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Sundae posted:I'm down about 90% on earnings as a result, so all my stuff is yanked. I'll have a busy July 4th weekend re-pubbing with a wide net again. It's a bad sign that - judging by what I've been hearing - the latter would surprise me more than the former.
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Jul 2, 2015 14:22
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edit: nm
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Jul 2, 2015 14:25
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Down by 90% or to 90%? Down by 90%. I usually make in the vicinity of $300 per day, give or take (excluding the recent crazy-good months). I made $24 yesterday, based on $0.0057 per page.
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Jul 2, 2015 14:29
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Sundae posted:Also - Yooper, I'm glad at least someone here isn't getting murdered by the new royalty structure. I'm down about 90% on earnings as a result, so all my stuff is yanked. I'll have a busy July 4th weekend re-pubbing with a wide net again. Man, that's a terrible drop. I feel for you dude. I'm going to hang on for now and see how it shakes out, my KENP total for today is already above half of what it was yesterday. It all feels really weird.
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Jul 2, 2015 14:42
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I was at like $60-$130/day (I had some big variance) and I made $25 yesterday: $8 from KU reads and $17 from sales. Today is my first day almost entirely out of KU, and as of 9:45am I have $3.52. At the end of last month I was usually at around $30-$50 by this time  To be fair, I haven't published since Friday, and I'm dropping two new stories and running a free promo tomorrow. I'm hoping I'll still get good buy-through when everything is $2.99, and I'm praying that going wide actually brings me somewhat in range of $50/day.
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Jul 2, 2015 14:46
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You may also have to wait and see how long it takes for more people to drop out. For the next few weeks, we may very well be stuck in the artist dilemma (observed by people in the arts, where nobody can charge what their art is worth because some ignorant dipshit will always volunteer to do it for free as "exposure" and drive down the prices for everyone else).
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Jul 2, 2015 14:54
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Judging by what I've seen, most people are dropping out. The payout is just so loving low that only the dumbest of the dumb would stay in for short erotica, so my readers are going to suddenly find themselves with little to no options in KU. I'm hoping over the next few weeks/month I see a nice spike in buys as a result. Like...no one is going to slave away on the erotica treadmill for 12-17 cents per "borrow" when they could be doing romance instead. And the few that could afford to do that and live off it won't make up enough of the market. I'm also hoping this means most erotica readers cancel KU when it no longer has much value to them anyway. That way when I do use KU to promote a title with a free promo, the borrows don't too badly cannibalize my sales.
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Jul 2, 2015 15:07
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Any non-Americans filled out the tax info for Amazon and know how to get a copy of the electronic form they sent in? I want to sign up to D2D and smashwords etc but I'd like to use my existing.. tax.. numbers or whatever. Can't find it on KDP. Your EIN or your ITIN? You'll probably need to contact the IRS if you're talking about a US taxpayer identification number/employer identification number. Keep a hard copy of IRS communications in the future, though. I recommend putting them in a safe, lockbox, or safety deposit box. 1099-MISC forms for 2015 won't be out til January or February 2016. If you received one from Amazon for tax year 2014, you should see your tax ID number on it...
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Jul 2, 2015 15:40
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 Bookreport dude posted:
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Jul 2, 2015 18:45
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Oh man if only Amazon had cheap access to a whole bunch of really good load-balancing servers, maybe then they could provide simple tools for authors to better manage their entire goddamn profession You cheap fucks
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Jul 2, 2015 18:47
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Just how many people are publishing on kindle for them to "overwhelm" Amazon's servers?
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Jul 2, 2015 18:53
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Fuego Fish posted:Just how many people are publishing on kindle for them to "overwhelm" Amazon's servers? It's a cover, Amazon wants to limit access to data that could help authors out. And they probably can't do anything to this tuguy for accessing that data but he is also apparently a bestselling author and they can mess with his books. Just the Zon being the Zon. #releasetherate
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Jul 2, 2015 19:12
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angel opportunity posted:Judging by what I've seen, most people are dropping out. The payout is just so loving low that only the dumbest of the dumb would stay in for short erotica, so my readers are going to suddenly find themselves with little to no options in KU. In one rather large romance/super-romance writing community that I'm involved with, our pulling out vs. non-pulling out poll has been hovering steadily at 50/50. Lots of worried people are jumping ship, sure, but I wouldn't call it a strong majority. Not yet, anyway. Also, just a reminder that none of us knows what the hell the payout will be. Everyone's getting over-the-top hysterical about the $0.0057 or whatever number, but that's just one possibility out of several outcomes. And in my opinion, it's not even the likeliest outcome. Amazon regularly, artificially adjusts the KU fund to whatever the hell they want, to pinch authors' pockets while trying to avoid pissing off a critical mass to the breaking point. There's no hard evidence that they won't continue that practice and throw us something meatier than a ha'penny bone when August rolls around.
