Furry Writers' Guild Forum

Any viable alternative to self-pub on Amazon, or way to fight Amazon changes?

Publishing and Marketing
#1

The more I hear about Amazon’s changing policies towards publishing ebooks with them, the more I want to avoid them.

For those that don’t know, Amazon handles royalties for ebooks one of two ways. Either you take 70% of the purchase price, and you give Amazon power to say, sign you up to Kindle Unlimited and other things, or you accept 30% royalties and that’s that.

Kindle Unlimited is where anyone can read as many ebooks as they want for $10 a month. If you, the author, agreed to get 70% royalties, you would receive $1.38 for a KU user to grab your book. Results has been incredibly mixed and lukewarm. Also it’s a harsh wash for authors who are going for the 30% to opt out of such things as KU.

I emphasize were; this month Amazon is going to start paying KU authors for pages read rather than a full purchased download. I don’t know about you, but I don’t read cover to cover quickly. I have various books I’ve downloaded that I’ve not finished, not because they were bad, but because I set them down and just haven’t went back. In those cases, those authors would be getting a fraction of pay.

Their rating system is now getting an overhaul too - now ratings won’t be based on all reviews, but only those that receive the “most helpful” votes and the most recent reviews. I don’t know the effect that a rating has on whether an item gets recommended, but still, boy do I not like that (and most likely, it will also come to Goodreads, as Amazon owns Goodreads too).

This is all in addition to Amazon’s past actions with publishers, with content removal (which was done inconsistently and with little explanation), even removal from individuals’ kindles and downloaded sections.

The point I’m driving at here is that Amazon is increasingly becoming unattractive to me as a self-pub venue. None of this looks like fair business practices or in good faith with authors. It comes off to me as hostile and exploitative. However, Amazon is the 800 pound Gorilla in the room - to not go that route is to cut out an enormous section of the market, and they know it.

Is there any alternative that’s viable to going with Amazon? And if not, if Amazon is strangling self-pub, is there anything that can be done?

Also there are self-pub authors among us who have made Amazon work (Maggie and Banner, that I know of). So their opinions would be useful.

#2

Amazon has made me about $25k. It’s made my publishers a bit more. In the same period of time. I’ve made at most a few hundred dollars at other web-based marketing sites. Indeed, I’ve earned more via direct sales at cons than at Smashwords, Apple, B&N, etc. combined. The amounts are so small I don’t even track them.

As near as I can tell, the changes cited above are meant to do two things. Kindle Unlimited is a way to make life better for readers, and I think it does-- at the clear expense of authors and other competitive bookselling sites. Everything else is meant to help Amazon turn a better profit, something at which they’re only marginally skilled at best.

Sadly, there will be no viable alternative to Amazon until the readers revolt, and as an avid Amazon reader (but not Kindle Unlimited subscriber-- I am an anti-monopolist and have my ethical limits) I can’t see this happening anytime soon. When a revolt comes it’ll take a Stephen King or John Grisham to lead it and inflict actual Board-of-Directors level pain. Amazon could care less what we do-- we don’t have enough readers even to cover the ante for the kind of high-stakes poker game that I agree must eventually come.

In short, when King or Grisham or someone on that level takes a stand I probably will too. But until then, trying to fight back or seek marketing alternatives that simply don’t yet exist (at least for me) is just another way to commit financial suicide. I’ll eagerly read the rest of this thread to see if there are any good suggestions made, but barring new ideas I can see no options at all. No one ever promised any of us we could actually feed ourselves at this game.

#3

As far as “viable” alternatives, it depends on how you define viable, I guess. If you mean able to compete equally with Amazon, no. If you mean getting your works to readers in Kindle format (as well as all other major formats), that would be Smashwords. Draft2Digital is another, though I don’t think they can do Kindle format for ebooks. (The biggest difference between Smashwords and D2D from the readers’ standpoint is that Smashwords has its own storefront as well as distributing your work to iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc., while Draft2Digital just distributes to the other retailers and doesn’t sell ebooks from its website.)

Historically, I’ve had better sales on Smashwords overall than Amazon, for whatever reason, and I feel it’s important to have ebooks available in as many formats as possible, so I’ve never been interested in participating in the Amazon features that require you to do Kindle Select and go exclusive to Amazon. On the other hand, avoiding Amazon entirely cuts out way too many potential readers. (For one thing, I have a Kindle myself and completely understand why Kindle readers would prefer to buy on Amazon, because it’s far easier to download automatically than having to sideload from Smashwords or email the file to myself. I also can’t figure out why Smashwords doesn’t have an official app yet – not on Android, anyway; don’t know about Apple.)

