15 years old scam Amazon's KU for $60,000+ paycheck

[mitford13]

Just FYI, your math is off by a large factor. If Konrath's page totals are 2320, multiply by the recently announced February payout of .0048, he gets approx. $11.14 if someone reads through all his works.
(Also, we don't know what his actual KENPC page numbers are which are not the same as page numbers listed on the product page--from what I've seen, KENPCs skew higher.)

In general though, the process you've laid out is the same, but it's not really the issue. The issue is Amazon contracted with authors saying they would pay per pages read, and it's become clear that they don't have a trustworthy system in place to calculate true reads. They left huge loopholes in the system, vulnerable to manipulation by scammers.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by mitford13

Just FYI, your math is off by a large factor. If Konrath's page totals are 2320, multiply by the recently announced February payout of .0048, he gets approx. $11.14 if someone reads through all his works.
(Also, we don't know what his actual KENPC page numbers are which are not the same as page numbers listed on the product page--from what I've seen, KENPCs skew higher.)

In general though, the process you've laid out is the same, but it's not really the issue. The issue is Amazon contracted with authors saying they would pay per pages read, and it's become clear that they don't have a trustworthy system in place to calculate true reads. They left huge loopholes in the system, vulnerable to manipulation by scammers.

I did .0045 for my math.

The issue is "no matter what Amazon does" the scammers will find a way to manipulate it.
There is no way to make a scam proof system.

[mitford13]

Okay...at .0045 he'd make $10.40, not the $104 you listed.

I agree things will probably never be scam-proof, but obviously Amazon realizes they have a serious trust issue with their authors. They virtually never publicly address these issues like they just did on KDP.
And I'm sure they'll take steps, just like they did in switching from KU 1.0 to 2.0.
Some of these scammers actually earned All-Star bonuses--if KDP doesn't fix that, they will eventually lose some of their top authors from Select, who are seeing serious number drops.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by mitford13

Okay...at .0045 he'd make $10.40, not the $104 you listed.

I agree things will probably never be scam-proof, but obviously Amazon realizes they have a serious trust issue with their authors. They virtually never publicly address these issues like they just did on KDP.
And I'm sure they'll take steps, just like they did in switching from KU 1.0 to 2.0.
Some of these scammers actually earned All-Star bonuses--if KDP doesn't fix that, they will eventually lose some of their top authors from Select, who are seeing serious number drops.

You are so right. I accidentally double multiplied the 10.
Thanks a million for the correction.

Hey on the serious drops, is that due to scammers, not unlimited readers (borrowers) or did their books get worse, or have they not put out anything new in a while?
Another thought is how much of these all-star books are just regurgitated from their previous books.

I am pretty sure I know one all-star that is losing readers and is vocal about it.

I love Joe, but the thing is that I have read all of the older Jack Daniels series. So he kind of lost at least one reader.

[mitford13]

I don't think it's that the 'real' authors are losing page reads so much, but that the mega-scammers are manipulating their read counts into millions of pages per day (but nobody's actually reading, just clicking through), which pushes the real reads further down the scale for bonus eligibility. I saw Amanda Lee mention she estimated losing about $40,000 in Dec/Jan. (Over in your favorite forum. ) David Gaughran also posted an update that he's had a long talk with someone at Amazon and they're supposedly seriously looking into the problem reports.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by mitford13

I don't think it's that the 'real' authors are losing page reads so much, but that the mega-scammers are manipulating their read counts into millions of pages per day (but nobody's actually reading, just clicking through), which pushes the real reads further down the scale for bonus eligibility. I saw Amanda Lee mention she estimated losing about $40,000 in Dec/Jan. (Over in your favorite forum. ) David Gaughran also posted an update that he's had a long talk with someone at Amazon and they're supposedly seriously looking into the problem reports.

Oh no. That explains why she is running a freebie on her second book.
I knew David was talking to Amazon.
Amanda was not the all-star I was thinking about.
I am guessing you mean the forum I refuse to name publicly.