The indie author world was aflutter with talk June 15 when Amazon announced it was changing the way it paid authors who joined the Kindle Direct Publishing Select Program. The changes (which involve compensating authors based on the number of pages a reader completes) left some saying they wanted out of the program. Continue reading “How to Opt Out of KDP Select in Light of New Payout Rules”
Tag: Amazon Kindle Select Program
Kindle Unlimited’s New Wrinkle: Pay by Pages Read
Indie-author-land has been agog this week over Amazon’s latest changes to its payment system for borrowed books. In case you’ve been living under a rock (or don’t have any books in KDP Select), here’s what’s going down.
In the past, Amazon has paid authors on books borrowed from either of its lending programs, Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, only when a reader reached a certain percentage of the book. The amount the author was paid varied from month to month, depending on the size of the global fund that Amazon designated for these payouts. In other words, you wouldn’t know what you were earning on your borrows in June until mid-July, when the Zon announced the per-book royalty it would pay authors for qualifying borrows. Continue reading “Kindle Unlimited’s New Wrinkle: Pay by Pages Read”
To Select or Not to Select?
Back in the good old days, before Amazon started tweaking their sales algorithms, an indie author would have been crazy not to enroll a book in KDP Select. You could put your book free for a few days, give away thousands of copies, and get a lovely bounce in paid sales when the promotion was over. Some indies made their careers from that bounce.
Of course, even in the heyday of Select, curmudgeons muttered darkly about Amazon being an evil corporation that would turn on indies when we least expected it, and so we shouldn’t be putting all our eggs in one basket, and so on. And some authors had books that sold pretty well at B&N and Kobo (although perhaps not as well as on Amazon). For these folks, Select might have been a temptation, but not enough of one to entice them into publishing with Amazon exclusively. Continue reading “To Select or Not to Select?”
Hey, you with the Kindle…lookin’ for a date?
Last week I wrote about KDP Select and how I was going to whore my first novel, ‘Joe Café’ out to the masses. Well, I thought I’d give y’all a bit of an update. Because I was shocked at the results. I used two of my five days of promotion (when it is free for everyone not just ‘Prime’ members – and I think Amazon may pimp it a little bit). During those two days it was downloaded 6,500ish times in the US. Almost two hundred times in the UK. Twelve times in Denmark (Germany, sorry – McNally!). And once in France. It also rose in the rankings, to number 13 in Literary Fiction at one point. I want to say it hit #3, but I don’t really remember. It was a hectic two days. Would I do it again? Oh yeah.
Continue reading “Hey, you with the Kindle…lookin’ for a date?”