It started out so well...
As you may know, recently I started writing stories and releasing them on Amazon. I'm not the fastest of writers, so I only have had two "books" out since April. The third is a sequel to my second book, not yet published, and it's taken a lot of research to get through it. An agonizingly long time in the Amazon world, all things considered, where you need to churn out stories before your previous book drops out of the Hot New Release list. That list is for 30 days.
Amazon runs this program called Kindle Unlimited, which is sort of like the Netflix of books. You pay a flat fee of $9.99 a month, and you can borrow and keep up to five books on your Kindle or account at a time.
Previously, every time someone borrowed your book and read at least 10%, an author would get paid $1.34 regardless of the length of the book.
Now, Amazon has changed the way they do things, and on July 1 started to only pay by the amount of pages read.
My income went from $1000 in May and June to $100 all of July. Why? Because we found out today that Amazon is only paying a half a cent for each page read. You heard that right, not even a whole penny. Oh, and did I mention the page length Amazon assigns to our books is completely arbitrary? They say it's a "normalized" page count, but friends have already said books of equal word counts get different page numbers.
People who write 500-page novels are happy, because they will earn more when people read their books. The rest of us? Not so much.
I was so excited and doing really well, and then in three months everything has crashed and burned. My fellow authors on a writers' forum I belong to say they'll just start writing novels instead of short stories. They can churn out thousands of words per day. Can you imagine writing the equivalent of a double Big Bang every single month? Because that's what it's going to take to keep heads above water.
Ugh, I'm so depressed.
Amazon runs this program called Kindle Unlimited, which is sort of like the Netflix of books. You pay a flat fee of $9.99 a month, and you can borrow and keep up to five books on your Kindle or account at a time.
Previously, every time someone borrowed your book and read at least 10%, an author would get paid $1.34 regardless of the length of the book.
Now, Amazon has changed the way they do things, and on July 1 started to only pay by the amount of pages read.
My income went from $1000 in May and June to $100 all of July. Why? Because we found out today that Amazon is only paying a half a cent for each page read. You heard that right, not even a whole penny. Oh, and did I mention the page length Amazon assigns to our books is completely arbitrary? They say it's a "normalized" page count, but friends have already said books of equal word counts get different page numbers.
People who write 500-page novels are happy, because they will earn more when people read their books. The rest of us? Not so much.
I was so excited and doing really well, and then in three months everything has crashed and burned. My fellow authors on a writers' forum I belong to say they'll just start writing novels instead of short stories. They can churn out thousands of words per day. Can you imagine writing the equivalent of a double Big Bang every single month? Because that's what it's going to take to keep heads above water.
Ugh, I'm so depressed.