***URGENT ATTENTION NEEDED*** Amazon changing the money rates for authors pay on Kindle Unlimited
#releasetherate
Help Authors Spread the Word – PLEASE SHARE!
Many of you know that I’ve been a HUGE proponent of the Kindle Unlimited program. It’s allowed me to gain a broader readership and new fans who would have never discovered me without being able to borrow my books and take a chance on them through KU.
That said, you may not be aware that Amazon made massive, sweeping changes to the KU program starting today. Beginning today, they will only be paying based on pages read, rather than books borrowed.
This change has left authors in the dark regarding royalties since Amazon isn’t telling us how many readers are borrowing our books or how much we’ll earn for each page read.
How can authors make good business decisions without knowing how much money they are earning? The short answer is, we can’t. And that makes many of us question whether we should remain part of the Kindle Unlimited program at all.
That’s why I’ve joined #releasetherate, an author-led initiative with a simple goal: getting Amazon to release more information to authors. We’re not asking for much. We’re asking for two small pieces of data that Amazon can easily produce that will help self-published authors make informed business decisions.
1.) Number of units borrowed per book — Amazon has this data; they have been providing it to us since the Select program began. Why withhold that number now? The only reason is to confuse authors. Give us the total number of customers who have clicked the “Read for Free” button on our book’s sales page. Or, at the very least, give us the total number of customers who have read a minimum of one page of our book.
2.) #releasetherate – Authors are aware that Amazon has a ballpark rate-per-page-read that they are expecting to pay for Select and KU pages read in July 2015. We hope it’s not the .0057 cents per page based on the June 2015 Select Fund and pages read, a rate that would decimate the income of many authors and make it impossible for us to remain part of the Kindle Unlimited program.
If you’re an author or reader who feels that Amazon should #releasetherate, please help us spread the word by sharing this post.
And if you’re as angry and frustrated about the lack of information being provided to authors, as I am, please let Amazon know by sending an email to jeff@amazon.com and letting him know that withholding basic business information from authors is making many of your favorite authors wonder if Kindle Unlimited is really the right program for them after all.
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Posted on July 1, 2015, in Important, Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. 10 Comments.
the Piggy has Flown Books 
Reblogged this on An Enthusiastic Indie Reader's Blog and commented:
I’m hearing from a lot of Indie Authors that make their living off of Amazon.com and Kindle Unlimited that Amazon is making changes without providing them the information they need to make decisions. What they have been told really concerns them.
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Great post. I reblogged to help share the word.
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Thanks so much, Hun!
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I don’t agree with the unlimited thing! Not that it looked into it. I would rather buy a book and pay the author for their services than just “rent” it. Yes I’ve used a public library before but if I liked the book I would go out and buy it!!
I personally don’t want to use Amazon to get my stuff out there… Cutting my nose off to spite my face, I know. Whatever happened to the monopolies commission? Or is online selling out of thier grasp?
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I completely agree with you. I do love their products and am a crazy lady when I do not have my kindle at my side. But AMAZON’s business practices within the last two months is by far the most ridiculous, almost enough to look into other e-books. When they first launched KU, I thought it was a joke. Why would you want to pay $10/mn to rent books? I can do that via my local library’s site. And they are free. There is no such thing as truly free within the KU. And this really does affect the reader and especially the author! I love all authors, and am a ‘friend’ with several.
On a Side note, I just recently read that one of their new practices was taking customer reviews and looking on social media is that reader is ‘personal’ friends with the author. If so, they remove those reviews written by the ‘supposed’ friend of the author. Which is the most ridiculous thing I have heard of! So make sure your friends lists are closed to everyone but you. (‘Only Me’ is the term FB uses.)
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Reblogged this on The Tales of Alhanassa and commented:
Greedy Amazon!
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Great post. Even more reasons for me to not do book business with Amazon. For as much as I love their Mechanical Turk and buying other products through their site, I just will not buy books from Amazon other than as an absolute last resort. I hate the way they treat (cough, cough, abuse, cough) their authors. It is sad, they have such a strong hold on the market that writers feel they HAVE to use them to get their name out to the masses The only way this will slow down is if enough readers stop spending money there.
The one part of this that makes no sense to me is how they can possibly know how many pages someone has read. How is that even calculated? My kindle app can’t even tell me that. It only has location numbers. Besides that, I skip back and forth a lot of times to cou t howmany actual pages I have left in a chapter. Will those page flicks count as pages read? Does KU prevent you from skipping ahead oe from reading a book twice? Not giving such basic information to authors makes me wonder if that is because they don’t actually know how they are going to manage this nightmare.
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I agree with you! The one creepy factor I found when I switched between my different kindles, kindle app on my phone or computer, it will ask me if I want “to go to the last spot read?” The only time I was okay with this, is in the unfortunate event that I forgot my kindle at work, and am not home to use the backup. So then in the middle of reading a book I do not have to stop. But it is weird how they track it, I too see the number or the percentage given, my 2nd generation kindle touch used to tell me the page numbers, but my Fire does not. Completely annoying, especially if I am reading a .MOBI file on my kindle and it cannot take me to the last location I was at reading. I have started to improvise with use of the bookmark function.
I so want to stop getting my books from Amazon, so that they too, will see that what practice(s) changes they are making are going to hurt them in the end too. Readers will leave. Authors will stop publishing with them. Profit will be lost to both Amazon and the Author. And one of the other E-Publisher’s will them reap all the benefit of their idiocy!
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I know you can turn whispersync off. I wonder if that affects their pages read stuff at Amazon.com?
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I saw some authors talking about the page count. It is not the normal page count you see when you buy, they have a special algorithm somehow based on words and paragraphs that equalizes things so that different font sizes no affect the number of pages. Each time you flick your screen to read more is not the same thing.
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