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Jul 2, 2015 20:08
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Trustworthy posted:over-the-top hysterical are you loving serious quote:ha'penny bone ok you're redeemed
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Jul 2, 2015 20:11
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Oh and I wonder if someone in charge at Scribd knew in advance that Amazon would be making its KU adjustments this week. What fortuitous loving timing for them. Their completely egregious (frankly unforgivable) treatment of romance authors is going to get completely lost in Amazon's sewage tsunami.
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Jul 2, 2015 20:17
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Trustworthy posted:In one rather large romance/super-romance writing community that I'm involved with, our pulling out vs. non-pulling out poll has been hovering steadily at 50/50.
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Jul 2, 2015 20:26
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EngineerSean posted:are you loving serious Yeah, I worded that shittily, but it's really frustrating to see people jerking dozens--even hundreds--of titles from a service that done very well for them so far, just a few days after getting a pretty vague email and a day after the rollout of a new dashboard (the latter of which Amazon has never not hosed up). In the absence of hard data about what July earnings will really look like, it seems like people are mostly feeding off each other's anxiety and making some really rash decisions that might not be the smartest ones in the long run. I feel like a whole lot of worried people are going to waste a month converting and cramming their shorts through Google Play and D2D/SW or a bunch of individual storefronts, and then next month when it turns out Amazon has a shred of common sense/decency and boosts the KU fund to a not-ideal-but-still-ehhh-acceptable-I-guess level, all those same people are going to be slapping their foreheads and hating that they wasted so much time. Sure, it might go down totally differently and we could all be hosed, but the mob seems way more reactionary at this stage than it necessarily needs to be. Don't get me wrong, I'm super concerned--I'll be sending my angry emails to Jeff and posting #ShowMeYourFiguresJeffrey hashtags and poo poo too--but the KU withdrawal grace period is pretty long, so I'm going to take some deep breaths and ride it out for a month to see what happens. Or, at the very least, wait for some actual, useful information to come down the pipes. Bobby Deluxe posted:I read this the wrong way. 
Trustworthy fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Jul 2, 2015 |
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Jul 2, 2015 20:44
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Trustworthy posted:Amazon has a shred of... decency don't make this mistake
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Jul 2, 2015 20:55
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EngineerSean posted:don't make this mistake Yeah you should've seen the pained grimace I was making as I typed that
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Jul 2, 2015 21:04
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Look, saying "we don't know the figure" is bullshit at this point. We know that half a penny would have been the figure, and we know why they are doing this change. It's reasonable to think at this point that a one cent per page payout is near the high end of the pay spectrum, and also that less than half a cent is possible. We don't know where it's ultimately going to stabilize, but we do know the range of possibilities. For short erotica, you need probably 3-4 cents per page for KU to be worth it. That is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN. There's no reason for short erotica to sit around until August 15th to figure out that the pay is poo poo. The only argument for staying fully in KU at this point would be some kind of strategic move to gain visibility before making a switch, but then most of your reader base are KU readers who may or may not pay actual money per story. If your stories are long enough that you are looking at around $1 per fully read story, you have an actual tough decision to make, and waiting until August 15th makes sense. If you have long novels that earn over $1.35 per full read, it's probably going to benefit you a lot to stay in KU. You then have to factor in stuff like "how dependent do I really want to be on this volatile thing that can change--or die--at the drop of a hat with no notice whatsoever?" For me personally, even if I were writing lengths that earned near $1 per borrow, and you told me with omnipotent knowledge "KU will earn you 20% more than going wide," I'd rather go wide, because the 20% income boost isn't worth knowing that my income is built on a Jenga tower.
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Jul 2, 2015 21:11
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So I take it I picked the worst time possible to think about getting back into writing.
