I’m certain that a lot of you in Romancelandia have been listening to concerning the michigas surrounding bookstuffers and how they’re leaching money out of Kindle Unlimited at an astounding fee. This is something that will have an effect on readers in addition to writers, as a result of if sufficient authors can’t make a dwelling with their books and have to take other jobs to pay the payments, it means less books to read aside from yet another variant on The Soiled Billionaires Subsequent Door And Their Secret Baby (A Compilation). Christ, I hope that’s not a real e book. Anyway, it turns out that anybody can write an e mail to Jeff Bezos, the head honcho at amazon ebooks, and so I've simply sent off the next letter. If you’re an author bored with seeing your KU revenue dwindle in favor of some faceless businessman using underhanded techniques to pimp their "compilation" on KU, or you’re a reader bored with wading by way of acres of prettily coated crap in hopes of finding an honest e-book, you might want to write down him, as properly.

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There’s strength in numbers, and if Amazon realizes that this could hit their bottom line they are going to take action. My identify is Melanie Fletcher. I write SF beneath my very own name and romance underneath the name Nicola Cameron, and since November 2015 I’ve additionally been in a position to self-publish my work utilizing the Kindle Direct Publishing system. At first, I was absolutely delighted with KDP; it gave me a chance to publish novels that weren’t simply marketable by the large 5 publishers in NYC, and I used to be in a position to construct on my readership with my first self-pubbed novel, Empress of Storms. Empress wound up earning a little bit over $16,000, primarily through Amazon, and that gave me hope for a viable career as an impartial author. Besides that Empress’s sequel, Palace of Scoundrels, didn’t do nearly as well as the first book. Sequels rarely match the success of the first ebook in a series, but Palace’s sales had been unusually lackluster considering that there had been quite a few requests for a sequel and that i carried out all the identical promotion activities that I used for Empress.

The reviews for KDP Palace have been uniformly good, from Amazon reviewers in addition to from professional overview sites, so its drop in sales puzzled me. But I shrugged it off as a studying experience and wrote a SF romance, pondering that putting out a separate title might assist. It didn’t sell nicely. I went back and wrote another sequel for Empress. It didn’t promote properly. I then wrote a contemporary romantic comedy, certainly one of the most popular subgenres of romance there is. You can guess how the gross sales went for that. I’ve accomplished due diligence on all my books as regards to promotion - buying promoting for them, sending out review copies, haunting social media to speak them up, showing at romance conventions to promote them, all the things that a reputable indie writer must do in an effort to get the word out about their ebook. However despite uniformly good evaluations, both on and off Amazon, my gross sales were getting increasingly worse despite a growing backlist.

I spoke with different indie authors and all of them complained about the same factor-their sales at Amazon were plummeting. When an indie creator Kindle similar to Sam Crescent, who has an enormous, loyal fanbase and can produce titles month-to-month, was seeing her sales dwindling, I didn’t have a shot in hell of saving my profession. After which I learned about bookstuffers who have been gaming the KU system. I’m certain you’ve nicely aware of the scenario by now and the way they use rip-off ways equivalent to adding further books to a title and instructing their readers to flip to the tip in an effort to have all of the pages register as having been learn. Not only are they driving out professional authors from KU, however their tactics then gamed Amazon’s ranking algorithms and pushed them into bestseller slots that, frankly, they didn’t deserve. This hijacking of Amazon’s ranking system has had a lot of unlucky knock-on effects - it’s rendered Amazon’s ranking system is not a reliable software for Amazon Ebooks readers looking out for brand new titles and authors, and it’s pushed professional indie authors like me fully out of the highlight.

As for KU, I can’t afford to put my books in it anymore. Mr. Bezos, I don’t want the KU system to shut down. Not solely does it makes you money, however it allows lots of readers who don’t have further money for books to learn as a lot as they like, and perhaps even discover a new favorite creator. I’ve included my titles in KU for that very function before I realized it was losing me earnings and needed to stop. I would love to be in a position to place my books in KU once more, however for that to occur it must be made equitable. Altering your terms of service to forbid more than 10% of "extra" materials in a guide will not stop bookstuffers-they’ll simply find another method to sport the system, as they have already got by labeling their stuffed books "compilations." I am begging you to have your programming group take a good, onerous look at KU and provide you with a sturdy method of monitoring it and preventing such abuses. Sample analysis that acknowledges extra material already in KU as a standalone title, or repetitive use of extra materials in a number of titles (where a bookstuffer publishes Book A with BCDEF additional material, E book B with CDEFA further materials, Book C with DEFAB additional materials, and so forth.) and flags a title for removal is one way of doing this. I know this would be a critical enterprise, however sir, I’ve heard from numerous readers who are now saying that they’ve been burned too many occasions by KU scammers and are cancelling KU or will only learn Large 5 books or titles from trusted authors. This is what the bookstuffers have accomplished with their rampant abuse of KU; while they’re solely hurting my backside line at the moment, in the event that they keep driving people away from KU they’ll finally begin hurting yours as well.