[caseysoftware]

> First, it depletes the pot awaiting actual no-shit real hard-working authors who supply a product people want.

It doesn't just deplete the pot, by driving the per-page price down, it discourages legitimate writers from making their books available via Kindle Unlimited.. which makes the overall program less attractive to customers.

Amazon needs to address this one before it enters the death spiral stage..

[djsumdog]

I personally think the whole Kindle Unlimited project is shit anyway and authors shouldn't bother using it. It's like Last.fm, Spotify, Rhapsody, etc. For non-popular artists/authors, it gets their material out there and they get a minimal payout. But compared to a system with legitimate sales, it pays content producers garbage!

I don't buy music from iTunes/Amazon because they take ~30% of the sales cost, which is insane! Bandcamp only takes 15% (10% if you form an independent label with other artists and produce a volume of sales).

[bigiain]

Do you realise just how much better a deal 30% is compared to buying a CD from a record store? For any muso who hasn't already sold their soul/rights to a major label (and who's not in Bono's infinitely privileged and connected kind of position), iTunes sales are a fabulous deal.

You're still right though, KU is more comparable to Spotify, where songs are effectively "worthless", but artists consider it worthwhile to give away their music there for discoverability - Zöe Keating used to publish year;y blog posts as raw data as spreadsheets showing how (litte) the variou streaming services (who didn't prohibit her contractually from doing so) paid.

[kbenson]

> But compared to a system with legitimate sales, it pays content producers garbage!

I imagine that it depends quite a bit on whether you have marketing in place to promote your work, and your own fan base. That marketing is generally provided by publisher (AFAIK), and isn't free.

I suspect there's a spectrum, and at the low end KU is vastly superior to a traditional publisher for your average author, and at the high end it's vastly inferior. Would you rather have 2,000 x $5.99, or 20,000 x $1.50? Or maybe you did some marketing, so it's 6,000 x $5.99 - $X, where $X is somewhere between $3k and $10k?

Here's one author's breakdown[1], which is interesting reading.

1: http://noorosha.com/kindleunlimited/

[m52go]

> That marketing is generally provided by publisher

Publisher marketing is minimal to none these days. Also, due to cluelessness, the marketing you do get is often not very useful.

I was just at a book marketing seminar yesterday and the speaker mentioned that her publisher did Facebook ads for her...which were known to be ineffective for her genre and demographic, but required by the publisher's guidelines.

So the author had to pick up the slack and take matters into her own hands (and pockets).

[cstross]

> Publisher marketing is minimal to none these days.

Sometimes true, sometimes false -- depends on publisher (and often on internal politics). What they want to push gets money thrown at it, whether or not it's productive: or sometimes extraneous shit happens. (I have a personal example in mind but I do not feel able to write about until after June 2018, at which time I will no longer be with the publisher in question ...)

> Also, due to cluelessness, the marketing you do get is often not very useful.

To some extent this is down to the author. If you actually roll up your sleeves and suggest some affordable and productive targets for marketing spend, the marketing manager in charge of your book will love you to bits because you just made their job a whole lot simpler.

Again: many authors seem content to leave it in the hands of their publisher's marketing department, who are overworked and under constant budgetary pressure. And because they're overworked they don't have time to research/learn new tricks. (I recently saw a proposed marketing plan for a book of mine scheduled for 2018. It was great ... just like the one they ran in 2008, only with a Reddit AmA bolted on top. Yeah, right.)

[m52go]

Hey thanks for the perspective. I've been going through your CMAP series over the past few days...it's incredibly helpful!