#4

A lot of what you stated isn’t true. I don’t know where you get your information from, but I would suggest you get it straight from Amazon, and not from the people who were ripping Amazon off for the last year, and now are all pissy and upset because Amazon got tired of what they were doing and got tired of being ripped off.

For 2.99 to 9.99 you get 70 percent royalty in most Amazon markets. For some Amazon markets (India for example) you have to be in the KU program to get 70 percent in those markets. In the major markets, you get 70 percent, regardless of if you are in KU or not.

KU switched over to # of pages read, and paying by # of pages read because people were turning 200 page books into 20 ten page books, and then as long as you read one page of it, they got 1.35! (originally you got 2.40, but with the amount of people ripping off the system, Amazon had to cut payments). So yeah, my 200 page book made me 1.35 in KU, while those scammers made over 20 bucks for the same amount of work. And don’t even get me started on the scamplets! One page of content, ten of copy and pasted internet crap!

So yeah: Boo friggin’ hoo. They were scammers and everyone knew that the gravy train would not last forever. They were all gaming the system, and they knew it, none of these people have any right to complain. With the new system I’ll make more, because I write novels. So I’m pretty darn happy.

Last of all, Amazon is the BEST option out there, especially for new writers. There is not a better publisher on the face of the earth, and that includes most of the big six in NYC, who now pay 5K for a book (if you’re lucky) and unless you sell hundreds of thousands of copies, or you’re one of their ‘darlings’ don’t expect to see another dime.

So, don’t go ragging on amazon until you know the truth about what’s going on. They may not be perfect, but there is no one better, and they pay real money.

#5

I’ll chime in because I am (currently ::slight_smile: ) enjoying some success with e-books, mostly Amazon.

I’m unaware of this . . . I believe you can still get 70% royalty on your e-books if you’re not enrolled in Kindle Select–unless this is about to change, and I haven’t been paying attention. You have to check a box that enrolls your books in KU or Select; Amazon doesn’t do it for you or force you to. I have 70% across the board (except in countries where I can’t, for whatever magical reason) and none of my books are currently in Select. People may say that KU helps with discover-ability, but I find that people value more what they pay for, and rather than be in a stack of free books a reader will get around to Someday, I prefer people shell out hard-earned money and then feel they should read them because of it. Psychology and all…

As for competition . . . not really. I do recommend that you have a strong author website and have all your traffic and links center around that. When linking books, link to your website, where they can click on the vendor of their choice. Let your books go wide, use all distribution channels, either via Smashwords, Draft2Digital, or by directly dealing with all the sites <-- that is a better way to deal with Kobo, at least, because if you have an account and deal with them directly, you can take part in promotions.

The other options are harder: Get into bookstores. For that, you want to sit down, and start calling independent bookstores. If you want the big boy (Barnes & Noble) you MUST be listed in Baker & Taylor, or the Ingram catalog, and your books MUST be listed as “returnable.” There are ways to do that and I’ll let you Google it, because I still haven’t got my lazy bum around to doing so. Even then, you will probably have to compile a list and call Barnes & Noble and have a script, “I’m a local author in such&such City, would you consider carrying my book? I’d be happy to do an event-blahblah…etc.” The nearest B&N to me would’ve been happy to do an event and carry my books but they are not listed as “returnable” (Thanks, Createspace :P) for that I recommend using Lightningsource, or somehow getting listed in the catalogs on your own. (I don’t know how to do that yet…still learning! I’m sure it involves putting together a book packet complete with press kit and marketing materials).

I don’t know if this helps. At the end of the day, selling books is hard, and nobody’s making it any easier. Write a really good book, then put together a strategy to get it out. Nothing, and nothing, will ever take the place of marketing and good word-of-mouth, no matter what Amazon is doing.

#6

Woops, didn’t realize I was repeating Banner’s info – sorry about that! ;D

#7

Hrm, sounds like a whole lot of blanket statements from both sides of the spectrum. Not all who complained about Amazon were scammers, for one (from what I’ve read elsewhere), and not all who complain are honest folks who are just concerned with making honest money.

Either way, I’d be more curious about SmashWords. I recently got a book of PT’s from there that was on an amazing sale, so it’s in the line-up for things after I finish the series I’m on. It sounds like that might be the best bet, what with all the various markets it hits.