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Jul 2, 2015 23:34
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Shima Honnou posted:So I take it I picked the worst time possible to think about getting back into writing. It depends what you were planning to write. It's not awful to start now because you can look at what is most thrown into upheaval from this change and try to steer clear of it. Erotica shorts might end up being plenty profitable again, but RIGHT NOW they are not. I'm stuck with like 300 mailing list subscribers who assumed my books would always be free on KU, and I went from like $70 in a day on June 30, to $25 on July 1, to $5 today. I'm effectively forced to just continue writing this poo poo and hoping that once I go wide and once short erotica on KU implodes it will become profitable again overall, but you--as someone who isn't publishing anything and has no 'sunk costs' can simply choose what looks like the most sure thing and write it. The only reason I chose short erotica was because it was--as of one month ago--the most safe and sure-fire way to be able to quit my day job in like 3-4 months time. Now that is all totally gone. From my perspective, I think serialized romance or long-form novels are the best bet; if you have zero self-pub experience serialized romance is probably safest. Go for something that sells at lengths that will still get close to $1 for a fully read borrow. The only poo poo thing about that length/genre combo is the readers seem to feel entitled to the 99 cent price, so you might end up with a bunch of 33 cent royalties and 50-cent half-read KU profits, but even then it seems still better than short erotica is, for now at least. My hope, and the reason I'm still sticking with short erotica, is that the readers are NOT going to suddenly switch to longer romance; they still want short erotica, and once the dust settles I'm expecting short erotica to be $2.99 everywhere. If you're not even thinking about romance, then this doesn't really matter at all. Non-romance was never doing poo poo on KU anyway.
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Jul 2, 2015 23:41
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Good news, everyone! Amazon is now cracking down on reviews from people who "know" the author, even if it's from something like following them on Facebook or Twitter.
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Jul 3, 2015 04:31
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Jul 3, 2015 12:34
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Blue Scream posted:Good news, everyone! I'll just pretend that my laziness over setting up a social media presence was actually prescience.
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Jul 3, 2015 13:23
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Amazon: Do not promote via social media. Do not promote via Kindle Unlimited. Do not promote. Your readers will find you by magic. This is the best business model ever.
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Jul 3, 2015 13:32
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Amazon's ideal self-pub author relationship seems to be "you type in words for us and only us, if we like it we'll sell it, if we make enough money we'll throw you a little bit to keep you writing".
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Jul 3, 2015 13:41
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I made this as a kind of ironic inspirational image for writers. It has now taken a whole new meaning. Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Amazon's ideal self-pub author relationship seems to be "you type in words for us and only us, if we like it we'll sell it, if we make enough money we'll throw you a little bit to keep you writing".
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Jul 3, 2015 14:25
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 quote:Bezos: Come on, men! Type those words! You there, show me your blog.
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Jul 3, 2015 14:34
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Amazon's ideal self-pub author relationship seems to be "you type in words for us and only us, if we like it we'll sell it, if we make enough money we'll throw you a little bit to keep you writing". Is there some way to just publish one thing on there, and then direct people to go get the rest of your work at your own site? Or some other more lucrative site? (this is posted from almost complete ignorance of the business).
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Jul 3, 2015 17:06
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You can include links in the back or frontmatter of your books. I use it to direct people to sign up for my mailing list. Some retailers (okay Apple) have a problem with you linking to their competitors, but Amazon gives no fucks. Yet.
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Jul 3, 2015 18:58
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Okay, pardon me for just jumping in here, but it seems to me like everyone should give this a little time. I've got nothing invested here, just interested, but it seems to me like lots of people might buy a book, read a few pages, and then have to go make dinner or get back to work or whatever. One day's worth of pages read doesn't seem like it really means anything. I read two pages and fall asleep days and days in a row, and then read half a book all in a day when I have the time. Especially with romance and super romance, people are going to want to read when they have some uninterrupted alone time, I would think. How many people might have been looking for some holiday weekend reading, picked up a book or two while eating lunch at work, skimmed, and then went back to work? If you jump out of KU now, how will you know if they ever picked that book back up and continued reading? On that note, how long does KU continue to track pages read on a borrowed book? A month? Until it's returned? If it takes someone six months to finish a book, but they DO finish it, does the author continue to receive payments based on each month's pages?
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Jul 3, 2015 23:47
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guaranteed posted:On that note, how long does KU continue to track pages read on a borrowed book? A month? Until it's returned? If it takes someone six months to finish a book, but they DO finish it, does the author continue to receive payments based on each month's pages? If they've borrowed the book and read it later, you'll receive the payment then. I still have books getting borrowed that have been delisted since September.
