You couldn't find anything on the hottest debate topic on this board? You didn't look very hard. This topic is a weekly bone of contention. For the con side, read S42's posts. He beats the dead horse on KU so strongly you would think he profits from others going wide.

Only because 95% of kboards beats the pro-KU side like a dead horse (to use your logic you must profit from people joining KU). And it's disingenuous because none of you really provide the necessary caveats to warn newbies about the negatives of KU, you simply tout it as the go-to-option for all new authors.

The notion that KU generates visibility is beyond ridiculous. It requires as much marketing spend as any other market, and I'd actually argue even more given the competition on AMS. And none of you KU junkies are disclosing your AMS spend or what it's taking to make KU work with a positive ROI for you; and while it works for some there are a ton of you that it ain't working for but that you won't admit it publicly. I suspect there will be a lot more "retirements" coming over the course of the remaining year. 

Instead of leading newbies off a cliff and getting them stuck in the same quagmire many of you are stuck in where you hold out your hands and await to see what King Bezos tosses into the crowd on any given month, be more vocal about the negatives of KU and I wouldn't have to.

Can KU work? ya. Can it make you rich? For some. Is it the land of lollipops and four-leaf clovers that most of you represent it to be to newbies? hell no.

KU doesn't exist to make a profit. It exists to get readers to come to Amazon for free books, so they'll buy toilet paper while they're there.

I'd love to know where this truth came from. Everyone accepts this as fact when there's no evidence that's the intent of KU.

If KU is anything it's:

1) a legacy division of the business (ie. books) that they are sentimental about
2) is one plank in their 360-degree media content strategy (books, movies, tv, music)
3) A commodification vehicle to attempt to apply pressure to the TP industry and their competitors (ie. a monopolization play)

But I've never ever seen any evidence that KU is designed to drive broader .com buying patterns. I'd be shocked if even 1% of KU users were non-amazon customers prior to getting a kindle who subsequently became prime members because KU introduced them into the amazon ecosystem.

Instant results are not the only results.

I've done no promos (literally nothing, no ams or anything) since my last BB in october and am still seeing a tail. I think the more intellectual the book, the more people wait to read it until they are in the mood. A glowing hands book will get read very fast because those readers don't wait to be in a "mood", they are consuming that stuff daily.

OPs books seem like the type of thing you'll read when you're in the mood for historical fiction. So he'll probably see a more shallow, yet longer, tail.

Also, it's been widely reported that when zon is down the other retailers will be up. Never made any sense to me, but I do find that tends to happen. If zon goes dry for me, kobo and itunes tend to pick up and vice versa.

So you need at least a month to assess what the sell-through picture really is. 

Seneca, either dial your tone well back into the "compassionate" range, or leave the thread.

I thought I was being compassionate. No one is being harmed here, they only think they are. Once they realize they aren't they'll feel a lot better.

Why are you guys complaining? Amazon is doing what they need to in order to keep KU going. Amazon enabled ebook publishing and everyone should be thankful to them, not complaining when they take $300 or $1000 or $10,000 of your money. If they didn't exist you wouldn't even have that money in the first place.

Whatever zon wants to do, it's the right thing to do.

Would you rather not have KU?

Good for Amazon. The whole store has turned into a flea-market in Djibouti. 80% of what you see is fake of misleading in some way (not just books, for all products).

Zon wouldn't be banning customers if they felt they were legit accounts. Even if they are false positives, clearly the issue of bad actors has reached epidemic proportions and they had to take drastic actions.

That being said, just like every other action zon has taken, the bad actors will ultimately outsmart them and come out on top.

And yet, the trads were using windowing of their products as their pricing strategy before ebooks and indies gained a foothold. A trad book came out first in hardback for, say, $19.99, then 3-6 months later, the trade-size hit the shelves for $12.99. Then another 3-6 months later, out came the paperback for $6.99. Then a short shelf life before the returns and pulping of any remaining inventory. So the 'art' was worth nearly 2/3 less a year out.

Ebooks pretty much were destined to take the place of paperbacks. Until the market rebelled and readers wanted the ebooks available concurrently with the hardback. The Big 6 (at the time) conceded, and colluded to keep the ebook price high if they weren't going to window. Bye-bye paperbacks, bye-bye collusion plans. And after a couple of years and a few million bucks in legal fees, the Big 6 (oops, Big 5 by then) were selling their ebooks at the same -- and in some cases, higher -- prices than the hardback or trade edition.

Every product in the world gets cheaper as time goes on. Well except limited supply art. So tiering their release is no big deal. And if anything it supports a valuation model. It says "our product is so good people will pay $20-30 upon release". They purposely force people to pay more for early access to the content. 

