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EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot

Bobby Deluxe posted:

if it's not even going to be possible to make $1k a month

this isn't going to happen

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Popular Human
Jul 17, 2005

and if it's a lie, terrorists made me say it
Well hell, I just started writing again last month: I cracked the $500 threshold in May and am looking on track to make $1200-1500 this month, and it's mostly b/c of KU borrows. This is going to gently caress me starting in July, especially since everything I'm publishing is between 15-20 pages.

Oh well, I was already starting to think of moving into the novella format, anyway.

edit: on second thought, if they actually do count the # of pages read, this might not be such a bad thing. I would estimate close to 100% of people who borrow my stories read all of it, even if its terrible: but how many people who borrow a 500-page self-pubbed fantasy novel will finish it, or even get 25% of the way through it?

Popular Human fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Jun 15, 2015

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005
Honestly, it was pretty much inevitable that Amazon would do something about the shorts market (assuming this has the impact we all expect it will). I'm sure they never intended to pay out the same rate for a 5,000-word story as they do for a 100,000-word novel, and honestly, I agree with them even though it fucks over one of my pen-names in the process. I have tons of novels in the works and was fully intending on releasing them all as serials instead, just so I could multiply my royalty rates. That's clearly not the intent of the program, though.

I guess what I'm saying is that it was good while it lasted, but it was pretty much inevitable.

Szmitten
Apr 26, 2008
After hearing about people releasing 10 page books so that they get paid the moment the book is opened while longer works are hosed I'm kinda relieved? Especially since I have no interest in shorts, erotica or otherwise.

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot
yeah and what about the books that held a gun to your head and forced you to read, not cool imo

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005

EngineerSean posted:

yeah and what about the books that held a gun to your head and forced you to read, not cool imo

And here I thought I was the only one using that technology. :smith:

Popular Human
Jul 17, 2005

and if it's a lie, terrorists made me say it
I'm glad at least that the system will be updating your pages read instead of your borrows the day it goes live. Makes it real easy to see if I even want to keep writing shorts in July or start pivoting ASAP.

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart
Without knowing the pay per page though, how will you make that decision until aug 15th?

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005
Watch them not scale the graphs so that it's like having a never-ending bookbub obliterating your sales lines forever.

Popular Human
Jul 17, 2005

and if it's a lie, terrorists made me say it

angel opportunity posted:

Without knowing the pay per page though, how will you make that decision until aug 15th?

Comparing myself to other authors, mostly. If most of the self-pubbed forums I read fill up with "I have ten borrows on my novel but only twenty-five pages read on average, WHAT THE HELL!?", I'm probably good.

brotherly
Aug 20, 2014

DEHUMANIZE YOURSELF AND FACE TO BLOODSHED

Sundae posted:

Watch them not scale the graphs so that it's like having a never-ending bookbub obliterating your sales lines forever.

Oh yeah, it's Amazon. You can be pretty sure whatever they roll out will be needlessly complicated and broken.

moana
Jun 18, 2005

one of the more intellectual satire communities on the web

Omi no Kami posted:

I may've been off on something fairly major though, for the authors who support themselves through this, is KU a primary source of monetization? I had been under the impression that people focused more on marketing for sale than for borrowing, but especially given the large number of works that romance fans go through, that might be a silly assumption.
KU was making up like 90% of my income with borrows, yes, it was very important. Now, who knows!

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart
What is considered a good author rank?

moana
Jun 18, 2005

one of the more intellectual satire communities on the web
Author rank is near-meaningless.

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart
So I've chilled out after freaking out all day.

I think I can still make good money on erotica shorts even if the KU payout drops to 30 cents by just publishing a lot and growing my mailing list

Aaronicon
Oct 2, 2010

A BLOO BLOO ANYONE I DISAGREE WITH IS A "BAD PERSON" WHO DESERVES TO DIE PLEEEASE DONT FALL ALL OVER YOURSELF WHITEWASHING THEM A BLOO BLOO
Yeah, I'm banking on the average payout per short to now hover around the 40-50c mark. Which loving sucks, but hell if it sucks more for people who've been doing this a lot longer than I have. I agree that it was unfair that people who wrote 50k pages get paid the same as me with my 15 to 20, but it really seems like this a correction a bit too far in the other side's favour. There's no guarantee that just because a book is longer, that it's worth more money or has a higher quality threshold. Ideally there'd be a cap, both on minimum and maximum earnings per book, or hell, if Amazon are that freaked out about super-romance shorts taking all their money, offering a separate subscription service for genre works.

