Erotica Authors Pull-Out on Amazon KU – Time to Come To The Dark Side!

Erotica authors were
impatiently waiting for July 1, for a look at the new dashboard and the opportunity for a glimpse into the Bezos crystal ball at what they might be paid for the month of July, when the Kindle Unlimited changes took place.

Looks like the numbers are (kind of) in... and the outlook is rather dismal. Erotica shorts authors knew it was going to be bad. I just don't think most of them thought it was going to be quite *this* bad. Because it looks as if authors will be making about $0.0057 per page. That's slightly more than half a penny a page, folks.

This was every erotica shorts author's face when they heard this news:

But we're erotica authors. We are the most versatile, adaptive and scrappy bunch of people I have ever known. And if Amazon thought we were going to take this lying down?

Bwahahahahahahahahahaha. Then they don't know us very well!

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Introducing the #releasetherate campaign

The objective is twofold:

1. Get Amazon to tell us how many people are borrowing our books, without which our page counts are utterly useless

2. Get Amazon to tell us how much they mean to pay us - NOW. IN ADVANCE. No more of this, "Enroll your books, choose to go exclusively with Amazon, and we'll tell you later how much you'll make" crap!

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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQ)

1. Won't Bezos get mad at us? We might get in trouble!

Look, if we don't stop this ride now, we may never be able to get off. And this particular ride ends at welfare-ville. So let's not go there. There are plenty of erotica authors who have made a nice living from writing. And we are satisfying a very voracious readership. Why shouldn't they have books they want to read, too? And why shouldn't we get paid for them?

2. Why don't we just go wide?

That's part of the message we need to send. If you haven't already sign up for an Excitica Publisher Account, do that now.

3. You sound mad, calm down.

Yeah, losing 50-70% of my erotica shorts income? I'm mad.

What do I have to do? SIMPLE!

A. PULL YOUR EROTICA BOOKS FROM KU. Every book you leave in is telling them YES, CONTINUE SCREWING ME OVER.

Wait, what about my romance? I need to eat! Fine, leave it in, but if you have erotica get it OUT.

B. COMMENT, LIKE, SHARE THE FOLLOWING FACEBOOK POST & TWEET:

TWEET

FB POST

C. EMAIL jeff@amazon.com

Be polite, cordial, and clear. Keep it short and sweet and include the following info:

-We want to know how many individual people are actually borrowing our books

-We want to know how much you actually plan to pay us.

-If you followed through on pulling all your short fiction (I know not everyone can do it, seriously. Don't do something you can't afford, but remember you're getting paid like ten cents for a full read now anyway) mention this in the email!

D. ASK YOUR NEWSLETTER/FANS/FRIENDS/RELATIVES/PETS to email Bezos, too. The more emails they get the more likely they are to act.

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Here's a form email you can give to your readers:

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Hello, Mr. Bezos

I am an avid reader, and I am contacting you today on behalf of my favorite authors who participate in your Kindle Unlimited book subscription program.

Under the new reporting system, authors have no idea how many individual people are borrowing their books through KU. This is vital information and authors NEED to have it. Please amend the KDP reporting system to share this information, which you are already collecting anyway and shared up until July 1, with authors.

Also, authors have no idea how much to expect to be paid. The email they received today suggests the payout could be as low as $.0057 per page. As a reader, I want as many authors to keep as many books in the KU program as possible, and it would help if Amazon would tell authors how much they're going to be paid. It's not  fair that they have to guess and hope for the best when they sign up for KU and give up the fixed royalty rates they receive outside the program.

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TEXT YOU CAN USE TO SHARE WITH YOUR READERS

(and feel free to right-click and use the graphic at the top of this page).

Thanks go to Natalie Deschain and Cassandra Zara for spearheading this campaign!

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Help Authors Spread the Word – PLEASE SHARE!

Many of you know that I've been a HUGE proponent of the Kindle Unlimited program. It's allowed me to gain a broader readership and new fans who would have never discovered me without being able to borrow my books and take a chance on them through KU.

