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History Repeats Itself: KDP Select Is Amazon.com's 'Payback For Playback'
New submitter brennanw writes "Anyone who was active on mp3.com during the late 90s/early 2000's will find Amazon.com's KDP Select awfully familiar: authors who make their works exclusive to Amazon compete for a pool of money. Any time someone 'borrows' one of their books, they get a cut of a monthly sum (700K in January, 600K for February) based on how many of their books were checked out vs. how many other author's books were checked out. This is almost identical to the 'Payback for Playback' service MP3.com provided musicians a little over a decade ago. Payback for Playback effectively destroyed the original MP3.com artist community, and I don't think KDP Select is going to be much different for the self-publishing community that is growing on Amazon."
Authors are going to get less from this. Even if it works, 600K is not that much, what happens when the pool runs out?
What did the PfP program do that was so bad to mp3.com? Honestly curious.
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
Aside from the kickback ( is that legal or does it get into the anti-competitive arena? ) aren't dead tree books exclusive to one publisher?
While i would like choice of format as much as the next guy, the precedent has been around for a LONG time.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As a KDP Select author (I wrote Lacuna: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006RZNR3Y), I have to say I'm a huge fan... and the borrows are just a nice perk.
Essentially what happens is this. Amazon puts $X in an account, your payout is that sum divided by total borrows, times by your borrows. So if there's $500,00 in the pool, and 500,000 borrows total, and you have six, you get $6. The cost of your book or its popularity don't matter.
HOWEVER... not everyone can borrow. The only people who can borrow are Amazon Prime members ($79 a year), and they can only borrow one book a month. Prime's main attraction for most people is the ability to get free priority shipping (as I understand it). The book borrows are just a perk and from what we've seen so far most Prime members aren't even using that feature.
Over January there were a lot of borrows because Amazon gave anyone a one month free trial of Amazon Prime. That's why they upped the amount from $500,000 to $700,000 in January. For reference, the borrows in December paid out about $1.70, which equated to a pretty good deal for those who publish at $0.99 since the 35% royalty meant those people were getting $1.70 per "purchase" rather than 35 cents.
Rumour is that Amazon felt that $1.70 was still too low, that's why the pool in February is $600,000 (up from $500,000) even though the free month has expired. Since we're expecting a lot fewer borrows this month, it's anticipated that borrows are going to be worth a lot more. My own borrows have dropped off a fair bit even though sales have picked up.
All that said... the main benefit of Select is not the borrows. The borrows are just a nice perk. The main benefit is the KDP Free Days... you get 5 days per 90 days where you can set your book as free ($0). Doing so gives you a huge publicity boost since in every way (aside from pay, and paid rankings), Amazon treats these as paid sales. That means that if you push a lot of free books you get on the "movers and shakers list" and for people who bought your free book and something else, your book has a good chance of appearing on that other books "Customers Who Bought This Also Bought..." list, which is a fantastic way to get a lot of publicity.
KDP Select has been a huge boon for unknown authors and in fact has encouraged the community over at www.kindleboards.com to grow substantially; there is now a massive so-called "MEGA THREAD" regarding KDP Select free days results and it's one of the most popular threads around.
For reference, I usually sell about 1-2 copies of Lacuna: Demons of the Void a day. Post free-days I get a massive boost, usually in the order of 10-50x more sales, usually 2-5 days after the free periods end as that's when Amazon does their "also boughts" recalculation.
KDP Select is awesome and the exclusivity of it doesn't matter to me since Amazon is the 300kg gorilla in the eBook market. It's important to note that the exclusivity does NOT apply to paperback versions of the same book, and in fact in the "Welcome To KDP Select!" email you get they actively encourage you to use various non-Amazon paperback publishing services.
All my works (including some shorts published under a pen name) are all in KDP Select and for the moment I'm sticking with it. The borrows are just a nice little garnish... the real benefits, especially for lesser known authors, lies elsewhere.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
The money is for the books being borrowed by paying customers (Prime members); and one per month at that, so while it's still possible to game the system, it'd be rather tricky.
I had overlooked the Prime thing, and yes, that will probably cut down on gaming. However, you could still game by trying to stuff the ballot box on your end by putting tens, fifties, hundreds of titles into the pool... the wiki-rippers come to mind.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
All of the national book chains have long had "exclusive to x" lines. Granted, it's been more common for distributors to do exclusive editions but exclusive titles are not all that rare. Usually, but not always, the exclusive titles are of poor quality: cook books, how to books, coffee table books, et cetera.
... not for the most part, anyway. The gamers never reached the upper tiers of revenue as far as I remember. But they were pulling out all the stops to try to get there and it wrecked the place.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Subscription services for books like Safari Books Online http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9781449309473 already "loans" books with a model like this. They pay out from a pool based on the number of times a book is selected from their library. Of course a single use isn't going to pay out as much as a purchase, but the alternative is for a Safari-like subscription library to buy a single copy, or as many copies as would be used simultaneously, and do license management. And that opens the whole DRM can of worms.