The strategy now really favours bundles and serials. I see the end of the viable, stand-alone super-romance short.

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot
It was never unfair that a book of length 5k got the same royalty/borrow as a work 50k long. Play the game better. That 50k word book would get a ton more sales than that 5k book if done right. Outside of erotica it would be absurd to think otherwise. basically what I'm saying is, quit rationalizing Amazon's decision which is just an attempt to snuff out Kink Unlimited. Just get better at playing the game.

Bobby Deluxe
May 9, 2004

Aaronicon posted:

There's no guarantee that just because a book is longer, that it's worth more money or has a higher quality threshold.
I don't know, this new system does kind of seem like a reward for quality. If people are riveted enough to read the whole book, you get paid more.

The people who mashed their keyboards to 50k and then paid for a good cover and blurb to sucker in buyers are the ones who are going to be in trouble, because when people drop it a third of the way in, the author only gets a 3rd of the cash.

That is, assuming I understood the email correctly.

Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jun 16, 2015

Jalumibnkrayal
Apr 16, 2008

Ramrod XTreme
I sent an email to jeff@amazon.com asking him to make public the number of pages read in May. Fingers crossed he forwards it to the right department. If a few thousand other authors do it, maybe we'll get some good info.

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot
At 100% read I have had over one million pages read this month-to-date so I hope the rate is like 2 cents per page lol.

edit: in fact I should pass a thousand Tolstoys tomorrow evening (assuming 100% read rate which is unreasonable but WHATEVER)

EngineerSean fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Jun 16, 2015

Walamor
Dec 31, 2006

Fork 'em Devils!
I mean it makes sense on the surface to have it be by page. Like someone else said, 100k novels should be paid more than 5k shorts. However, there is a reason lawyers aren't paid by the word anymore. Hopefully the same thing won't happen to the writing industry.

fruit loop
Apr 25, 2015
Still, putting two breaks between each paragraph and making an effort to write short(er) paragraphs seems worthwhile now. You can probably get a 10% boost in page count right there without sacrificing quality.

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart
they're going to standardize how pages are counted based on character count basically, so changing line spacing or font size won't affect anything.

Walamor
Dec 31, 2006

Fork 'em Devils!
Don't forget to do two spaces after every sentence also! Can you cheat the fonts like a college senior would on a term paper? Gimme that Ariel 12.5 font!

Edit: drat

fruit loop
Apr 25, 2015
But seriously, if you were only getting paid because people would buy your thirty-page book and read just three pages, then you probably shouldn't be getting paid anyway? Paying per page seems like it doesn't hurt people whose books are read completely, whether they're short or long. If you write seven 30-page books per month or write one 210-page per month, assuming you have the same number of readers read the entirety of your work, you're doing better.

Additionally, if you have a 210-page book and it's a dud, that hurts. If you have seven 30-pagers, you have seven times as many chances to be discovered, so if any one of them is a dud, you haven't lost as much effort. So it seems shorter works are still less risky.

If the size of the pot doesn't shrink, then people who wrote 30-pagers that were only read for three pages will see their share of the pot decrease while people who write 30-pages that are read completely will see their share increase.

And 210-page books probably become slightly less risky, because you get paid for ten pages instead of zero when someone reads 5% of the book and then stops.

I just don't see how this hurts people who write short books that people actually read. If nobody is reading your stuff then fine, then sure, you'll make less. But if people are reading most of your book, you'll be fine.

E:

Oh, wait a second. If you had 10% of borrows but only wrote 1% of the pages read under the old system, you would have 10% of the pot. Under the new system, you may have 10% of the borrows but you still only get 1% of the pot. So yeah, writers of short stories are hosed

On the other hand, that share has to go somewhere. People who were already doing well with longer stories are probably going to be making ridiculous amounts of money over the next couple months before everyone adjusts and moves to longer fiction.

fruit loop fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Jun 16, 2015

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
Gotta tell you, I'm feeling tempted to make some of my longer works exclusive.

