Amazon is testing “Kindle Unlimited,” an ebook subscription service for $9.99/month

[sirmaru]

I've noticed that, even if one does not join Kindle Unlimited, one does get a big discount on a regular purchase of an eBook offered on KU.

For example, I just purchased "Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox." Its digital list price was $ 14.99 but its new discounted price is $ 2.51 which I paid. Of course, it is free on Kindle Unlimited. It contains 547 pages.

ALL the other 178 eBooks on my Amazon eBook Wish List are not yet covered by Kindle Unlimited either. If a few get on KU, it is likely their purchase price will also be slashed for regular purchasers.

That is yet one more reason not to join.

Finally, in the last 12 months I have only spent $ 103 on eBooks. I only buy eBooks with over 500 pages and they usually are over 600 pages. I read two at one time alternating daily. A KU membership would cost me $ 120 per year, more than I actually spend now with far more eBooks available to me than in KU.

[copyrite]

Beware! You can 'check out' a title multiple times and when you look under "Manage Your Content and Devices" it won't show you the multiple check outs. I had 8 books listed, two with audio content and I was thinking maybe the audio content was counted as its own individual title, BUT when I attempted to check an additional book out it went to a page that said "Return a book to continue", and under Return Another Book it listed all the books and one title three times.

I'm not sure how long I'll continue the KU subscription. At the moment I have Overdrive priorities I have to read before they expire so I haven't gotten a chance to even start the first book I've checked out. Just playin' around for the moment.

[latepaul]

Michael Sullivan is calling KU a 'two-tier' system for authors.

The differences boil down to:

Self-published authors MUST be exclusive to Amazon (except for a handful of best-selling authors) and can’t sell their books on other sites. Traditionally published books have no such exclusivity requirement and can be sold wherever the publisher wishes.

Self-published authors are paid from a pool set by Amazon each month. They have no idea how much they will be paid per book. Traditionally published books get paid exactly as they would if a sale were made. They know exactly what the unit price will be for each book and are not relying on the Amazon’s whim as far as what their unit price will be.

[Self-published authors] have been conditioned through several years of Select and those in Select are more than willing to give up other venues for higher visibility on Amazon. I can’t help but think I’m Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, trying to tell people at the Bedford Savings and Loan that Potter isn’t offering them a deal; he’s buying them cheap.

Thoughts?

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by latepaul

Michael Sullivan is calling KU a 'two-tier' system for authors.

The differences boil down to:





Thoughts?

In general, it's always been a two-tier (or more) system. Those who sell well can negotiate an advantage. The trad authors have agents and publishers to negotiate for them, and there aren't too many publishers who are going to back off getting their typical payment (some 40 to 60 percent of list) just to be in a subscription program on Amazon. They certainly aren't going to go exclusive. Of course, the supposed bonus for the author is that the publisher does some advertising for the author. The supposed bonus for an indie participating is that Amazon does some advertising for the author.

What happened with previous exclusivity deals with Amazon is that Amazon did less and less "ads" and "placement" for authors over time. When they first started the Prime lending, just getting in the program meant more visibility for the book. It was also speculated that your ranking bumped higher with a "borrow" than just a buy. That advertising lasted a while and it helped if you put your book free because Amazon did some additional visibility things for those.

Problem: Free doesn't really generate as many sales as everyone would like to believe. Yes, it works for SOME authors SOME of the time. Yes, for a while there it worked for quite a few authors...but that is not the case so much now. Worse, some readers expect free, so the barrier to finding new readers actually got worse instead of better for some authors.

Problem: Amazon stopped doing much of anything for authors in the exclusive deal. They didn't have to. Author participated anyway, did advertising FOR Amazon and books offsite and helped drive traffic.

Problem: Trad publishers SUPPOSEDLY offer advertising for authors. Well, they sort of do, but a lot of authors get left by the wayside. Some get no ads or help at all.

The bottom line is that authors have to do a lot of marketing themselves--regardless of how they are published. From where I sit, there's very little advantage to being exclusive to Amazon. I've worked hard to gain fans across the spectrum of e-readers. That means reviews, ads, forums, and so on. Going exclusive is a tool and doing it for 90 days can bring some benefits, but you have to really weigh those benefits and hope for good odds.

Right now, with KU being a new program, Amazon is likely to help out with placement to get things going. For an author with more than one book, putting one book in there to see how it goes might make sense. Putting everything in one basket, probably doesn't make a lot of sense.

Any author has to hope to get to a level where she can negotiate a better deal for herself. The Amz programs are tools that may or may not help. But no one is going to offer anyone a free ride so the best thing you can do is position yourself as high on the totem pole as possible.