An open-ended revenue model can be advantageous to authors of frequently-read books.
I wrote parts of this stuff
There's generally a reason musicians need a label, too, but in both cases the people providing useful screening and critique can also act as leeches on the artists and block excellent material from every being noticed.
I'd rather live in a world with 9000 crap titles and 1000 good ones, all independently published, than a world with 1000 crap titles and 300 good ones, all screened by a label or publisher. The indy world has way more crap but it also has three times as much excellence, and I can use the internet and things like Pandora to find the good stuff and weed out the crap.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
and that is....? Because their stuff "isn't good enough for trad publishing"?
These days trad vs independent aren't an if-else type question, now it's a fairly even handed option either way. Contrary to the big dream, most people getting trad contracts are not able to just kick back and watch the money flow in, instead it's a full on marketing drive that -you- have to organise and perform (while also writing more to comply with the contract), it's no free ride. For the most part, people being signed up by the Big-6 end up worse off than if they take the independent route, assuming they put in the same level of work.
Things have changed a lot in the last 2~3 years and major publishers are having to now fight harder to remain relevant among their back catalogues. There are several independent writers who have been picked up by trad-publishing, but that's only after they've succeeded as indies and are subsequently given some fairly nice contracts - unlike the ones you'll get if you start from the bottom. Conversely, there's a lot of writers who have now cancelled their publishing contracts and reacquired the rights to their work and are going independent. Trad publishers used to be the only practical way of getting your resources for making a good book (editing, proofing, artwork, marketing) but with the introduction of ebooks, print-on-demand and improved internet connectivity those old exclusivity barriers have come right down.
No matter which way you go - you have to gain your own readership. If you want that, you then take the time to do your covers well, you get your work edited, proofed, beta'd and marketed. For sure there's a lot of trashy work out there by people, but there's also a lot of professionally run independent publishing who go through all the same steps, the difference simply is that they're taking it on their own back.
Payback for playback killed the original mp3.com artist community? That's funny, 'cause I could've sworn it was the RIAA lawsuit that shutdown the site for a while that did that.
The original community was broken into pieces and moving over to other sites (like the ill-fated AMP3.com) before the RIAA lawsuit came to be.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
KDP Select appears to me to be KOC again, but it's no longer a game, and real money is given out. I fully expect it to be a complete disaster.
But in order to "game" the system you need a unique Amazon account - that has ALSO paid the $75/year for Amazon prime. Given the amount of money coming out of the system how do you think someone looking to game the system can justify purchasing straw man accounts at $75/pop?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A while back, the EFF proposed a similar payout scheme which would allow pirates to voluntarily pay a monthly fee and the money would get paid out to creators who's work was pirated based on the number of downloads. It sounds a lot like the EFF's suggested plan.
https://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing
I got my book into the KDP thingy ... the biggest thing is that you can make your book available for free for 5 days, hence I now got my book available for free on amazon until tonight.
The worst part of using amazon is that your book is effectively "lost" in the hundreds of thousands of crap that is there. Even doing a verbatim search for the title of my book doesn't result in a showing on the first page, you have to go to it directly like this. I was hoping to get a few reviews, but no go - for every 5000 downloads you can expect one review.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
In case you think authors should hire a contract lawyer, let me tell you the vast bulk do make less than they would have made by working the same hours flipping burgers.
While it's certainly true that the vast bulk of authors do make less than they would have made by working the same hours flipping burgers, there's still significant money involved. It's the hours it takes to write a book that brings down the hourly rate.
My first visit to a contract attorney turned a profit for me. He reviewed the draft contract sent by the publisher and (because he knew what was usual and customary in the industry and I, a first-time author, did not) doubled the royalty percentages it offered. The modified contract was accepted without comment by the publisher, and the increase in first year's royalties alone, due to the attorney's work, more than paid his fee.
In addition to this, the attorney added clauses that stipulated what would happen in cases I had not considered -- for example, what would happen if the book were published in non-traditional media (only a theoretical possibility at the time, but most of my sales now) and how I would be compensated if the publisher bought the rights to the book, but never published it. Things like that.
In my opinion, people who sign business contracts without the advice of an attorney are taking a huge risk. Ask Eric Weisstein, author of Mathworld, about the dangers involved when an author signs a contract without consulting an attorney first.
The problem is the large amount of awful awful awful stuff that is self pubbed. I know traditional pubs put out a lot of questionable work too, but they never would have put out Moon People, or the thousands of books that are almost equal in cringe-worthiness. I love the idea of people being able to publish whatever they want, and I sort of hate the idea of traditional publishers being the gateway to culture, but it seems they're fairly decent at the job. It seems to me that its much harder to find the golden needle in the pile of... hay that self published books is. It's a ghetto, much like fanfic. Mary sue stories abound, and every Twihard housewife thinks they can have a go at writing their sexual fantasies down and selling them. I'm sure self publishing will come out with some amazing books, (just like fanfic came out with methods of rationality) I just don't see them coming up with much wheat compared to the amount of chaff.
nobody's perfect