That said, you may not be aware that Amazon made massive, sweeping changes to the KU program starting today. Beginning today, they will only be paying based on pages read, rather than books borrowed.

This change has left authors in the dark regarding royalties since Amazon isn't telling us how many readers are borrowing our books or how much we'll earn for each page read.

How can authors make good business decisions without knowing how much money they are earning? The short answer is, we can’t. And that makes many of us question whether we should remain part of the Kindle Unlimited program at all.

That’s why I’ve joined #releasetherate, an author-led initiative with a simple goal: getting Amazon to release more information to authors. We’re not asking for much. We're asking for two small pieces of data that Amazon can easily produce that will help self-published authors make informed business decisions.

1.) Number of units borrowed per book -- Amazon has this data; they have been providing it to us since the Select program began. Why withhold that number now? The only reason is to confuse authors. Give us the total number of customers who have clicked the “Read for Free” button on our book’s sales page. Or, at the very least, give us the total number of customers who have read a minimum of one page of our book.

2.) #releasetherate – Authors are aware that Amazon has a ballpark rate-per-page-read that they are expecting to pay for Select and KU pages read in July 2015. We hope it's not the .0057 cents per page based on the June 2015 Select Fund and pages read, a rate that would decimate the income of many authors and make it impossible for us to remain part of the Kindle Unlimited program.

If you’re an author or reader who feels that Amazon should #releasetherate, please help us spread the word by sharing this post.

And if you’re as angry and frustrated about the lack of information being provided to authors, as I am, please let Amazon know by sending an email to jeff@amazon.com and letting him know that withholding basic business information from authors is making many of your favorite authors wonder if Kindle Unlimited is really the right program for them after all.

Selena Kitt 

Erotic Fiction You Won't Forget 

www.selenakitt.com 

LATEST RELEASE: Highland Wolf Pact: Blood Reign

The New Kindle Unlimited – What It Means for Authors & Readers

Well, authors and readers, the heyday of erotica shorts filling

Kink

Kindle Unlimited may be coming to an end. I hope you made hay while the sun was shining, authors. And readers, I hope you got your fill of the all-you-can-eat buffet that was 

Kink

Kindle Unlimited while it lasted, because many of the erotic shorts that glutted the program may be going back to sales-only and being distributed wide, if the rumblings of authors about this new "pay-per-page" system is any indication. I know some (non-erotica) authors who think this is a great thing!

It's not.

For erotic or non-erotic authors, this is a slide toward being paid by the word. And not words SOLD, like our old friend Charles Dickens, but words READ. If I go into a restaurant and order a steak, but I fill up on drinks and chips and salsa, do I get to send the steak back because I'm no longer hungry? No. If I buy a DVD but never open it (I have Keanu Reeves in "The Day the World Stood Still" AND "Pumpkinhead" on my shelf still in shrinkwrap... sad...) do people not get paid for it? Uhhh no. If I get sick in the middle of a movie and spend 3/4 of it in the bathroom, do I get my money for admission back? No. If I pay for concert tickets and my car breaks down on the way, do I get my money back? No.

So why in the world would an author not get paid for a sale/borrow, based on the initial interest of the consumer to buy/borrow it? Why are authors opting into Kindle Unlimited (the best place for a self-published author to make the most money with the vendor who happens to have the largest share of the ebook market) now going to be paid by "pages read?"

Because Amazon's been losing money on Kindle Unlimited. And this is a way to "spin" it to make it look as if Amazon is actually listening to authors, while screwing both short and long writers. Yay! Oh wait...

Amazon said: One particular piece of feedback we've heard consistently from authors is that paying the same for all books regardless of length may not provide a strong enough alignment between the interests of authors and readers. We agree. With this in mind, we're pleased to announce that beginning on July 1, the KDP Select Global Fund will be paid out based on the number of pages KU and KOLL customers read.

