A Little Venting

So, some of you may have heard (though most of you probably not) that Amazon changed the payout method for the authors of books in the Kindle Unlimited program. The reason for this change was that a very large number of authors were gaming or scamming the system.

Eh, gaming is too kind, they were scamming it and they knew it.

See, in the old system, you got paid when your book was borrowed and someone read 10%. Everyone got the same amount, no matter how big, or how small. So needless to say the scammers took advantage of this, which not only drove the share from $2.40 down to $1.35, but it forced Amazon to pour tens of millions of dollars into the program to keep the people who were actually WRITING BOOKS from leaving (that would be people like me, BTW).

Now the scammers came in two flavors. The worse were the people who would put out a ten or so page book, with one or two pages of original content, and then the rest was all just shit cut and pasted off of the internet. Those people, as a whole, raked in millions, and as fast as Amazon could find them, they left and created a new account.

The other flavor were people who just wrote short stories, lots and lots of short stories, usually serials and series. They'd take what would have been, say a 200 page book, and would turn it into twenty 10 page books, so suddenly they're getting $20 instead of $1.35 like everyone else. Those people scammed Amazon out of TENS of MILLIONS of dollars.

'But Wait' you say, 'How was that a scam? They were selling real stories!'
Well no, they weren't. You see, if they were selling real stories, then people would have been buying their stories on Amazon, in regular sales. But they weren't, their actual sales were probably less than 1% of their borrows. They'd make between 3K and 10K a month (some way more than that) from their borrows, and maybe $10 a month from their actual sales. They'd go on and on about how great they were, but as long as someone read the first page or two, and then moved on to the next one, they made bank. Because the people borrowing the books are getting them for free, so they don't care, and they're not going to complain.

These people are now crying and screaming the loudest. They ripped off Amazon by taking advantage of the system, and now that Amazon got tired of losing about a hundred million dollars and went to a system that is a lot more fair, they're all upset that they can't continue to publish shit and rake in money hand over fist.

I like to point at them and laugh. A lot. Because they got what they deserved, it's just too bad it didn't happen a lot sooner.

For me, this may very well mean that my Novels will start getting more money, instead of less, because there aren't all these scamphlet writers diluting the pot. Also this has encouraged me, and a lot of other writers, to put our longer and more expensive works in the program. Which is what Amazon wants. They don't want a sea of short stories written by scammers trying to rip off the system, they want decent novels and longer books. And with this system, that only pays on pages actually read, if you fill up 90%  of your book with crap, or if you can't write all that well to keep people reading, you won't get money you haven't earned.

Despite what you may be hearing, this isn't a loss for authors, but a win. It's a loss for people who were ripping off the system. Those who can actually write will adjust accordingly and move on. Those that can't, well I really don't care what happens to them.