If the TP's wanted to they could destroy the entire indie market in a year by just low balling. They don't do that because it would devalue the perception of their product.

It truly amazes me that bargain bin strategies are somehow seen as a sign of strength. It's not. It's a sign of weakness and desperation and it's the hallmark of the indie industry. Covers + 99c pricing + write to market + 2 week release schedule + bots + KU + utter lack of humility and obsession with braggadocio = the face of the indie market today.

maybe xhamster will get into ebooks and then everyone will be happy.

You are indeed. Have you ever been in KU? They don't use your book's listed page reads to calculate the payout. They use KENPC pages to calculate page reads. My book is listed as 423 pages for my print version, but for the purposes of KU I have 668 pages. So assuming the current KU rate I make 2.94 per full read through. Also, because of the delivery fee Amazon charges I don't get 3.50 per sale. I think I worked it out to be like 3.30 (I also factor in the few days a year I run countdown sales, which slightly depresses the average price I earn per unit)

Did you not know that the KU payout is not calculated from your print book length? No offense, but I'm not sure you should be trashing the program when it doesn't seem you understand how it works.

Generally the print count is HIGHER thn the KU count. But for some authors it's the opposite. I assume because you format your print book in smaller font or something.

But while we're on this topic, how ridiculous that they can't even tell you what your page count in KU even is. You have to figure it out yourself.

And you meant to be offensive, but that's okay    I'm pretty much impossible to offend so don't worry about it.

I'm a bit confused. Where are you getting 1.50 and 5.00? Do you price your book on other platforms and Amazon at 7.99? That would be a bit of an indie ebook outlier. My novel in KU is 135k words and I price it at 4.99. I get about 3.00 per read through, and I make around 3.30 per sale. 1.50 through KU would be about a 70k word book, I believe. Doubtful you'd make much traction as an indie writer trying to earn a 5$ profit on a 70k word book. (yes, okay, I'm sure there are exceptions out there. But not common, certainly)

your book is 423 pages x .0046 = $1.94
direct $4.99 x .70 = $3.50

am I missing something?

...unless your goal isn't revenue. Say your goal is brand awareness. Then the best price is going to be the one that sells the most books, or more specifically, gets the most press/eyeballs on it...which may or may not be free. Not to nitpick, but... 

Or how is anyone supposed to know what their best price is? Maybe if you have 30 books and a couple years time you could get enough data to be able to delineate volume between different tiers of pricing, but otherwise it's all a big guess.

I'd also say, for someone like me, I don't want to know what price I can move the most books at. I want to know IF I can sell at a reasonable price. If I can't sell my books for $5.99 (excluding an entry priced book), screw it, clearly I don't have enough value as a writer for readers to want to dish that out. For me, that means this isn't a feasible pursuit. Dropping down to $1.50 a book where people will buy it because it costs almost nothing, merely deludes me into thinking I have a market when in reality I don't.

I'm happy to take $1.50 per book in KU because its a convenient, low-cost ecosystem I know how to work in.

If you're in KU you're also selling direct on amazon. You can't do one without the other.

So it has nothing to do with convenience.

And no one, unless they want to lose money, chooses $1.50 if they can make $5. The only reason to choose $1.50 is because you can't move volume direct (and amazon makes it cost prohibitive to sell direct below $2.99).

Let's just call KU what it really is... it's the bargain bin. And if people want to say "I made damn good money in the bargain bin" then that is 100% logical. I can buy that and respect that (although still disagree with it).

But this notion of "I don't want to at the front of the store in the display area selling for $14.99, I prefer to be in the 99c bin at the back of the store." is craziness. 

The Now Option is a significantly more known quantity. I guess it comes down to how much money is at stake, both in the the short term and the long term. If you're killing it in KU, maybe you'd be killing it even more wide? Who knows?

If you're killing it in KU, but can't do even better wide, then it's tantamount to saying your work has a market value of about $1.50 (or whatever KU pays out on a full novel read).

I know people don't want to hear that, but it's what KU values a book at. The logic in KU has always been not to make more per sale, but rather to make more through VOLUME (take less margin, but make up for it on volume). But that's also the trap... because the more volume amazon can control, the less they have to pay in margin because where else are you going to go if all the (your) readers are in KU? Hence you get commodification, as the more of the market KU controls, the less they have to payout to authors. Hence the implementation of bonuses, so that well-performing authors aren't hurt by the programs commodification process and hence stick around.

But the good thing is that KU only controls volume for specific niches. Outside of that they've been unable to own the market.

So, I'll actually defend amazon in a strange way here. If YOU can't generate your own volume, then amazon kind of has a right to pay you crap in exchange for giving you their volume. But if you can generate your own volume, you're insane to drive that volume into KU for pennies on the dollar... it's literally tantamount to cutting your own throat.