Timothy Ellis
Short version:
The payout per page read dropped so low, the gap between the royalty on a sale, and the full read of the same book grew too large.
At the same time, reads in Page Flip mode are no longer counted, and so the author is no longer paid for whole reads of books, and in fact whole series.
The whole thing came to a crunch point on Aug 1, when Amazon introduced what they call KUv3. The following day my income dropped 30%, and stayed there. It took a month to figure out why and see nothing was going to change. Amazon say there is no problem. There is. And this was the second 30% down adjustment Amazon made in just over 1 year.
I pulled out, since I do not view KU as being 'free books'. Its a subscription service, everyone pays for the use of it, and the author gets paid as well. But it no longer pays enough.
I seriously wish I could remain in, but selling books puts food on my table and pays the mortgage, and KU kept paying me less and less for more and more, cannibalizing sales, and paying me nothing for them.
All authors will face this decision at some stage. KU has been losing good authors for 2 years now. This will continue, unless Amazon fix what has become a seriously broken system.
Long version posted on Quora, from an email I sent to my mailing list:
https://legacymuse.quora.com/Going-on...
The payout per page read dropped so low, the gap between the royalty on a sale, and the full read of the same book grew too large.
At the same time, reads in Page Flip mode are no longer counted, and so the author is no longer paid for whole reads of books, and in fact whole series.
The whole thing came to a crunch point on Aug 1, when Amazon introduced what they call KUv3. The following day my income dropped 30%, and stayed there. It took a month to figure out why and see nothing was going to change. Amazon say there is no problem. There is. And this was the second 30% down adjustment Amazon made in just over 1 year.
I pulled out, since I do not view KU as being 'free books'. Its a subscription service, everyone pays for the use of it, and the author gets paid as well. But it no longer pays enough.
I seriously wish I could remain in, but selling books puts food on my table and pays the mortgage, and KU kept paying me less and less for more and more, cannibalizing sales, and paying me nothing for them.
All authors will face this decision at some stage. KU has been losing good authors for 2 years now. This will continue, unless Amazon fix what has become a seriously broken system.
Long version posted on Quora, from an email I sent to my mailing list:
https://legacymuse.quora.com/Going-on...
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