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Kindle Unlimited: the scoop threads merged... :)

192K views 1K replies 206 participants last post by  Harmonious 
#1 ·
Looks like Amazon just started (at least I've never seen it before) Kindle Unlimited: $9.99 for unlimited access to Prime books?

Anyone know how we are going to get paid for these books? Is it just like another borrow? I can't imagine it would be, or they'd loose money on the deal?

(My Select title seem to be auto-enrolled)

UPDATE: The original link has been removed, so here's a cached copy (thanks to Julie):
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6jL66Zad7zIJ:www.amazon.com/gp/kindle/ku/sign-up/ui/rw/about+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

UPDATE 2: Here's a link to the KindleUnlimited Youtube ad (thanks to Karen McQuestion):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnVNbYdo2FU

UPDATE 3: It looks like the service is really live now:
https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-eBooks/b/ref=ARRAY(0xa6e16ea0)?_encoding=UTF8&ie=UTF8&node=9578129011&pfShowFeatures=&ref_=ku_lp_rw_dp_pb&ref_=ku_lp_rw_dp_pb&tag=viglink20273-20
 
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#478 ·
I don't normally feel strongly about new industry developments, but add me to those who are not hugely impressed. If there was no exclusivity requirement I'd have less reservations, but I don't want to have to pull my titles from other stores. And I'm trying to make a living at this. So it's depressing.
 
#479 ·
LisaGloria said:
What the actual pot will be, 30 days hence (when subscriber $ actually begins to accumulate) is anyone's guess.
Granted we haven't seen any evidence one way or the other, but I don't think the number of subscribers directly impacts the monthly pool of money available. I think the money going in to Amazon from subscribers and the money available for Select authors are contained in two separate buckets.
 
#480 ·
Jim Johnson said:
Granted we haven't seen any evidence one way or the other, but I don't think the number of subscribers directly impacts the monthly pool of money available. I think the money going in to Amazon from subscribers and the money available for Select authors are contained in two separate buckets.
OK, so if there is no direct correlation, then Amazon is aiming us toward a particular per-unit price. Since that was always around $2, it may stay that way for a while.

If there is a correlation, they could still be aiming us toward that one price by adjusting the correlation every month... Or we will see lower author payments during the warmup phase that gradually climb as readership inevitably dwindles toward what Scribd sees, which is 2% of its subscribers reading >10 titles a month.
 
#481 ·
maiasepp said:
I don't normally feel strongly about new industry developments, but add me to those who are not hugely impressed. If there was no exclusivity requirement I'd have less reservations, but I don't want to have to pull my titles from other stores. And I'm trying to make a living at this. So it's depressing.
On the bright side it is US only - and not every US customer will sign up immediately to KU. Unlike the ACX debacle earlier this year we'll have time to evaluate what to do next.
 
#482 ·
Jim Johnson said:
Granted we haven't seen any evidence one way or the other, but I don't think the number of subscribers directly impacts the monthly pool of money available. I think the money going in to Amazon from subscribers and the money available for Select authors are contained in two separate buckets.
Yes. And as I said previously, $1 or $2 or even $20 million is nothing to Amazon if their intent is to take Scribd and Oyster's authors away from them.
 
#486 ·
Bluehorseshoe said:
check your keywords and watch the ascent of the kindle unlimited titles eclipse your own, am doing it in real time. the game is over folks.
*fondly pats B&N sales boom* Not for all of us.

Beside,s I'm going to be making something like 20 times what they are for every sale soon enough.

Once again, the prudent and diverse portfolio pays off for the savvy investor.
 
G
#487 ·
Bluehorseshoe said:
check your keywords and watch the ascent of the kindle unlimited titles eclipse your own, am doing it in real time. the game is over folks.
For people who are completely dependent on Amazon for sales, maybe. For the rest of us, it's just another day.

The people who are going to the most impacted by these are people who depend on free + Bookbub to boost sales and drive the majority of their sales through Amazon in specific high-consumption genres. This will most likely impact romance, YA, and NA authors the most, because those readers tend to be the ones who consume lots of books a month. But as has been noted, if you are a writer who publishes in a specialized niche or a genre in which the demographic is not high-consumption, then this won't change anything.
 
#489 ·
Hey guys I am new here and a new author. I had to sign up and stop lurking to talk about this change :)

I have put a lot of thought into this and I have a couple of things that I wanted to share.

