I’m not surprised. This kind of thing has been going on with free books for a while now. I’m a big fan of free reads-- a lot of e-book authors might offer the first of a series for free, or do a promo sale (free for a day/week/whatever.) If you know where to look (www.centslessbooks.com is great) you can find just about anything. I’ve downloaded a couple thousand of freebies, at least. Quality is a huge variable. Some are clearly a bunch of crap thrown together to make a quick buck and/or harvest email addys (“you can get a bonus book by signing up at my website…”) Others are people following their writing dreams. Of those… some books are good, many are ok, and a few are OMGWTFIdon’teven BAD. Some just fail to catch my interest and those books never get finished. There are gems out there though, authors who clearly need to get signed up with a major publisher, and I’ve gladly paid to keep reading their works.
Tldr: I’m not suprised. Sturgeon’s Law, and if there’s a system, gamers gonna game it.
Thank you for that tidbit of info. I was going to sign up for the KU trial month right before I went on vacation and use it to taste-test a bunch of stuff in my Kindle-maybe-buy list. I may still do that, but now I know to expect very little from it. OTOH, Amazon just announced that they are making KU available by subscription, something like $10 per month. I might dip my toe into it occasionally for that price.
You say that like there isn’t a sucker born every minute.
As if people doing something, any amount of participating people, gives such a predatory practice legitimacy.
Amazon needs to pay the authors and publishers. Given that subscribers are essentially paying a flat monthly fee to read anything and everything, they’re probably using the same model as Prime Video.
Besides, authors have been paid by the word before.
Paid by the word for a complete article. Or essay, or whatever in a mutually beneficial arrangement whereupon writers produced a whole product, not click-bait in novel form.
After all, who does this system most reward, but those who cater to the short attention span, the prolific fluff writer, the copy/paste artist,
the amateur who hopes to make it big but of course, never will because nothing is easier than closing a book.
Amazon continues to dream of a day when all writers are paid minimum wage and work from cubicles.
Yeah, except Kindle Unlimited is meant to be the opposite of click bait, because the authors do not get paid just to trick people into clicking on and downloading a book. They don’t get paid at all (last I read up on this) if readers abandon the book before completing at least 10% of the book. The system is designed to pay authors who write things that people actually read, black hat tricks notwithstanding.
Selling books by the unit (physical books or electronic ones), based on blurbs and advanced publicity is the actual click bait equivalent you are so blithely ignoring in your haste to condemn Amazon. I’ve lost count of the book I’ve bought based on blurbs or reviews that I didn’t like, but too late. The publishers already had my money and don’t care.
“@Blaze_Curry is the new (and terrifying) face of horror. For a better understanding of the online marketplace, read his posts. Once I passed the third word, I couldn’t stop reading, impossible to put down. He makes the rest of us look like we’ve been asleep for the past ten years.” - Stephen King
Amazon already holds KU funds for two months from the end of each calendar month before paying out, so they have plenty of time to investigate suspicious accounts before sending out the checks. All that’s lacking is the will to commit resources to it (so far, at least), because the losses are currently sustained by legitimate authors rather than Amazon itself. They have little reason to care as long as subscribers don’t make too much of a fuss, and since Amazon now has a virtual monopoly on the self-pub market there’s little incentive to act.
The usual reaction to issues such as this is a wild, nonsensical overreaction that hurts legitimate authors for the sake of expediency. Amazon doesn’t like nuance or a light touch when it comes to nipping issues in the bud (see the ill-advised switch to a per page payout last year). They’re much more likely to sit on their hands until the summer (when they usually roll out ‘upgrades’ to the KU program) then respond with new. crazy, scorched earth rules that make little sense and make the program much more difficult to use.
Sorry, yes. Not only have I been in the industry writing for Canadian, American, and UK outlets, i covered the industry as a journalist. Authors take all sorts of degrading abuse thinking that bragging and puffing is going to mask the stench. It is like an abusive marriage a person endures because they married someone with a bit of money and clout; so it is all okay.
No it is not okay. It is an exploitative business where abusers and abusers alike pretend it is an enviable and good place. It is not. Writers are exploited and screwed over every day and it is a place where people lie through their teeth how getting kicked in the teeth is wonderful.
I will not keep silent and I will not enable the desperate and deluded.
Is it? Does Amazon provide a drop of value in the process? Any editorial work, production work, anything? They set it up so that the author’s royalty rate goes down if users read more pages. Does that make sense?
So Kindle Unlimited accounting system has a bug that was probably the result of a resource-saving hack (i.e. don’t have to keep data on all the pages you read in every book). Obviously paying by the page is not perfect, but what metric do you use to make it fair? By the book would cause a flood of 5 page books. By the time spent reading means you only need to keep your kindle open on a single page forever.
It’s not an easy problem to solve correctly, but this thing coming out probably means they’ll invest more time in coming up with a better algorithm.
What makes it even harder is that they don’t just need an algorithm that works but one that looks good. Authors want some semblance of transparency. You can’t just tell them that your black box of a classifier has decided how much money they should get this month.
Considering that those 3000 page books are apparently pure spam, they degrade the quality of service. Quality of service is important for subscriptions. So I think they’re inherently incentivised, especially now since the issue can prevent some new subscribers from joining.
