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Sundae posted:I've mentioned this before, so I'm just going to quote the post again. TL;DR: That's not what the erotica category did. They didn't make a category for the erotica authors, but rather a prison for them. Amazon are just playing the classic censorship game - balancing a fine line between being seen as draconian by banning anything that mentions sex, or being too permissive by having porn turn up in 'normal' search results. Too far in either direction results in a spike in complaints, too many complaints and revenue takes a hit, and the board wakes up and takes notice. But still, it makes money and customers do want it. So the compromise is that they haven't banned it, but they have hidden it in the so-called 'adult dungeon.' Which just means it doesn't come up in normal search results. That's pretty much how it should work from Amazon's perspective. Honestly, I've had stuff dungeoned before but all it did was make me feel surprised at how much they do let past the filters. I get that you and AO are coming at this from a visibility / revenue maximisation angle, but look at it from the point of view of two customers: A normal customer and a smut customer. Normal customer wants to find a story about subject A. Amazon wants normal customers to find stories about subject A, but they also want the porn to be strictly opt-in to prevent complaints. So they do their best to hide as much smut as they can behind the normal results and the 'click here for adult results' link where there is a keyword overlap between subject A and smut. Now smut customer, smut customer wants to find that poo poo. So they search for the term they want, click the link at the top offering them adult results, and the cornucopia opens up to them. And given that Amazon's focus isn't porn, it's miraculous that they've even made this concession. However the way it works now is that normal customers are being targeted by smut authors. Smut authors know they're doing it to get sales of opportunity from normal customers. And that is what Amazon does not want. It's not a case of 'let's find customers who are looking for smut,' it's a case of 'let's see if we can get smut in front of the normal customers despite Amazon trying their damnedest to stop us.' Yes, people buy it when it turns up there, in the same way that people would watch hardcore porn if someone managed to get it on TV at 5pm. But that's not what's supposed to happen, nor should the person who managed to do it expect to get away with it. EngineerSean posted:Anyone who writes anything like "erotica authors deserved this" is dead to me. Not all words are created equal. I'm talking about the outliers writing things they knew they shouldn't, gaming the search and category systems designed to hide it, and making upwards of $10-20k a month. I'm just astounded that people who built a business model around tricking a retail giant into selling things it didn't want to sell are so indignant now that the giant in question has finally found a way to shut them down - hitting them in the wallet. One thing I will agree is that they do need better guidelines for what's banned entirely, what's allowed behind the adult filter, and what's allowed in general search. But with how much erotica authors have shown they're willing to game the system the second they find out how it works, do you blame them for not clearly spelling out the rules? In the same way that the KENP system might eventually lead to novel authors getting a better share of the pot now the big smut authors are dropping out of Select, maybe it'll mean Amazon can also take a look at the way genuine erotica is presented in search. But I doubt it. Like SullaMarius pointed out, that's not the focus of their business. My understanding is that Amazon are constantly tweaking the search algorithms to make sure people see the right thing in results. Time spent making sure Erotica is properly represented is time they could be spending elsewhere. And like 90% of companies in the western world, they have to maintain a veneer of being 'family friendly' by hiding the porn. So yeah, they hid the porn. I knew it was a mistake typing that last night. But honestly, the bottom line is that some people were taking the piss, they knew they were taking the piss, and now they're trying to pretend Amazon's the bad guy here. Innocent authors incomes may have been harmed in the fallout, but that's the compromise they've had to make for now unfortunately. I don't like it, but I do understand where they're coming from. Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 09:41 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 09:24
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ravenkult posted:You should read more carefully. Editors get a line in the front matter and that's it. They don't get accreditation on the cover or on Amazon. Yeah it was 4 in the morning so I got a bit confused. Translators definitely absolutely get that poo poo in standard templates and ive seen some rates and agreements for editors and copywriters so I must have been blurring it a bit. "Edited by" is a pretty important distinction in academic referencing (for collections of letters etc) and ive been editing a bunch of that lately so it must have filtered through my dumb sleep deprived brain Sulla Faex fucked around with this message at 11:52 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 11:50
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Hey, looks like within hours of B&N un-loving itself from its poorly timed site 'upgrade', I got my first wide sale. That one sale probably earned me as much as leaving all my shorts in KU for the month-to-date, so if anything else, it's been worth it.
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Jul 8, 2015 13:33
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Yep, all my poo poo just hit B&N now too, waiting eagerly for the sales to pour in...