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot

psychopomp posted:

Gotta tell you, I'm feeling tempted to make some of my longer works exclusive.

they suckered you in

Sulla Faex
May 14, 2010

No man ever did me so much good, or enemy so much harm, but I repaid him with ENDLESS SHITPOSTING
^ yeah

Fair doesn't enter into it anyway. The business model has changed and your business will have to change as a result. This IS a bigger change than some of you seem to appreciate (maybe I'm confusing optimism with ignorance though).

The fundamental fact of business is that it is way easier to retain existing clients than it is to find new ones. It is way easier to keep somebody reading a book they have already started than it is to get them to start a new one.

So shorts have the exact same overhead as a 1000 page behemoth in terms of attracting customers, only now they are worth far far less because, by and large, people read things through to the end. Of course with erotica in particular you are talking about a voracious market that is habituated to seeking out new titles and giving things a go on a whim, investments being only on the 30-page level, but there is still an undeniable overhead in competing to get that reader to see and download your book. That overhead just shot up to comprise a staggering portion of your income for that book (or rather your income for that book shot down so that the overhead is now a massive part of it. Expect to see a billion new bundles).

Also I'm not worried about people throwing out crap, but good or competent writers will start padding their books to ridiculous levels. Editors will be a foreign concept as your business goal becomes to hook people in the first chapter, write low-density plot that gets pages turned super quickly, stretch it out as long as you can and then end on a bang so they still buy your other works. Its the middle part that will drag on and on as authors start start getting paid by the word again (essentially). Things are just going to get padded out like crazy and writing quality is going to drop.. But that's business

Sulla Faex fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Jun 16, 2015

ravenkult
Feb 3, 2011


EngineerSean posted:

It was never unfair that a book of length 5k got the same royalty/borrow as a work 50k long. Play the game better. That 50k word book would get a ton more sales than that 5k book if done right. Outside of erotica it would be absurd to think otherwise. basically what I'm saying is, quit rationalizing Amazon's decision which is just an attempt to snuff out Kink Unlimited. Just get better at playing the game.

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot
cats and dogs living together
families will become broken
cthulu rises from his watery grave
bezos cackles from his ivory tower

Jalumibnkrayal
Apr 16, 2008

Ramrod XTreme
Bezos bringing back the halfpenny.

ArchangeI
Jul 15, 2010

EngineerSean posted:

cats and dogs living together
families will become broken
cthulu rises from his watery grave
bezos cackles from his ivory tower

quote:

Cats and Dogs, living together no matter how unlikely such a scenario might be, seeing how cats and dogs are habitually opposed to each other's presence


Families broken, shattered by the strains of an ever-changing world that forces them apart against their will


Cthulu, the great old one, the devourer of sanity, the eater of souls, the crusher of worlds, rising form his bed in the deepest depths of the deepest ocean, to come and end the earth

Am I doing this right?

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005

ArchangeI posted:

Am I doing this right?

Keep going. I'm almost there. :fap:


Seriously though, it's time for some novels. Amazon can take my income from my cold, dead hands.

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot

Jalumibnkrayal posted:

Bezos bringing back the halfpenny.

just want to point out that this post is only one quarter the length of my post but earns the same amount as my post, it's completely unfair

it's also completely unfair that Maroon 5 makes more money than Philip Glass, have you heard Glass' work? I mean it's not my cup of tea but it's certainly longer in length

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot
you know, I was enjoying this game FTL: Faster Than Light the other day, when I realized how many more superior games I had. I paid $10 for that game and it's only 198 MB of ones and zeroes, can't believe that poo poo. I paid $50 for Thief 4 and it's 24000 MB of ones and zeroes, a much better deal

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot
holy poo poo, only 62 MB for Geometry Wars? I can't believe I ever loved you

Bobby Deluxe
May 9, 2004

Why the hell would I want to eat steak when I can get three mcribs for the same OK you know what that's a bad example.

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart
how to make money ???

painted bird
Oct 18, 2013

by Lowtax
Let's talk pen names for erotic romance. Is flowery but gender neutral a decent thing to aim for if I'm writing gay fantasy eromance or should I be going with Dirk Lang III here?

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Sundae
Dec 1, 2005

quote:

Let's talk pen names for erotic romance

No... let's not. :v:

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