I hadn’t heard of that either. Maybe a difference between the Kindle app and having a physical Kindle?
Yeah, I’ve never had any issues side-loading books onto my Kindle. Calibre will let you back up any Kindle books, too (to be fair, so will just mounting the Kindle as a USB disk and copying them to a folder on your computer). I’ve never used Kindle for Windows, but I’ve never seen that behavior on either of the actual Kindle devices I’ve owned nor the iOS app; there’s even a desktop app from Amazon explicitly designed to send any document you drop on it to the Kindle, converting it to a Kindle-readable format if necessary.
[quote=“Rechan, post:9, topic:1330”]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.[/quote]
All of them then, apparently. Because what they are reporting isn’t true.
And I suggest you go back and take a second look, because you obviously mis-read something.
I have sold on all of the ebook sellers in the world today. I currently sell only on Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, Apple, and Kobo. I sell a large number of books, it’s in the five figures for numbers of copies sold each year now. This is what I do for a living.
There is a lot of FUD out there about Amazon right now, and the people writing it are doing so because they hate Amazon, and they are playing fast and loose with the truth. Yes I saw the telegraph article, the PC mag article, and the reddit stuff.
Most of what they wrote is not true.
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.[/quote]
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.[/quote]
sigh
You appear to mis-understand.
The page read payment plan is for the books that are BORROWED via KU. NOT for the books that are sold in the normal store.
In the KU plan, you get to borrow as many books as you want, for free.
Because there has been a lot of fraud and abuse in that system, Amazon has always had a policy that they only paid the author for books that were actually read in the KU program. It used to be that the reader had to read ten percent to trigger an author payment. That however lead to fraud and abuse that cost Amazon tens of millions of dollars. So now Amazon is paying authors based on the numbers of pages read, for those books borrowed via the KU program only.
This has nothing to do with sales. This has nothing to do with normal book purchases.
It has to do only with books that are borrowed in the KU program. Books which authors voluntarily put in the program.
If you are a KU subscriber, where you pay a flat monthly fee, and can then read all the books in the KU program that you wish to read, then yes, Amazon will track how much you have read. You agree to that when you sign up for their lending library program.
If you do not sign up for that program, I have no idea if they track how much you have read, and I suspect that they don’t, because unless you’re using the synch feature, I think it would be a waste of their resources.
I have been a published author on Amazon since early 2011. I have done a lot of business with them, and have been rather pleased with them overall.
I should be surprised at the amount of things in this thread about Amazon where people don’t know how things actually work, but then most of you don’t do business with them, and I suspect few of you have read the fine print on the contracts.
Yes there are things about Amazon I wish were different, it would be nice if you didn’t have to go exclusive to be in the kindle unlimited program, but no one forces anyone to be there, and for my main byline, I did the research, I crunched the numbers, and it turned out to be profitable for me to do it.
That may not be the case for you however, it depends on what genre you write in, and where your chief reading demographic shops.
I also am published under two separate pen names that write in an entirely different genre than what I write under my own name. Neither one of them is exclusive to Amazon, and for one of them the sales on B&N far outstrips the sales on Amazon. That is because the demographic for people who own the Nook, is very different from the people who own Kindles.
Every online book seller has advantages and disadvantages to it, but Amazon is the major market. If you want to be successful, you will probably have to do business with them, but because they are the major market, there are many people who hate them, and who lie about them. Not unlike say, Walmart. As an author and a professional, it is dependent on YOU to go read the contracts, to go read the agreements, and to understand how it works. Reading what other people have said is just hearsay.
If you are going to work in this business, then you have to do your own groundwork, or other people will mislead you and probably take advantage of you. Just because you read an article in a newspaper or on a website doesn’t make it true. These places often have an agenda. The information is there, it is freely available. Go and read it yourself, talk to the people who actually work with the companies involved. Don’t make professional decisions based on hearsay. Or you will probably regret it.
