‘The Absolute Best Experience For Readers’ Here’s an argument we don’t hear frequently for the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select programs. I’m ensuring the best possible reader experience with ebooks. This is the soon-to-be-seafaring author Hugh Howey, who says that there’s something more important than the doubling of his overall income since Amazon instituted per-page payouts… Read More
In Publishing's CyberVillage: So Much Anger
Calling Them Out Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh IRL, in real life, if you were mad at someone for something, would you walk into the village square, face the buildings, and start yelling that person’s name and your complaints about them? You’d be calling them out, physically, demanding that they change their ways and accusing… Read More
Is Amazon KDP Select's per-page payout better?
I’d like to be paid per-page for everything written about Amazon’s KDP Select since the 15th of the month. And certainly, I’ve tried to hold up my end. I wrote about it here. And then I wrote about it there. And now I’m writing about it once more, hoping that you’ll join us in this week’s #FutureChat on… Read More
Gaming the system: Amazon at home and abroad
The special symmetry of ‘the disrupter that demands to be undisrupted’ As Friday’s edition of The Bookseller points out, last week brought Amazon’s place in European markets into tighter focus. A scene-setting article from my colleague Lisa Campbell announced the European Commission’s formal antitrust investigation into the retailer’s relationships with publishers and ebook distribution. Campbell also pointed to… Read More
Amazon And Its New KDP Select Per-Page Payments: Everybody Has To Swim For It Now
‘What This Means For Authors Is Debatable’ Yesterday’s news (15th June) that Amazon is changing its payout structure for Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) lending scenarios — that’s Kindle Unlimited (KU) and the Kindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL) — has been met with somewhat muted reactions. And this is good to see. Some mature, prudent thinking is… Read More
All-you-can-guess about subscriptions
Publishing can be forgiven for its mixed response to the ebook-subscription issue. Not only does the all-you-can-read construct for selling books run contrary to traditions in bookselling — and reading — but even some of our sister media disciplines, much deeper into their experience with subscriptions, are still trying to parse the effects of similar models. Just… Read More
Do you subscribe to subscriptions?
Many young, digitally oriented companies enjoy taking a specific kind of staff photo these days, I’m sure you’ve seen it. In such a photo, everyone is happily gregarious but individualised. Several staffers laugh together. Two or three peer at some paperwork as if it were intensely interesting. Another small knot of employees watches something on a screen.… Read More
Is the honeymoon over? KU comes between Amazon and its self-publishers
A kind of downgrade for Amazon, and nowhere near Wall Street The most significant change is that Amazon KDP has slipped to third and also reflects the growing discontent self-published authors have with the introduction of Kindle Unlimited and recent communications regarding the new VAT law in Europe for 2015. We also have five new providers entering… Read More
Not exclusively about exclusivity: Kindle Unlimited
With subscriptions at the center of last Friday’s #FutureChat — and Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (KU) in particular — it’s worth noting how pleased we are that both Justo Hidalgo of Spain’s 24Symbols and (tentatively) Eric Briys of France’s Cyberlibris will join us on 14th November in London for The FutureBook (#FutureBook14), Europe’s largest publishing conference, at the… Read More
Is Amazon KU exclusivity a velvet barrier for authors?
It “might be a possibility” at some point that Amazon would consider changing the the Kindle Unlimited (KU) subscription programme’s exclusivity requirement for independent authors, according to Daniel Slater, Amazon Independent Publishing principal. He spoke Thursday (22nd October) on a panel discussion at the 25th anniversary national conference (#ninc14) of Novelists Inc., in St. Pete Beach, Florida. Slater was… Read More