1. This seems like a good opportunity for new indie writers. This gives readers a chance to "discover" you without taking a chance. Since they already paid the $10 a month fee they are not taking a chance on a brand new or not well known author. If they read 10% you get paid :)

2. When marketing with facebook ads many people will already have kindle unlimited soon. So you get a new reader without them even having to pay. You just got to find your crowd and put the ad in front of them. If they read 10% you get paid :)

3. If readers like your novel they will read another book of yours. You can make list your first book in the series in Kindle Unlimited and put a link to your second book in it. That way you could sale the 2nd book for maybe $1.99 or something.

4. It seems like you could make your novels shorter and the readers would not care since they get them all for free. But in return you will get paid for each novel.

5. Seems like shorter works might do better. I know when I get "unlimited" access to stuff I tend to jump around more from thing to thing. So I am in the fantasy genre and think I will write shorter works at say 8-20k words.

I think in the end if you are an entertaining writer and people like your work you can figure out a way to make money from it. At least we are getting in on the "ground floor." LOL

That being said I am not even done with my first novel yet. So I got to get done so I can get on this while its going on early. Just a few thoughts I wanted to share with everyone :)
 
#490 ·
dmac said:
Yes. And as I said previously, $1 or $2 or even $20 million is nothing to Amazon if their intent is to take Scribd and Oyster's authors away from them.
the math doesn't work out like that.

lets start with 1 million kindle users on board. that is 10M subscription monies. Of course this isn't new money. That is 10M those people are no longer spending on other kindle titles. Lets imagine for a minute that contains some of kindles biggest spenders who spent on average 30-50 USD a month on books and suddenly Amazon has swapped 30M to 50M of revenue for 10M.

Out of that 10M Amazon decides it wants 50 percent. A logical move, Amazon is pushing for more margin off trads, it is a good way to offset the 70 percent it needs on KDP to keep apple at bay.

So that is 5 million in the kitty. Each reader averages 10 reads a month. lets face it the big whales will be doing a book a day if we count in novellas so there will be lots of early adopters hitting the service for 30-50 reads a month. But we'll go with 10 average, so that is 10 million reads / 5m pool = 0.50 cents a read.

For Amazon to match KOLL rates they'd have to subsidise every read by 1.50 - that is 15M USD a month (180M a year). Possible.

Now lets imagine 10 million people get on the KU bandwagon. Suddenly the same numbers mean's amazon has 10x the amount to deal with. Their subsidy just jumped to 150m a month - 1.8 BILLION p.a. Probably about twice the entire revenue from Kindle in its entirety. Amazon could BUY scribd and Oyster for less than that. If we were talking 20 million subscribers and 3.6 Billion in subsidy a year they might as well buy Simon & Schuster and Hachette to go with it.

There is no way Amazon is going to line the pockets of indies with 1.8 billion a year when they have shown such willingness to bend over and take it lining up to give books away for free/permafree and take whatever they offer on KOLL.

And while scribd may get less than 2 percent whales, I would wager the number will be huge on Kindle. Kindle Romance readers are the most voracious in the reading world so I'm pretty sure they will be binging out.

I'm not surprised they have limited this as a trial to the US. If they get the numbers on this then they could end up either destroying the entire economics of kindle or leaving themselves on the hook for a huge chunk of change trying to stop the KOLL/KU rate plummet into single digits when Kindle readers go berserk.

The comparison with this was when one of the mobile networks switched to 'all you can eat' data tariffs for about 30 USD. the uptick in usage of people downloading movies, music etc was so large it nearly brought down the entire network and they had to quickly add a fair usage cap.

On their 10 bucks a month even if they put all the money based on their own ten books out at a time that is maximum 1 buck per read. if they take 30 percent it is 70 cents, if they take 50 percent its 50 cents. Anything over 1 USD and they have to put money in. For all the people who don't read 10 books there will be the big chunk of early adopters who are reading 10-20-30+, and for every subscriber there will be an attached drop in Kindle revenue from books they no longer pay for.
 
#493 ·
dmac said:
Yes. And as I said previously, $1 or $2 or even $20 million is nothing to Amazon if their intent is to take Scribd and Oyster's authors away from them.
If it is Amazon's intention to take authors away from Smashwords, D2D, Scribd and Oyster, etc, then I can safely say I have not been tempted for a single moment to ditch diversity for exclusivity.
 
#494 ·
jackiegp said:
I just tracked mine. I got paid $1. That's it. Not $2. for a borrow. $1. for the KU. The gig is up.
Wait, how do you know how much you got paid already. Doesn't the pot scam revolve around only telling you how much you got after the fact?
 