#8

I use both Amazon and Smashwords for selling e-books – and I make approximately the same amount from each of them. I don’t plan on ever using any option that locks me into selling e-books through only one vendor.

#9

I linked to a news report by The Telegraph. I linked to Author Earnings, a site about helping authors get the best pay for their books, and a reddit post directly linking to cnt.com and PCMag before summarizing the articles. Which one of those is scammers, exactly?

As for where I got the author royalty pay, I got that directly from Amazon, when I was looking into publishing through Amazon a few months ago. So I don’t know where you get off on telling me I’m getting information from the wrong sources.

And so what some people were abusing the system. Authors shouldn’t be paid based on the number of pages read. That’s like a bakery only being paid 66% of a cake because the customer only ate 2/3rds before the cake went stale.

#10

Or maybe it’s like a candy shop selling salt-water-taffy by the pound.

Just because a model isn’t what we’re used to doesn’t necessarily mean it’s inherently wrong.

#11

Look at your bookshelf. How many books have you bought and not read yet? Now imagine those authors would only get paid if you finished that book. How is that even remotely fair?

Even your example, the taffy is bought and paid for at a certain amount, not under the condition that it is all consumed. The equivalent example would be if a person purchased the first 50 pages of a book, as opposed to the whole book.

#12

Or selling songs by the album-full.

For what it’s worth, the part about Kindle Unlimited that really bothers me is that the work can’t be made available elsewhere. I consider that monopolistic and anti-competitive to a disgusting degree. I’m a natural for Kindle Unlimited, from a purely business point of view-- Amazon already generates nearly all my income and practically all my readers are already there. So I can appreciate why good, honest authors jump on what looks to them like a great deal. But… I can’t support a policy that ultimately, I think, will result in an effective monopoly on the epic scale even though on the surface it’s not all that different from an author selling his book through only one publisher in the paper-book days. In the long run and based on the information I have to date, I suspect Kindle Unlimited is going to be as bad for everyone involved as Rockefeller’s original Standard Oil. Even though I suspect it might actually double or even triple my income, and on the reader end of things would certainly make my life richer, so far I’ve therefore resisted joining for ethical reasons.

#13

Kindle Unlimited is in a sense a rental program, so arguments about royalties are beside the point–you aren’t being paid royalties in the new model, but you weren’t being paid royalties under the old one, either.

According to Chris McMullen, in May 2015 (under the old system) Amazon divided $10.8M among all the “borrows” in the KU program, which led to a payment of $1.35 per borrow. Again, the retail price of the book is irrelevant. Someone selling a $0.99 book would get more from the borrow than they did from an actual sale, but someone selling a $2.99 book still only got $1.35 (about 45%). Someone selling a (gasp) $5.99 book? Still $1.35 (about 23%). Under the new system, instead of counting up books borrowed, Amazon is counting up words read and doing essentially the same division.

So is that good or bad?

The old system unquestionably rewarded shorter and cheaper books; the new system doesn’t, but there are two open questions: whether it effectively punishes shorter books, and whether most authors will see lower (or higher) payouts. I don’t think we’re going to get clear answers to either of those until the system’s been running for a few months. My suspicion is that most people whose work tends to the novella-and-under length are going to see less revenue under the new model, simply because most people who write novellas cannot produce four 25,000-word works in the same length of time it takes a novelist to write one 100,000-word work. Short story and novella writers are simply going to have less out there.

Having said that, a few things to note: First, in traditional publishing, short story and novella writers tend to make less than novelists, too. (In fact, it’s only novelists who are traditionally immune from being paid by the word!) One can make a good case that the new model isn’t unfair to shorter-length writers but that the old model was unfair to people who were good at cranking out doorstops.

Second, under both models they’re dividing a big pot of money monthly, and what’s changing isn’t the total value of the pot, but rather how the pot is divided. If Amazon saves any money, it’ll only be if there are fewer books total downloaded and thus (slightly) lower bandwidth and storage costs for them. That would also slightly increase the per-page payout.

Third, it’s not fair to say that everyone, or probably even most, people complaining are “scammers.” Without getting too blunt, the quality of a novel doesn’t have any direct correlation to its word count. While there were probably “scammers” in the original KU program trying to get people to borrow junk books and get money for them, there are scammers in non-rental ebook stores and there will be scammers in the new KU program.

Last, this is orthogonal to the question of whether Amazon is truly the self-published author’s best friend. I don’t want to get too far down this hole, at least in this thread, but Rabbit noted that Amazon’s profits are marginal. They are. Yet Amazon is still an investment darling. Anyone who makes the majority of their sales–on anything–through Amazon should probably make an effort to understand why. (Rabbit’s later comparison to Standard Oil is on the nose.)

