I’m certain that lots of you in Romancelandia have been listening to about the michigas surrounding bookstuffers and the way they’re leaching money out of Kindle Unlimited at an astounding rate. That is one thing that will have an effect on readers in addition to writers, as a result of if enough authors can’t make a residing with their books and should take other jobs to pay the payments, it means much less books to learn other than yet one more variant on The Dirty Billionaires Subsequent Door And Their Secret Child (A Compilation). Christ, I hope that’s not a real e book. Anyway, it seems that anyone can write an electronic mail to Jeff Bezos, the head honcho at Amazon, and so I've just despatched off the following letter. If you’re an author uninterested in seeing your KU earnings dwindle in favor of some faceless businessman using underhanded techniques to pimp their "compilation" on KU, or you’re a reader bored with wading via acres of prettily covered crap in hopes of finding a decent e book, you might want to write down him, as nicely.

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There’s power in numbers, and if Amazon realizes that this might hit their bottom line they'll take action. My name is Melanie Fletcher. I write SF beneath my own title and romance below the title Nicola Cameron, and since November 2015 I’ve also been able to self-publish my work using the Kindle Direct Publishing system. At first, I was completely delighted with KDP; it gave me an opportunity to publish novels that weren’t simply marketable by the massive Five publishers in NYC, and I was able to build on my readership with my first self-pubbed novel, Empress of Storms. Empress wound up earning just a little over $16,000, primarily through Amazon, and that gave me hope for a viable career as an impartial creator. Besides that Empress’s sequel, Palace of Scoundrels, didn’t do nearly in addition to the primary guide. Sequels hardly ever match the success of the first book in a collection, however Palace’s gross sales were unusually lackluster considering that there had been numerous requests for a sequel and that i performed all the same promotion activities that I used for Empress.

The critiques for Palace have been uniformly good, from Amazon reviewers as well as from skilled overview sites, so its drop in gross sales puzzled me. However I shrugged it off as a studying expertise and wrote a SF romance, considering that putting out a separate title would possibly help. It didn’t sell properly. I went again and wrote one other sequel for Empress. It didn’t promote effectively. I then wrote a contemporary romantic comedy, one among the most popular subgenres of romance there may be. You can guess how the gross sales went for that. I’ve carried out due diligence on all my books as regards to promotion - buying advertising for them, sending out review copies, haunting social media to speak them up, appearing at romance conventions to advertise them, every thing that a respectable indie creator needs to do in order to get the word out about their e book. But regardless of uniformly good evaluations, each on and off amazon ebooks, my gross sales have been getting more and amazon ebooks more worse despite a rising backlist.

I spoke with other indie authors and they all complained about the identical thing-their gross sales at Amazon had been plummeting. When an indie writer resembling Sam Crescent, Free Ebooks who has a huge, loyal fanbase and might produce titles monthly, was seeing her sales dwindling, I didn’t have a shot in hell of saving my career. And then I learned about bookstuffers who had been gaming the KU system. I’m positive you’ve properly aware of the scenario by now and how they use scam tactics corresponding to adding extra books to a title and instructing their readers to flip to the tip as a way to have all of the pages register as having been read. Not only are they driving out official authors from KU, however their techniques then gamed Amazon’s ranking algorithms and pushed them into bestseller slots that, frankly, they didn’t deserve. This hijacking of Amazon’s rating system has had quite a lot of unfortunate knock-on results - it’s rendered Amazon’s rating system is no longer a dependable tool for readers looking out for new titles and authors, and it’s pushed legit indie authors like me fully out of the spotlight.

As for KU, I can’t afford to place my books in it anymore. Mr. Bezos, I don’t want the KU system to shut down. Not only does it makes you money, but it surely allows a lot of readers who don’t have additional cash for books to read as a lot as they like, and maybe even find a new favourite writer. I’ve included my titles in KU for that very purpose earlier than I realized it was losing me revenue and needed to stop. I might love to be able to put my books in KU again, however for that to occur it must be made equitable. Changing your terms of service to forbid greater than 10% of "extra" material in a ebook is not going to stop bookstuffers-they’ll simply discover one other approach to sport the system, as they already have by labeling their stuffed books "compilations." I am begging you to have your programming workforce take a very good, laborious take a look at KU and give you a strong technique of monitoring it and stopping such abuses. Pattern evaluation that acknowledges additional material already in KU as a standalone title, or repetitive use of additional materials in a number of titles (the place a bookstuffer publishes E-book A with BCDEF additional material, Ebook B with CDEFA extra material, E-book C with DEFAB extra material, and so on.) and flags a title for elimination is one way of doing this. I do know this could be a severe undertaking, but sir, I’ve heard from numerous readers who are now saying that they’ve been burned too many instances 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 achieved with their rampant abuse of KU; while they’re solely hurting my bottom line in the meanwhile, in the event that they keep driving folks away from KU they’ll eventually start hurting yours as nicely.