and here comes the hammer

[solarbird]

Amazon has been working on adjusting Kindle Unlimited – their streaming-service equivalent for writers – for a while. A fair number of people have been worrying about what that would mean. We’ve known for a while that the author money would come from a fixed-size pot – and that pot would probably be small. But we didn’t know for sure.

Now we do. Surprise! Pseudo-streaming for writers means the same thing as streaming means for musicians. Payment schedules which are somewhere between a joke and an insult.

I don’t know enough about the writer side of the world of things to know exactly how terrible this is, but given the zero-sum gaming of the system, and Amazon’s market dominance in the epub world, I’d have to say it sounds pretty damn bad – possibly even worse than for musicians, even if the actual rates are higher in some ways. The numbers being thrown around involve phrases like ’60-80% cut in royalties.’

Anyway, writers, you’ve been warned. Anybody with a better understanding of the book world want to chime in?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

Comments

[stickmaker]

When something new comes along, first the hobbyists play with it, then it's used for porn, then "normal" people start to make good use of it, then big business tries to cash in on it and ruins it. :-(