#14

This.

#15

I agree that I think authors should be able to enroll their books in Kindle Unlimited without having to be exclusive. I’m hoping Amazon will eventually take this step–maybe, with enough author pressure, they will.

As for being paid per page and whether it’s fair or not, remember that it’s still optional. You don’t have to enroll in Kindle Select and you can still charge whatever you want for your books. Being paid per page only applies to KU downloads, not regular book sales. Getting frustrated with Amazon over those rules seems like a waste of energy since you don’t have to enroll your books in any of their programs. As Ryf said, you don’t ever have to be exclusive to anyone. Smashwords is a viable option. Apple has 15% of the market. People still buy paper books–so if you don’t like Amazon, print through Lightningsource (I hear that indie bookstores like them better anyway).

As for whether an author “needs” Kindle Unlimited: I did not see a significant change in sales when I enrolled, and subsequently withdrew, all of my books from Select & KU. Your rankings change, but readers-who-are-not-writers don’t actually look at rankings. They look at cover, blurb, and reviews, so I don’t really care about my book ranking. It’s an irrelevant number based on some ever-changing Amazon algorithm that tells me how well my book is doing compared to Harry Potter and every other book on Amazon. What I care about is selling a specific number of books per month. With KU, and without KU, that number has so far remained the same.

Also, I’m of the strong opinion that readers who subscribe to unlimited downloads per month are a completely different market than people who buy books and read them at their leisure. Someone who reads voraciously is not likely to sign up for a download subscription and not take advantage of it. Someone who buys a book a month is not likely to sign up for a subscription service.

My sister is a subscriber to KU but she buys books by authors she likes, for the specific purpose of supporting the author. The world of writing and publishing is changing so rapidly that booksellers, authors, and publishers are doing all we can to keep up and make sure everyone is getting the best of the publishing world–publishers making money, authors making money, readers getting great books for great prices. I wouldn’t say that one thing is more important than the other prepares to duck :wink:

My point is that self publishing is still a good and viable option no matter what way you go, and we still have the freedom to sell our books however we like. If you write it (and market the heck of it) they will come.

Notes from the eternal optimist ::slight_smile:

#16

I would not be comfortable purchasing an e-reader or an e-book if it’s going to track of how many and which pages I’ve read from the books I’ve purchased and report that information back to the seller or any other online entity. It’s okay if the information is for my personal use as the consumer, but at the very least, I would insist on having the ability to disable any third party reporting. If KU operates in a manner that requires subscribers to allow their reading behavior to be tracked, I would as a matter of principle be reluctant to have my works made available under such an arrangement.

#17

If it makes you feel better, it doesn’t show anything about individual users at all. Just a total of pages read for a particular book, on the whole, by day. Nothing is broken down into individual devices or users that I’ve seen.

#18

And I can guarantee you Amazon has already been tracking what you read, how much you read, and how fast you read it so they know how to advertise to you. But I don’t think they’ll show that information to publishers/authors except in bulk statistics.

#19

It’s plenty obvious to me that they track my browsing and purchasing history and market to me based on those factors. If they wanted to market to me based on what I’ve purchased on my Kindle (if I had one) I’d be okay with that too.

I don’t currently own a Kindle, and if I were to ever buy one, I’d want to make certain I can keep backup copies of anything I download and possibly read it on other devices that have the appropriate e-Reader software installed. I would also want to make certain that I’m the only one who can remove content from my Kindle.

A while back I was writing a book review of a story that had recently been released in a Kindle edition. I e-mailed the author to let him know I was writing the review and ask a couple of questions, and along with his responses he sent me a copy of the Kindle edition of the book. I had nothing to read it on so I downloaded the Kindle software for my Windows computer. When I attempted to add it to my library, it deleted it. After exploring the settings, help files, and getting the same result every time, the only thing I could figure was that it was cross-checking my library against my buying history and deleting anything it couldn’t account for. Sorry Kindle, but that sort of behavior is a deal-breaker for me. (I found a program that enabled me to convert the e-book in question to another format I was able to load into Calibre).

#20

Not to go too off topic but it seems very odd that it did that o.O My Kickstarter backers and reviewers have never had things removed from their Kindles knock on wood just because they didn’t buy it on Amazon. I’m thinking it was a quirky file thing… I’ve always been able to send people ebooks (contest winners etc) and if they’ve been removed, no one told me… Hm.