Amazon Is Recruiting Authors For Its eBook Library

Nate the greatest writes "Amazon just announced a $6 million pool of money that it plans to pay authors. All you have to do to get a share of the loot is commit to sell your ebook exclusively through the Kindle Store and agree to let your ebook be lent to Kindle Prime members. Amazon has already signed up a number of authors, including 31 of the top 50 self-published ones (J. Carson Black, Gemma Halliday, J.A. Konrath, B.V. Larson, C.J. Lyons, Scott Nicholson, Julie Ortolon, Theresa Ragan, J.R. Rain, Patricia Ryan, and more). It looks like Amazon launched this to support the Kindle Owners' Lending Library that Amazon launched just over a month ago. When it launched it had around 5 thousand titles as well as some less than voluntary participants. But there's a catch. Authors are required to give Amazon an exclusive on any title in the program. That means they're giving up the rest of the ebook market. Would any authors care to weigh in on the deal?"

Comments

Worth experImenting with

[rbowen]

My publishers don't give me stats that distinguish what ebook readers are purchasing my books, so I really don't know what percentage the kindle accounts for. However I also have a few Kindle books (ie exclusively Kindle) and they aren't exactly flying off the (virtual) shelves.

I would guess that with the Amazon marketing machine working for you, any book is going to sell better than without it. I expect that would be strong enough incentive to be willing to experiment with a book or two.

Re:Summary is Silly

[postbigbang]

For some books, time to market is important. Getting the first three months @ 100% of that market is taking the cream from the top, and helps Amazon as a goto-place for new fresh titles. There's a lot of money in that space.

I don't see, however, how this means (as the post indicates) that Amazon is getting out of the rest of the eBook business; that inference doesn't make sense. And as an author, I'll put my books through ALL channels at eBook publishing point, especially the lucrative alternate channels. There is no need to make Amazon exclusively rich. They're going to have a hard time pulling the entire program off, IMHO.

Experimental authors may like this

[sandytaru]

I'll come clean and admit it: I wrote a novel, and it was soundly rejected by over a hundred agents, 90 of whom didn't even look at it (this is very common.) A dozen requested either partials or even the full manuscript, but the final verdict was that although the store was good and entertaining, it was too strange. Traditional publishers are risk averse these days and anyone who wants to do something out of the mainstream is best off looking at non-tradional publishing. Amazon could be come the niche marketplace for people who like weird or controversial subjects that don't really have a mainstream market out there.