EC said:
Too much speculation. August will bring our earliest indicator so there's no point stressing out about it.
No, I'd say a fairly healthy amount of cynicism. Amazon have launched a new business model on us that has the potential to change a lot of our business dynamics and they have been remarkably tight lipped on the most important aspect - exactly how much we get paid to participate.
I was never stressed about KOLL. We all knew that it was limited to 1 borrow a month. so if you had 6 books out and a reader borrowed your first then they'd either have to wait a month for the next or buy it. The amount of borrows floating around the system was capped and the payment rate was reasonable for most books but didn't affect the sales of books higher up the food-chain.
I don't think we can apply scribd's read rates to amazon, for one thing they are a new entrant and have a tiny pool of readership and content compared to Amazon. Its know than Kindles earliest adopters and biggest users are the 'whales' of book reading. Many of them may well have been in scribd, but bear in mind those 600K titles aren't on scribd - they were locked into exclusivity with Kindle. Now they've got access to 600K titles.
A good example, I got a review and mail off someone who had read my first five novellas. he had been planning to save them for his holiday but read the first and ended up reading them all in one sitting and was waiting for the next. it probably took him less than 6 hours to read those. Had that been unlimited he could have consumed 6 'borrows' in one sitting and one day. My mum is retired and can easily go through a book every day or two. This isn't even factoring in Novellas - if people are reading 1-2 novellas a day they could be doing easily 30-50 borrows.
I'll agree it's speculation and a worse case scenario, only time will tell what the aggregate borrows number ends up, but 10 seems like a very low amount since one of my readers alone ploughed through 6 books in a day or so. I could easily do the same, so that is why I'm going with 10 a month. I could do probably 1 full length book and 2-3 novellas a week and easily be doing that number which brings me back to the 50-70 cents number.
I'm not speculating for a 'tin-foil hat oh noes the world is ending' - as a business person I want to know what the bottom line is 'most likely' to be - since Amazon haven't been forthcoming with that number the best we can do is run the scenarios based on best, worst and middle cases and determine how that would affect us both in and out of the scheme.
Do i stress over it? of course to a certain extent. I have a plan that relies on XYZ and it has suddenly been upended by a major retailer introducing a new model that could change the dynamics of the business I work in. Its prudent to think 'is this good for me?' or 'is this bad for me?' and work out a game plan based on various outcomes in advance.
What I don't like is the fact Amazon isn't prepared to nail its colours to the mast and say 'this is our scheme and we're prepared to underwrite the risk by ensuring you get 2.50 or 3.00 per borrow. They have transferred the entire risk onto our shoulders.
Worse case scenario is that select authors wake up to find they are getting 35 cents a borrow and their sales collapse in the space of the next two months.
Best case scenario is that select authors make out like bandits and get a huge cash windfall.
Likely scenario is that there is a gradual shift from paid sales to unlimited borrows and Amazon let the KOLL rate gradually decline 10 cents a month so there isn't a sudden shock outpouring of select authors, but there is a measurable decline in earnings over the mid term.
All speculation. But the entire of wall street make billions on speculation by making the smartest bet they can with information to hand coupled to their best guess, I'm no different, I want my books best placed to get the best ROI i can, thus I'm reading everyones opinions on this thread because honestly speaking Amazon has left us in the dark and it is such a big event that we are bound to feel a little WHOA JIM about it for the next few days, months until we see what happens.
I don't think the sky is going to fall in, but then I don't think this is suddenly all going to give us James Patterson's bank balance. As usual I suspect it will be somewhere between a gradual decline and getting the usual shaft off our business partners at the behest of their shareholders.
We're mere authors after all, we only write the damn books that powers their gravy train. No reason to expect we should profit the most from that fact is there beyond the fact they'd have blank paper to sell without us.