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Jul 8, 2015 14:09
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angel opportunity posted:Yep, all my poo poo just hit B&N now too, waiting eagerly for the sales to pour in... I'm trickling everything out, trying to maintain the sort of schedule I had when I released things in the first place. Figure it might be good for momentum's sake.
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Jul 8, 2015 14:40
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I debated doing that, but I release 2-3 new shorts per week anyway, so I figure they are going to trickle in either way, I might as well have a solid back catalog while they trickle in to new markets. ARe and Excitica are such a hassle though that I'll probably put 2-3 stories up every Friday just to save my sanity of not having to do it all at once.
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Jul 8, 2015 15:04
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2-3 shorts a week? Christ, no wonder I've been floundering. I can't keep up with the competition.
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Jul 8, 2015 15:13
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ravenkult posted:You should read more carefully. Editors get a line in the front matter and that's it. They don't get accreditation on the cover or on Amazon. I'm an editor and am in full agreement with this. A line in the front matter and passing my name along to any writer you think would benefit from my services is all I want.
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Jul 8, 2015 15:47
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Soichiro posted:2-3 shorts a week? In all seriousness, this is like the baseline you want to hit. I do three on a lazy week, and upwards of five on weeks I actually get off my rear end and spend a few hours a night writing - but then, I've always been fast. In heart-warming news: I've actually seen a sales increase sine I pulled out of KU, and it doesn't seem to have faded. While I was in KU I was averaging 5-6 sales a day and 30+ borrows; now I have no borrows and 10-12 sales a day. The thought that some of my borrowing customers like what I'm doing enough to become full-paying customers is almost a better feeling than the money. 
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Jul 8, 2015 17:08
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My shorts are 6-7k words, and I try to write 3k words per day, and I work 40 hours per week. I do hit a crazy burnout point usually on Friday and Saturday where I just can't manage to write, but I'm going to try to fix that but diversifying a bit. Starting a new series helped with that as well. If you don't have a full-time job you should be able to make like 5+ shorts per week. For me, this is totally a "hit this as hard as I can so that I can quit my loving job" thing. I can't really imagine doing this as a sustained income supplement long-term, because it's consuming so much of my free time. I actually enjoy doing it, and the hard work feels good, but it would feel a lot better if I were doing it full time. If you're publishing less than one thing per week and writing shorts, which have terrible staying power, I don't see how you can really expect good results.
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Jul 8, 2015 17:22
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angel opportunity posted:If you're publishing less than one thing per week and writing shorts, which have terrible staying power, I don't see how you can really expect good results. Back in KU 1.0, I'd have disagreed with this. I release about 2 shorts every two weeks (both at once) and was making approx $13-15K a month on them.
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Jul 8, 2015 17:35
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Bobby Deluxe posted:And not all erotica is created equal. I'm not talking about people writing smut within the guidelines and making $1k a month. I suspect they're probably going to keep rolling along, happily making scratch and diversifying into other storefronts. Lol if you make $1k a month you're fine, but if you make a lot you're obviously thwarting the system. quote:I'm just astounded that people who built a business model around tricking a retail giant into selling things it didn't want to sell are so indignant now that the giant in question has finally found a way to shut them down - hitting them in the wallet. Let me ask you a quick question. If you have cancer, and the doctors want to get rid of it, is it better to excise the tumor or go for chemotherapy? quote:One thing I will agree is that they do need better guidelines for what's banned entirely, what's allowed behind the adult filter, and what's allowed in general search. But with how much erotica authors have shown they're willing to game the system the second they find out how it works, do you blame them for not clearly spelling out the rules? yes
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Jul 8, 2015 19:13
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I have literally asked Amazon to not give me a form letter after one of their dumb mad emails and for them to give me a clear definition of what I'd done wrong. They responded with a form letter. They don't give two shits about us, please don't delude yourself into thinking it's a pleasant working relationship. If they weren't the only real viable ebook retailer I would've jumped off that ship a long time ago.
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Jul 8, 2015 19:42
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I'm not going to argue with Sean, he's been doing this a lot longer than I have. And the more I think about it, the shittier it is that Amazon have hidden most of their rules so that writers have had to discover them by testing boundaries and getting stuff banned, dungeoned or miscategorised. But you must concede that certain authors were making it difficult for Amazon to keep ignoring the problem. Something like this had to happen eventually.
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Jul 8, 2015 19:54
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angel opportunity posted:If you don't have a full-time job you should be able to make like 5+ shorts per week. That's 30k words a week. 120k a month. Two and a half novels. Crazy.