#495 ·
Josef Black said:
the math doesn't work out like that.

lets start with 1 million kindle users on board. that is 10M subscription monies. Of course this isn't new money. That is 10M those people are no longer spending on other kindle titles. Lets imagine for a minute that contains some of kindles biggest spenders who spent on average 30-50 USD a month on books and suddenly Amazon has swapped 30M to 50M of revenue for 10M.

Out of that 10M Amazon decides it wants 50 percent. A logical move, Amazon is pushing for more margin off trads, it is a good way to offset the 70 percent it needs on KDP to keep apple at bay.

So that is 5 million in the kitty. Each reader averages 10 reads a month. lets face it the big whales will be doing a book a day if we count in novellas so there will be lots of early adopters hitting the service for 30-50 reads a month. But we'll go with 10 average, so that is 10 million reads / 5m pool = 0.50 cents a read.

For Amazon to match KOLL rates they'd have to subsidise every read by 1.50 - that is 15M USD a month (180M a year). Possible.

Now lets imagine 10 million people get on the KU bandwagon. Suddenly the same numbers mean's amazon has 10x the amount to deal with. Their subsidy just jumped to 150m a month - 1.8 BILLION p.a. Probably about twice the entire revenue from Kindle in its entirety. Amazon could BUY scribd and Oyster for less than that. If we were talking 20 million subscribers and 3.6 Billion in subsidy a year they might as well buy Simon & Schuster and Hachette to go with it.

There is no way Amazon is going to line the pockets of indies with 1.8 billion a year when they have shown such willingness to bend over and take it lining up to give books away for free/permafree and take whatever they offer on KOLL.

And while scribd may get less than 2 percent whales, I would wager the number will be huge on Kindle. Kindle Romance readers are the most voracious in the reading world so I'm pretty sure they will be binging out.

I'm not surprised they have limited this as a trial to the US. If they get the numbers on this then they could end up either destroying the entire economics of kindle or leaving themselves on the hook for a huge chunk of change trying to stop the KOLL/KU rate plummet into single digits when Kindle readers go berserk.

The comparison with this was when one of the mobile networks switched to 'all you can eat' data tariffs for about 30 USD. the uptick in usage of people downloading movies, music etc was so large it nearly brought down the entire network and they had to quickly add a fair usage cap.

On their 10 bucks a month even if they put all the money based on their own ten books out at a time that is maximum 1 buck per read. if they take 30 percent it is 70 cents, if they take 50 percent its 50 cents. Anything over 1 USD and they have to put money in. For all the people who don't read 10 books there will be the big chunk of early adopters who are reading 10-20-30+, and for every subscriber there will be an attached drop in Kindle revenue from books they no longer pay for.
This was my point, but much more eloquently stated.

The only way this possibly works is if there are so many more readers and/or reads that you make up in volume what you lost in revenue by making let's say $0.50 a sale. I ... don't think that's going to happen as people have discovered when they raise their prices from $0.99 to $2.99. They sell less, but they make MORE. KU is going to pretty much keep you in the 99 cents range and you can do nothing about it.
 
#496 ·
So I'm concerned because Amazon is making a two-tiered system.  From the Publisher's Marketplace article it appears that....

1. KDP authors get paid based on the KOLL pool

2. Traditionally published authors, including those at the Amazon imprints are getting paid exactly the same as if someone purchased the book.

This means the KDP authors (in general) make a lot less per book than the traditional authors do.  I would like to see both paid based on their MSRP.
 
#499 ·
Saul Tanpepper said:
Reasons to invest my work in KU:
1. Potential for more exposure.

Reasons NOT to invest my work in KU:
1. No guarantee of more exposure. In fact, if the catalog gets swamped with hastily written short works, that benefit vanishes.
2. Restricted distribution and restricted choices for readers.
3. No guarantee what the payout will be month-to-month.
4. I get 60% list price now on Oyster and Scribd.

I'll look into writing a few quick funnel books for my series and enrolling them into KU because that seems to make good business sense for now (and, incidentally, underscores the 1st point in my NOT list), but I don't see this being a boon for anyone in the long term, especially if it further erodes competition. Not good for indies, not good for readers.

(BTW, I think I read Amazon has agreements with some of the Big 5 to pay full list price royalties on books borrowed through KOLL; I presume these agreements extend to KU. If this is true, then why would indies stand to be paid slave wages?)
Powerful important stuff Saul, about how Scribd & Oyster pay out.

Yeah, the tiered pay-out system, and non-universal exclusivity clause, both give me a lot of concern.

But I'll probably still put my upcoming new short in the program, so I can at least see how it works for me.

Actually knowing how Scribd and Oyster work, and how difficult it is to have our titles found in libraries, gives us first hand info to compare with.
 
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