Tag: Author earnings

Is Kindle Unlimited Gutting Author Earnings?

KDP Select logoThe indie-author intarwebz have been buzzing this week with the news that Joe Konrath is pulling all of his books out of KDP Select. Konrath mentioned it almost offhandedly in a comment on his own blog post fisking an open letter from MacMillan CEO John Sargent.

I won’t quote Konrath here, because Amazon has so many programs that it’s easy to mix up the acronyms, and I think Konrath himself was writing quickly and not being as careful as he could have been. The gist of it, though, is that Konrath’s titles will all be out of Select when their current enrollment period ends next month. This comes in the wake of complaints by author H.M. Ward and others that Kindle Unlimited borrows are gutting their sales, to the point where it’s affecting their livelihood. Continue reading “Is Kindle Unlimited Gutting Author Earnings?”

Indie News Beat: The Shifting Stigma

Indie News BeatUnless you were living under a rock last month, you’ll have heard about Hugh Howey’s incendiary new website in which he and an anonymous friend collate a mass of book sales data to show that self-published titles are taking more and more of the spoils. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth from nearly everyone (it seemed), given that so much data analysed in such depth was perhaps bound to be open to selective interpretations.

Over on Publishers Weekly, Smashwords founder Mark Coker took a more sober approach, pointing out that: “What matters is the directional trend, and the strong social, cultural and economic forces that will propel the trend forward in a direction unfavorable to publishers.” In an excellent article which is a must-read for all Independent Authors, Coker goes on to describe how the perception of stigma is shifting. From just a few years ago, when self-publishing had “failure” written all over it, we’re now moving to a point where traditional publishing is getting its share of negativity: the lousy royalties on e-books and their own vanity imprints ready to fleece the unsuspecting Indie, which Coker politely calls “misguided”. The more heated the debate gets, the more useful it is to listen to a cooler head. Continue reading “Indie News Beat: The Shifting Stigma”