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Jul 8, 2015 20:08
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A novel is more work though. For shorts you can shoot it out with minimal planning and do one quick editing pass. I can write 1k words of the shorts I do in about 30 minutes now. If it takes one hour to write 2k words, then you're only looking at ~3 hours of in-the-chair writing per short. Even if you do five shorts in a week, that's like 15 hours of writing per week. You'll spend several of those hours being unproductive while writing, and you'll need more time to write blurbs, make covers, etc., but a full-time job is 40 hours of work. Think how much you could actually write if you wrote for eight hours per day, five days per week. Your brain will probably fry trying to write that much, but I've seen people on the off-site who publish one short every single day. I've heard people say they wake up at 8am, and write shorts all morning, take a break, then write novels until 4 or 5pm. If you want to justify quitting your job to do this, you definitely should be writing a lot, even if it's not eight hours per day. I keep dreaming about being able to do something like that, but instead I'm writing after getting home from working for eight hours, and usually on the weekend I feel totally spent, but still force myself to write more. I'm sure the reality of doing this full time would make it really hard to keep yourself so disciplined, but I at least hope that after working so hard to earn my ability to quit my day job, that I will not take it for granted and be able to work really hard at writing and treat it like another full-time job. As much as I've complained about the KU changes, it's actually fortunate that they happened when they did. If they hadn't, I would have been making $5,000/month probably next month, then more from there, and I would have quit my job. I'm lucky that the bubble got popped BEFORE I quit my job. Now I see it's going to be a lot more work to get up to $5,000/month, but I know it's still possible.
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Jul 8, 2015 20:23
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angel opportunity posted:As much as I've complained about the KU changes, it's actually fortunate that they happened when they did. If they hadn't, I would have been making $5,000/month probably next month, then more from there, and I would have quit my job. I'm lucky that the bubble got popped BEFORE I quit my job. Now I see it's going to be a lot more work to get up to $5,000/month, but I know it's still possible. You're not the only one who was getting ready to quit the day job.  I was sitting here going "holy poo poo, I'm gonna break $100K in super-romance alone this year!" and prepping for the end of the day job. NOOOOOOOOOPE.
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Jul 8, 2015 20:27
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Do those of you planning to quit your day jobs for this not worry about the long-term sustainability? I realise that right now many of you are making way more money from this than you did on your day job, or than most people do in their day jobs, but do you feel you can keep that up until retirement? What do you do about superannuation/pension/401k? What do those of you who are American do for healthcare? I guess it's actually no different from being self-employed or running a small business, but some Marge Simpson-like voice in the back of my head thinks it's reckless. Or maybe it's just baggage I picked up from all my old creative writing courses when Amazon was a blip on the horizon, and I distinctly remember one of my professors telling me that the number of authors in Australia who lived solely off their writing could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
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Jul 8, 2015 22:17
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I would have to be making an ABSURDLY large amount of money to ever quit my day job. Even then, I might not: I like having health insurance, thanks.
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Jul 8, 2015 22:26
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I quit my day job last year to write full-time. No, I don't worry about long-term sustainability because I've saved enough to live for 5-10 years without getting another job if I had to. Self-employment is the tits when it comes to retirement savings - I can contribute up to $52k a year / 20% of profits into my solo 401k. More expensive healthcare, but not by that much, and you get an HSA deduction if you're self-employed. I also have the fail-safe fallback of math tutoring, because high schoolers will always hate calculus.
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Jul 8, 2015 22:35
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freebooter posted:Do those of you planning to quit your day jobs for this not worry about the long-term sustainability? I realise that right now many of you are making way more money from this than you did on your day job, or than most people do in their day jobs, but do you feel you can keep that up until retirement? What do you do about superannuation/pension/401k? What do those of you who are American do for healthcare?
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Jul 8, 2015 22:37
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freebooter posted:Do those of you planning to quit your day jobs for this not worry about the long-term sustainability? I realise that right now many of you are making way more money from this than you did on your day job, or than most people do in their day jobs, but do you feel you can keep that up until retirement? What do you do about superannuation/pension/401k? What do those of you who are American do for healthcare? To be fair, it's not like any given day job is a sure thing for the long term.
