ROBUST discussion

I got this from the Smashwords Blog.

Scribd, the fast-growing ebook subscription service, today announced dramatic cuts to their catalog of romance and erotica titles.

Effective immediately, I estimate 80-90 percent Smashwords romance and erotica titles will be dropped by Scribd, including nearly all of our most popular romance titles. Books priced at free are safe and will remain in their catalog.

Based on what I've been able to glean, the lower the price and the higher the word count, the better the odds the book will remain. Few books priced $3.99 and above will remain. Scribd is not publicly revealing the formulas for what stays and what goes, probably because much of this is still in flux. They're cutting all publishers and distributors with the same blunt knife.

It's ugly. The problem for Scribd is that romance readers are heavy readers, and Scribd pays publishers retailer-level margins for the books. In a letter to publishers and distributors delivered earlier today, Scribd said:
Dear Publisher

As you know, in starting Scribd, we bore the majority of the risk when establishing a business model that paid publishers the same amount as the retail model for each book read by a Scribd subscriber. Now, nearly two years later, the Scribd catalog has grown from 100,000 titles to more than one million. We’re proud of the service we’ve built and we’re constantly working to expand the selection across genres to give our readers the broadest possible list of books for $8.99 per month.

We’ve grown to a point where we are beginning to adjust the proportion of titles across genres to ensure that we can continue to expand the overall size and variety of our service. We will be making some adjustments, particularly to romance, and as a result some previously available titles may no longer be available.

We look forward to continuing to grow subscribers, increase overall reading, and increase total publisher payouts in a way that works for everyone over the long term. We of course want to keep as many of your authors and titles on Scribd as we can, so we’d love to discuss our plans and how we can best work with you going forward.

Thank you for your business.

Bottom line, romance readers - readers we love dearly at Smashwords - are reading Scribd out of house and home. Scribd's business model, as it's set up now, simply can't sustain the high readership of romance readers. They're not facing the same problem with readers of other genres.

Read the rest here:
http://blog.smashwords.com/2015/06/sc...

They cut D2D titles as well:

Scribd took a significant risk putting in place a model that paid authors the same amount as a retail model for each book read by a subscriber. As we all know, romance readers tend to be incredibly avid readers. In trying to cater to this voracious readership while under this progressive payment model, Scribd has put itself in a difficult place. In a bid to better balance these operating expenses, Scribd is immediately slashing the volume of romance novels in its subscription service.

This is a bad, bad, bad decision by Scribd. One wonders what sort of businessmen they are if they cannot see that their asset is not money in the bank, or even cash glow, but that customer who spends the money, and that the romance customer, the voracious reader, is a more valuable customer than the other kind. This way they'll just lose their most valuable customers because they're not serving them.

What they should have done is to have raised their subscription either across the board (and pocketed the extra margin from the readers of all other genre than romance and erotica) or to have introduced a variable subscription, higher for romance and erotica than for thrillers, non-fiction, whatever.

In your capital appreciation, dimbos, it is your hold on the loyal customer who matters, not the actual amount of profit you earn from her.

Actually, when I had a Scribd subscription, I behaved exactly like the romance customers: I read Will and Ariel Durant's 11-thick-volume History of Civilization, for which Scribd probably had to pay S&S a hundred bucks or so... But then I was never going to be a cheap customer.

Thanks for posting this, Kat.

You're welcome!

I couldn't find anything I wanted to read. None of my favorite authors were on there. Dang it!

I had no problem finding something by favourite writers. Scribd have something by almost everyone, but I think committed fans would expect everything by an author they are particular to.

Your taste ranges much wider than mine. :-)

The controversy over the new Kindle Unlimited and Scribd polices is going strong over at The Passive Voice.

http://www.thepassivevoice.com/

A friend from the old days of Authonomy put up a pithy post that I found here: http://lexirevellian.blogspot.com/201...

I put up a couple posts on the subject. One was tongue-in-cheek. http://www.kajordan.net/

I did find myself feeling sorry for the women who read and write Romance. They've taken a huge hit in a week. The blow to the wallet is coming fast.

Also, I've noticed that Smashwords is now in a position to supply what the readers demand, if - and it's a BIG IF - they can get readers to switch over to SMashwords instead of Amazon.

Not gonna hold my breath on that one. :-P

K.A. wrote: "Also, I've noticed that Smashwords is now in a position to supply what the readers demand, if - and it's a BIG IF - they can get readers to switch over to SMashwords instead of Amazon."

I don't think Smashwords will fill the gap. Its writers may be a big asset, but Smashwords is not an innovator, not an initiator; it just reacts to what others do, and never fast enough.

If Smashwords were a live-wire, it wouldn't be filling gaps other create, it would make the gap and fill it before anyone else can grab it. For instance, Smashwords had all the goodies in place to set up its own subscription service -- and didn't.

Very true.

We'll have to see what the Erotic Collective does next.

:-)

I think Mark is sitting on his assets. He profited BIG time with Scribd, because he couldn't tap the Amazon market in a significant way.

His alliance to the Erotic Collective may have made big bucks for a time, but that bubble just burst.

He might make more money if those who just left Amazon come to him. They will want an easy way to hit the other markets, and he's got it.

I think I moved to D2D just in time. Smashwords is swamped with porn and it's going to get worse.

There's also a site called All About Romance that might profit, again, if they can get readers to switch over.

If the porn and romance writers go to Smashwords, with its sales-only model, that will fix the short-arse type of fiction in those markets forever, and will over time create a moat between them and "real literature". The gulf will be reinforced by Smashwords' complete absence of quality control. Limp as the quality control may be elsewhere, there is at least some. The writers who will suffer because of this will be the quality romance and erotica writers and the novelists in those fields, all the way down to novella specialists.

Before there was Kindle, there was Ellora's Cave, Jasmine Jade and Black Rose - all e-book or 'digital first' websites. They were specialist sites "Romantica" was the term used, trademarked by Ellora's Cave.

Ellora's Cave made BIG bucks until Kindle came along.

I'm SO glad I switched to D2D, just in the nick of time, too.

Don't forget who put you onto D2D, many months before the curl of the wave.

I shall not forget. You've helped me a great deal, and I greatly appreciate it!

I dropped "Let's Do Lunch" to $0.99 to see if I can get any interest on Scribd.