apparently giving bonuses to scammers and even selecting scam authors for its features and promotions can do enormous damage to KDP and Amazon's book business in general.
GeoffR's criticism seems to me to relate as much to the lack of a gatekeeping function in self-publishing as to the scammers. Many people, me amongst them, love Self and Indie publishing and are quite happy with our ability to find good books. I like to do my own gatekeeping rather than choose from a comparatively small collection curated by self-appointed guardians of all that is good. However, there are also some who rarely read books not produced by traditional publishing, and continually complain about what they see as endless piles of garbage. I don't agree with this position, but do agree that widespread scamming does not help this perception. And of course scammers books are all garbage, And if they continually take the prominent positions so important for book discovery the situation could ultimately end up similar to what Geoff describes, with the result that more and more people may decide Amazon's store is unusable. I think we are still a long way from that, but Amazon does need to act soon.