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Jul 8, 2015 22:38
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Anyone who has ever read the BFC subforum knows everything I have to say about my day job.  quote:Do those of you planning to quit your day jobs for this not worry about the long-term sustainability? I realise that right now many of you are making way more money from this than you did on your day job, or than most people do in their day jobs, but do you feel you can keep that up until retirement? What do you do about superannuation/pension/401k? What do those of you who are American do for healthcare? Short answers in order: #1 - I worry less about long-term writing sustainability than I worry about long-term day job sustainability. I can make way more as a writer than I can as a scientist. #2 - Same answer as #1. There is no such thing as "retirement" for most of the USA anymore, and that includes my career in spite of my day job paying drastically more than the American household income. The vast majority of Americans cannot rely on their career to last to retirement. This has nothing to do with savings and everything to do with job instability. #3 - A quick Google search tells me that the average employee 401(k) match/superannuation is 2.7%. That is entirely something to sneeze at when you can open your own self-employed retirement accounts with equivalent or higher contribution limits and you have higher earning potential. (IF you have higher earning potential, rather. Some people, this will not apply to. Most, though... absolutely.) #4 - Thankfully, we now have the ACA. It is not a godsend, but it now makes healthcare much more affordable and readily available even to people with pre-existing conditions. Given the cuts to employer plans/subsidies over the last ten years, a lot of workplace health benefits are pretty sub-par these days. I have no idea how bad they are because that's not something I was able to find in an easy google search, but speaking for my last two jobs in the pharma industry, I'd sum up my benefits as  . I've worked for three of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world and don't even get prescription coverage, and I pay over $6,000 a year for employee+spouse benefits that suck horribly. Yes, doing this is a risk. However, it's a risk that has its rewards as well. You have your own schedules. You're your own boss. You reap what you sow in terms of income/effort. You're effectively running a small business, and hopefully it's something you like doing. (If not, you have bigger problems.) Speaking purely for my own industry (pharmaceuticals), it's no bigger a risk than staying employed as a scientist. I do not have career stability and never will, so why not be my own boss with that sort of non-stability? It's not like I'm missing out on anything fun or worthwhile to humanity.
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Jul 8, 2015 22:55
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Bobby Deluxe posted:I'm not going to argue with Sean, he's been doing this a lot longer than I have. And the more I think about it, the shittier it is that Amazon have hidden most of their rules so that writers have had to discover them by testing boundaries and getting stuff banned, dungeoned or miscategorised. You didn't answer my question (and I assume it's intentional). If you have a batch of cancerous cells that are causing a problem, do you excise those cells or do you start chemotherapy?
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Jul 8, 2015 23:07
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Thanks for the replies. I guess my gut feeling partly comes from the fact that since I enjoy writing anyway, I do it in my spare time regardless of how profitable it is - I think I've earned less than $500 from selling short stories to magazines in the last three years. I'd probably (at this stage in my life, anyway) be more inclined to keep the double-income stream rather than abandon the day job. A massive incentive to being self-employed as a writer, to me, would be being able to move out of a major city. That alone would massively slash living costs, in Australia and the UK at any rate.
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Jul 9, 2015 00:05
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EngineerSean posted:You didn't answer my question (and I assume it's intentional). If you have a batch of cancerous cells that are causing a problem, do you excise those cells or do you start chemotherapy? Maybe pick a better analogy? Some cancers are easy to cut out, some respond well to chemo cocktails? Maybe some super romance authors are metastasizing into other categories is a cancer, sure. Amazon's clearly valuing their image more than the money they were making from it, which again makes me wish B&N would fire back up once more. It's still my bigger money maker, though I think this month Amazon might swing back into majority despite the KU upset inexplicably - and I haven't put anything on B&N in over a year. Edit: Nevermind, misread things. Not worth arguing about anyway. Apologies if I've come off as antagonistic. Mortanis fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Jul 9, 2015 |
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Jul 9, 2015 00:46
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Mortanis posted:(even though we all know it's violating the spirit and intent of what Amazon wants), How do you know Amazon wants otherwise? It would be downright easy for them to stamp out "miscategorization" - the fact they haven't yet suggests they don't care. Going by what I know about big companies and the people who work in them, the people at Amazon don't give a poo poo either way. They just don't want bad press. If anything, there's probably a project manager somewhere who looks slightly better at performance review time if Amazon makes more money by selling ebooks and is ignoring or deprioritizing super romance writers as long as no concerned parents send Jeff Dean emails about how they're offended that Amazon sells such stuff.
