Effective immediately I am pulling all of my books out of Kindle Unlimited (KU). Apparently someone at Amazon is engaging in a witch hunt and is shutting down authors, completely destroying their livelihoods.
I'm not talking about small time authors either, I'm talking about the name authors in the genre in which I write. I realize that I will probably be next, and I can not afford to lose my income, that it is far better for me just to take a hit from no longer being in the KU program.
If you are an author, I would highly recommend you drop out of KU as well. Remember, Amazon can not be questioned or appealed to. You can sue them, that's about it.
Now, some of my books will still be in KU for the next few months, because it's a 90 day sign up. I will be contacting them tomorrow to see if I can get everything pulled immediately. Financially, I just can not take this risk.
Are going to continue writing or are you done? You’re one of my favorite authors and I’d hate to see you stop.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to continue writing, it's my job now, I quit doing the consulting job 3 years ago. That's why I'm so upset about this, I just lost half my income by dropping out of KU, but the risk of staying in is just too great now. I just hope I can get all of my books out of it before I get caught up in this witch hunt.
Deleteare you removing them from amazon period, or only KU? where will you be selling them in the future?
ReplyDeleteon another note, Portals and valen are in top 5 reasons why i pay a KU sub... Michael-Scott Earl, William D. Arand, Randi Darren as well as J. A. Cipriano (<- all books on Amazon US are missing) are why i even bother with KU at all...
DeleteOnly KU.
DeleteAnd JA Cipriano was banned from Amazon last week.
MSE was suspended yesterday.
That's why I'm leaving KU, they're using it as an excuse to go after people.
Good grief. This is blowing up into a real mess. Keep on trucking, we support you, but apparently KU is about to become an ridiculous sinkhole of nothing much.
Deletewell im Fluked... i dont make enough money to purchase lots of books each month. KU got me access to MSE, JAC and your books and it let me read them for 10$/mo... considering MSE posts 2-3 books per month, reading just went from 10/mo to over 15-20/mo for MSE's alone. not including yours and the other awesome authors.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone know why Cipriano was banned? Is there any notice/documentation online that mentions this?
ReplyDeleteI've been trying to understand this one. Going on the bits I could scrape up online, it sounds as if they're claiming that the people being removed were gaming the KU system.
ReplyDeleteWhich might be true, or might not. Too bad that they don't have a transparent and timely appeals process, rather than this "you must prove yourself innocent without seeing why you were banned, and even then there's no guarantee" system.
I've been using KU as for previews, then buying the books once I've sampled them. But if they're doing this, I'll just drop KU and buy authors I know and like, and (possibly) those people I like also recommend. Which won't hurt you, but will hurt newer authors.
The issue is that there were "shops" using click farms to farm money from KU. They would put up a book, well written or not.. usually not. Then "read" it many times with KU trial accounts.
DeleteAlso some small authors HIRED those same farms to boost their read counts. Amazon sorta noticed... so they started taking down any books clicked out by those trials.
The scammers then started clicking out a bunch of OTHER big name books thinking that mask their activities and that Amazon would be unable to tell which were farmed.
Amazon just started taking THOSE down too. Most likely JAC and MSE DID get a bunch of farmed clicks -- but they didn't have anything to do with it.
I hope the hit won't be as bad as JVS expects -- it should give him more SALES and he at least has the readership numbers to not need promotion by KU. A sale should net 3-4 times as much as a KU "borrow." even if the price is pretty low.
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DeleteAt which point they apparently started running a bot that issued bans on some kind of "score", which fired off bans on anyone that got over a certain number of reviews or clicks from some accounts.
DeleteWhich, of course, inevitably resulted in the scammers figuring this out quickly and then they took down as many of Amazon's most popular KU authors in revenge as they could.
Of the top 10,000 reviewers on Amazon, about half have been banned now.
(Sigh, misspelled a word and forget this makes a mess here.)
Welp, I'm almost glad KU hasn't even come to Denmark yet so I haven't had the chance to use it. I decided quite a while ago that if I want to read it I'll just have to buy it at the price the author sets. I think I'm averaging between 75$ and 100$ a month in books at least...
ReplyDeleteGood luck with Amazon, and I'll be buying your books wherever you sell them :)
not everyone can afford an increase of 75-100 dollars a month for books that once cost us only 10/mo. this has effectively terminated any chance of me being able to continue reading Valens, Portals or Michael-Scott Earle's stuff.
Deletenow that i have to chose 1-3 books per month, from among 7-8 different series that release monthly/bi-monthly... i will have to find an alternatives
Iskoaya, well tell that to Amazon. Remember MSE didn't leave, he was banned, from all of Amazon! Good luck finding his books now! Same for JA Cipriano.
DeleteI left because while I can afford to lose half my income, I can not afford to lose all of it.