So to sum up, your argument is that multiple news agencies are in on a conspiracy to take Amazon down and are in league with scammers.
Sounds reasonable to me.
Though, at heart, I may be a bit of a conspiracy theorist.
No.
The places you quoted, which ran those false articles about Amazon, are owned by (wait for it!!!) PUBLISHING COMPANIES!!!
And those companies are what?? That’s right, they are IN COMPETITION with Amazon!!
So you’re going to trust them? You’re going to believe that they’re going to give you a fair and honest opinion when writing about the company that is putting theirs out of business?
You are way too trusting.
[quote=“Ryffnah, post:28, topic:1330”]Sounds reasonable to me.
Though, at heart, I may be a bit of a conspiracy theorist.[/quote]
See my reply above. The companies he quoted are all owned by publishing companies that are in competition with Amazon, or their good friends are. So yes they’re going to lie. The fact that they actually did lie makes that pretty apparent.
But hey, you can either listen to a guy who has already sold over 20K books via Amazon this year, or you can listen to a couple of magazines with an agenda.
Because you know what? I don’t care. Do what you want.
I came here because I wanted to help furry authors, sort of a payback I guess you might say. I’m successful, as I noted above, I’ve been doing okay on the sales front. Now I don’t know if I’m the most successful author on this board, and I don’t really care if I am, or if I’m not.
I just came here to help people to sell more, be more successful, and get their books out there. Why? Because I believe the more books we all get out there, the more readers we create, the better we all do. We are not in competition with each other, we are actually supporting one another, just by writing and publishing. Because the more books are read, the more people will want. It’s like a self full-filling prophecy, we create more demand by satisfying the current demand.
So yes, go do what ever the hell you want to do. Take the word of whoever you want. I don’t really care, I know what works, because I’m doing it. I know how the system works, because I actually USE it.
But if you want my help, please, by all means, drop me a line. I don’t care if you like me or hate me, because like I said before, I’m not in competition with you, so I’m more than happy to help you. I just want everyone to write more and sell more, because I believe that we all profit when we do.
And if I can help you to do that I will.
Did my reply come across as sarcastic? It wasn’t meant that way. I really thought the things you said sounded reasonable.
Banner, I sincerely doubt that anyone here hates you-- certainly I do not. In fact, I’m grateful that you share your hard-earned knowledge and insights. It’s just that this is an emotional topic, and some of us (again not me. Or at least not yet, though I begin to worry) not only have huge problems with Amazon as a business model, but are terribly frustrated at how difficult it is to succeed in this field-- which you clearly have done-- and are therefore pre-inclined to get a bit extra-emotional when discussing anything surrounding it.
Again, I’m pretty sure it’s not personal. Instead, this is merely a topic like religion and politics where people have a lot of emotion invested in their positions going in. For my own part, I can say that my own comments in this discussion weren’t meant to be personal and I hope they weren’t taken that way.
To sum up and make my position as clear as I know how…
…yes, I really do have very real ethical questions about Kindle Unlimited program, though not yet the rest of Amazon, for the reasons earlier cited. But I have no personal problem with you, Banner, or anyone else who is part of it. Indeed, I’m grateful for what you bring to the table here and hope you will continue to contribute.
I’m sorry if I took it the wrong way, and I apologize.
shows up briefly
It depends on your priority. If your priority is ‘I want to sell without going through Amazon,’ then yes, there are alternatives.
If your priority is ‘I want to be read widely,’ or ‘I want to sell a lot of books,’ or ‘I want to make good money,’ then… no, not really.
Personally I have six books on there and I have never had a problem.
I never imagined that something such as selling venue (accurate term at all?) can rank up there with religion and politics X3 Not saying this as a bad thing, just a really cool observation of the differences in different groups.
For the record, Banner, no hate here :3 One of the things I love about this place is that folks can disagree and still value each other’s experiences and wisdom- even keep friendships.