So those of you who were complaining that "short erotic dino porn" was glutting up the

Kink

Kindle Unlimited program and eating up all your precious borrows in the global fund pot?  Be careful what you wish for. You got it now. I guess we'll see how many people are actually reading to the end of your 500 page epic fantasy tome. ;)

I predict that many "shorts" authors will opt out. (Poor Chuck Tingle - from $1.30 a borrow to... probably less than a $0.99 buy would net. But I guess we'll see! Not that I'm dissing Chuck Tingle - if there's an audience for Sharknado, there's an audience for anything!) Not that you should, but many may, just out of fear. But shorts are, in our attention deficit world, not necessarily a bad thing. Erotica writers have always written short - and we've generally been paid more for it, too. (Much to the chagrin of authors in other genres!) But for those, like this guy, who say that anything under 30 pages is a "scam?" Dude, go tell O'Henry that, eh?

I know there are scammers out there who have been taking advantage of the 

Kink

Kindle Unlimited program - writing (literally) 500 words, throwing it up there with provocative covers and blurbs to make people one-click, and boom! Just opening it is 10%, so they now collect $1.30ish per borrow. And that sucks. There are always a few bad apples, right? But let's not lump shorts writers in with scammers, okay? To each their own. If my readers want to read a hot little short about an illicit relationship between stepsiblings, why not? That's not a scam. Nor is it or should it be penalized, simply because it's short.

The SkyJump in Vegas costs you $119 and lasts a few minutes. I rest my case. :P

I predict that mystery, thriller/suspense and horror writers will make a killing. People read those books to the end to find what happens! I predict short chapters with "cliffhanger" endings. I know people have been complaining about serials and cliffhangers - but I think we'll see more of them. Because cliffhangers! I predict the sweet spot will be 25-35K. 50K at most. I predict pages of short, snappy, untagged dialogue! ;) Oh the places authors will go...

As a publisher (and self-published author) I had some questions for Amazon about the new system. Below is a summary of what I was told. I'm providing it to you as information. Do with it what you will!

• Borrows will be displayed as PAGES now instead of BORROWS. So TOTAL number of PAGES (not broken down by number of borrowers) will appear on the report where the "borrow" appears now. We'll be getting no other information besides this. We won't know the number of people who borrowed each book - will will JUST know the TOTAL number of pages read in each book.
• Pages will display and count in the report as they're read by the reader. This will be when a user syncs up. Whether that's hourly or monthly. Pages will appear as they're read/synced, and you'll get paid for those during the next payment period.
• The 10% rule applies no longer. Pages are pages. They click into it and back out? One page. Click in and swipe left? Two pages. Swipe all the way through the backmatter? You get paid for all the pages.
• There will be an SRL (Starting Read Location) determined by Amazon (start of Chapter 1). The ERL (end read location) defaults to the end of the Amazon book. If someone flips all the way to the end, you'll get paid for backmatter pages. However, linking from the TOC to the end of the book? That would be two pages, no matter how many there were in between.
• They do not have "average number of pages read" information up to this point (yeah, sure) and cannot provide that information currently.
• Page averages will be done using the new "KENPC" system. The current page estimation system will change to the new (KENPC) one once the new KU rolls out in July.
• You only get paid for pages once. If they read the page again, it doesn't count.
• Rank - ghost borrows for rank will still have the same effect. A person borrows, rank goes up, but they may never open or read the book, meaning you may never get paid for it. But authors will still get the same rank boost for being in Select.
• For the first 90 days, everyone enrolled in KU will be able to opt out AT ANY TIME. You are NOT TIED TO THE 90 DAY PERIOD. This is the best and most important news (which is why I saved it for last? heh) This will apply for at least the first 90 day period of the new system.

So authors, if you're thinking of jumping ship, Amazon wants you to stay. They'll let you opt out as you wish for the first ninety days. Clearly, they're trying to prevent a mass exodus here. That, of course, will depend on how much a "page" ends up being worth. And we'll have to wait until mid-August to find that out... Ooooo a cliffhanger! I see what you did there, Bezos...! Curses!

Selena Kitt Erotic Fiction You Won't Forget www.selenakitt.com LATEST RELEASE: Highland Wolf Pact: Compromising Positions