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Jul 4, 2015 00:08
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guaranteed posted:Okay, pardon me for just jumping in here, but it seems to me like everyone should give this a little time. It's possible this will all level out soon. But it's possible it won't, so people are playing the surest gamble. Right now that's diversifying, and it's the early adopters that tend to make the most. Jesus, between Reddit and Amazon I feel like the corporate world has just gone completely insane over the last few days.
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Jul 4, 2015 00:30
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I recently finished a long, long, looooong zombie story that I'd been writing since high school and serialising online. Now I'm considering self-pubbing it because, obviously, the bulk of the work is done and also I am going into debt soon. Frankly I don't think it's great, since I started writing it as a teenager and I've grown a lot as a writer since then, but on the flip side there seemed to be a lot of people who liked it, so maybe that's the whole literary quality vs. pop appeal paradigm? Whatever. I should publish it, right? Amazon seems glutted with zombie fiction that sells very well.
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Jul 4, 2015 01:26
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Compile it, give it a fresh edit, a snazzy cover, maybe some EXCLUSIVE EXTRA CONTENT that wasn't serialized, upload it, and market it to the fans of the serial.
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Jul 4, 2015 02:22
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guaranteed posted:Okay, pardon me for just jumping in here, but it seems to me like everyone should give this a little time. I get this, I really do. I was trying to be optimistic - the problem is, Amazon released their pages read for last month and it comes out to about a half-cent per page. Even at a cent per page, I'd be losing 80% of my borrows revenue. Believe me, I would LOVE to come crawling back to Amazon after discovering erotica shorts can make a killing through KU after all. And if that somehow happens, I'll pivot and re-add the 35 titles I've written in the last two months. But the fact is, I was making about $40 from borrows a day and now I'm making less than $3. That's just not worth it for me. I'll (hopefully) make more than that from B&N/Smashwords sales. How long did it take you guys to get confirmation from Amazon that you were removed once you sent your ASIN's through that form? I just sent them mine; I've been camping the last couple days and just got home. Feels good, man.
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Jul 4, 2015 03:21
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Bobby Deluxe posted:The problem is that traction and momentum count for a lot, at least with erotica writing. Right now there are a lot of people who were making a lot of money out of the old system. They don't want to suddenly be making a lot less, and the reason they've been making so much is by quickly adapting to changes and opportunities as soon as they arise. I totally get that this is scary and painful and has very real consequences for a lot of people; I hope it doesn't seem like I don't. I guess I just feel like you'll lose 95% of the traction and momentum you've already gained if you jump out of KU too soon. Like I said before, I don't have a horse in this race, but if it were me, I think I'd diversify by leaving what's in KU there until I could see what happened with it, and start putting different eggs in the other baskets. Maybe put a note in my newsletters telling people to look at various other markets. Or do all your works have to be exclusive to Amazon if some of them are?
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Jul 4, 2015 03:44
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I made $30 so far today just from $2.99 sales on Amazon only. I just put all my poo poo onto D2D, so I'm hoping to get up to around ~$50/day on a weekend, which is like half to one-third what I was making on the old KU. Still...if I can hit $50/day again and grow from there, I think I just might be okay and won't have to switch from erotica to romance immediately.
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Jul 4, 2015 03:55
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psychopomp posted:Compile it, give it a fresh edit, a snazzy cover, maybe some EXCLUSIVE EXTRA CONTENT that wasn't serialized, upload it, and market it to the fans of the serial. OK. I'll have to give it an edit, so I'm not doing it any time majorly soon, but are there any good free resources that sort of hold your hand through the process? This from the OP... Sundae posted:FREE RESOURCES: ...no longer seems to exist, and while I'm sure this thread will be helpful down the line it mostly seems to be full of seasoned pros that I don't want to bug with idiot questions. Actually I do have one other question. The story itself, as I said, was serialised online in journal format, spanning an entire year. All up it's over 600,000 words (yeah, I know) so it'll obviously have to be split up quite a few times, and I was thinking of doing a 12-book series, month by month, and maybe putting the first book up for free. Is that a good idea as a hook, or do free books not actually do well because they're considered "worthless"?
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Jul 4, 2015 10:20
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