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Jul 9, 2015 00:52
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EngineerSean posted:You didn't answer my question (and I assume it's intentional). If you have a batch of cancerous cells that are causing a problem, do you excise those cells or do you start chemotherapy? Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Jul 9, 2015 |
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Jul 9, 2015 00:54
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Bobby Deluxe posted:I don't understand the question, I would have thought both. In the UK that's fairly standard, cut out the growth and then if the patient's strong enough, hit chemo to catch anything they missed. Both is actually the correct answer. If you start chemotherapy (or a new payment structure designed to starve works you don't like) without removing the mass of bad cells (scammers or other works you don't like), what happens first? Does the body die off first or does the cancer? Do you end up losing more good tissue if you remove the tumor before chemotherapy or not? The last hint I'll give you is: the chemotherapy is negatively affecting many "good" cells as well, and saying that they don't deserve to bitch about it is callous and cold to me in an industry where we should all be trying to help each other.
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Jul 9, 2015 01:29
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Mortanis posted:Maybe pick a better analogy? lets get pedantic
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Jul 9, 2015 01:31
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Visible, Sean. Visible! Let's Get Pedantic is the bestselling guide to the Debate & Discussion forum.
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Jul 9, 2015 02:27
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EngineerSean posted:The last hint I'll give you is: the chemotherapy is negatively affecting many "good" cells as well, and saying that they don't deserve to bitch about it is callous and cold to me in an industry where we should all be trying to help each other. But still, I don't entirely blame Amazon for the changes they've made. I've been trying to be careful to say 'some' authors were abusing the system, and I still think they were. I also think their actions probably contributed to Amazon taking action like this. Amazon has handled the situation terribly. But if we defend the people who were using black-hat tactics in the name of community solidarity, it just means we end up hoisting the blame entirely onto Amazon and learning nothing from the situation. As much as you have the right to complain about your loss of income, I have the right to point out that the KU changes are likely a reaction to non erotica categories getting filled up with short smut, in particular short smut the authors knew they shouldn't be writing. Obviously I don't like it, nor do I take any pleasure in seeing honest writers losing money. But I do understand where Amazon are coming from.
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Jul 9, 2015 11:11
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Jul 9, 2015 12:34
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How are they defining bestsellers in that? Top 100 per genre? Top 1000? The Top 100 will always be dominated, steady-state, by longer works. It's the things hiding back just outside the Top 100 / Top 1000 where the huge KU money is made. Prior to the change, I had approximately 250-300 borrows per day from things hanging around the 2000-4000 rank range. Nowhere near the top of the lists, but a wonderful pile of income. Now... not so much. 
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Jul 9, 2015 14:17
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I know the graph is from the authorearnings website but I wasn't able to track down the corresponding post in a few minutes of searching.
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Jul 9, 2015 14:20
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So I guess here's a question. I was already looking to move into novels (60k-ish, which I can produce monthly with no real issue) when KU 2.0 was announced, because I'm pretty burnt out on shorts. I'm also aiming to move out of super-romance into romance/thriller/mystery. Would KU still be an appropriate venue for that? Or do we just have no real idea how it might shake out until the numbers come down on August 15?
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Jul 9, 2015 14:48
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Hm. Nook closing down international access. Not great. http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/07/08/the-beginning-of-the-end-bn-shutters-the-international-nook-store/
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Jul 9, 2015 15:41
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Beautiful. Just what I wanted to see while going wide back to the only other even remotely viable platform.
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Jul 9, 2015 15:53
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Toaster Beef posted:So I guess here's a question. Based on the numbers Amazon released, last month's pay rate was about .0058 per page. But since KENPC numbers are so inflated, a 60k novel could get you around 1.80-2.00 for a full read. Which is better than 1.35. But that's a lot of assumptions (rate, readthroughs, etc). As for me, assuming .0058 per page, I'm doing okay. Still not making huge stacks of cash but I'm on track to break 2k again this month (hopefully closer to 3k). I'm growing slowly but steadily. So KU2 seems to be fine for longer works; it's the shorts that it gutted. But the truth is, nobody knows. Really, nobody knows for a few months, because Amazon can do whatever it wants to do, and only one month isn't much of an indicator.
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Jul 9, 2015 16:19
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Sundae posted:Beautiful. Just what I wanted to see while going wide back to the only other even remotely viable platform. This might not be as bad a piece of news as it seems. Supposedly the international stores were a bit of a joke for English language authors (Australia might be the exception?). Nook is bleeding out but it's not dead yet, and if they have to amputate some limbs to keep the torso alive (goddamn it Sean lets have a more positive analogy next time) maybe it will work out for a few more years.
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