No one said it would be easy.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by sirmaru

I've noticed that, even if one does not join Kindle Unlimited, one does get a big discount on a regular purchase of an eBook offered on KU.
For example, I just purchased "Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox." Its digital list price was $ 14.99 but its new discounted price is $ 2.51 which I paid. Of course, it is free on Kindle Unlimited. It contains 547 pages.
ALL the other 178 eBooks on my Amazon eBook Wish List are not yet covered by Kindle Unlimited either. If a few get on KU, it is likely their purchase price will also be slashed for regular purchasers.
That is yet one more reason not to join.
Finally, in the last 12 months I have only spent $ 103 on eBooks. I only buy eBooks with over 500 pages and they usually are over 600 pages. I read two at one time alternating daily. A KU membership would cost me $ 120 per year, more than I actually spend now with far more eBooks available to me than in KU.

More than likely it is just a coincidence, and the book is probably on temporary discount. The publisher, Open Road Media, does frequent sale-pricing. I bought a book by this same author, James MacGregor Burns, several weeks ago before KU existed. I bought it for $1.99 on sale. It is on KU and currently selling for $7.99.

[Andrew H.]

I can’t help but think I’m Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, trying to tell people at the Bedford Savings and Loan that Potter isn’t offering them a deal; he’s buying them cheap.

I think this kind of simplistic analysis is both simplistic and non-helpful. What Amazon offers is not a priori a good or bad deal, and, importantly, there is no Jimmy Stewart to whom authors can turn to get an automatically better deal. Like anything else, authors have to look at the terms to see whether it make sense for them or not.

[latepaul]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

I think this kind of simplistic analysis is both simplistic and non-helpful. What Amazon offers is not a priori a good or bad deal, and, importantly, there is no Jimmy Stewart to whom authors can turn to get an automatically better deal. Like anything else, authors have to look at the terms to see whether it make sense for them or not.

You may well be right about Amazon and KU but the pedant in me wants to point out that Jimmy Stewart didn't have a better deal, which is why he had to make the appeal in the way he did.

Anyway it's not my analogy so...

[fjtorres]

Not that many folks will care, but Digital Book World is going to exclude all Kindle Unlimited titles from their bestseller list:

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2014...t-seller-list/

What we’re looking to provide isn’t what people are reading, per se, but what they are purchasing and at what prices. So, it’s very important for us for this particular list to make it all about individual purchases.

And,

Because of the kinds of books available in Kindle Unlimited that had to be removed from the DBW Ebook Best-Seller list, the average price of a best-selling ebook has shot up this week to $8.45, an increase of almost $1 from last week’s $7.57. All of the books on the DBW list are currently “big five” titles.

This, from the website that last week felt the need to proclaim to the world that they aren't biased against indie titles.

It's a strange world and getting stranger by the minute.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Not that many folks will care, but Digital Book World is going to exclude all Kindle Unlimited titles from their bestseller list:

Are they able to sort read vs paid titles found on Oyster and Scribd?

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Not that many folks will care, but Digital Book World is going to exclude all Kindle Unlimited titles from their bestseller list:

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2014...t-seller-list/

And,
This, from the website that last week felt the need to proclaim to the world that they aren't biased against indie titles.

It's a strange world and getting stranger by the minute.

There seems to be a bit of a bias there towards wanting to believe that people are willing to pay up for books? Maybe I'm just reading that in there.

For the most part all of these various groups that aren't against indies and who don't track them--don't seem to be really hurting them either. They just keep right on selling.

Thanks for linking to the article. Always interesting. And weird.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks

For the most part all of these various groups that aren't against indies and who don't track them--don't seem to be really hurting them either. They just keep right on selling.

...in ever increasing numbers.

Pretending something isn't happening doesn't stop it from happening. Which brought this to mind:

[jersysman]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Are they able to sort read vs paid titles found on Oyster and Scribd?

I doubt whether or not they really care TM.

[Joykins]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Are they able to sort read vs paid titles found on Oyster and Scribd?

I doubt they're collecting sales figures through them at all...they aren't sales.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by jersysman

I doubt whether or not they really care TM.

Originally Posted by Joykins

I doubt they're collecting sales figures through them at all...they aren't sales.

Thanks; I thought they also sold books for those who wanted their own copies.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Thanks; I thought they also sold books for those who wanted their own copies.

SCRIBD does as far as I know.

And a subscription should probably count as a paid sale. The author makes money and so does the publisher. And in general, the reader is paying something. The amount paid might be in question but the publishers and authors negotiate WHAT they will be paid upfront. In other words, I get paid full price for the novel just like I would a purchase. Whether the reader ends up paying more or less than that depends on how many books she reads.

Don't get me wrong. I don't care if they count them as sales or not, but the reader is paying and the writer is earning, so the way I personally define that, it's a sale.