Damned if you do; Damned if you Dont: Kindle Unlimited

Amazon.com has this wonderful thing called “Kindle Unlimited”. It is a subscription plan whereby you pay $10 per month and can then borrow and read all you want of the e-books which are entered into what Amazon likes to call “Select”. "Select" gives the book extra visibility, and the author the ability to use a couple of different advertising devices – such as setting the book free for a limited time. In other words, it can be very financially advantageous.

It has its disadvantages, too. To be eligible for Select, the author must make his or her book available to Amazon exclusively for the duration of its time in the program (90-day increments). No selling it through any other distributor. Amazon has exclusive rights to sell it.

Originally, the authors were paid (about $1.35) every time someone read over 10% of their book. Short story writers loved that, novelists … not so much. And, of course, the scammers got involved. They put out very short books, such that if you even opened it, they’d get paid the $1.35 – even if the content was word salad, pure garbage.

Eventually, about a year later, Amazon changed the rules, to stop those scammers, and to make it more ‘fair’ for those who wrote longer works.

Amazon decided to pay the authors whose books got borrowed by the number of pages which the borrowers read. If you read 10 pages of my book, I got paid for 10 pages – or so they had us believe.

Authors are curious sorts. They study, and share what they discover. It seems that Amazon has no way of knowing how many pages you’ve read. Their program simply checks your kindle device or app each time you sync with Amazon. It then looks at the last page read. So, if you had jumped to page 150 in my book, Amazon would see it as 150 pages read, and pay me accordingly, even though you’ve only read one page (page 150).

Needless to say, scammers figured this out and went to town. They uploaded very large books (6000+ pages – sometimes of only the same paragraph repeated over and over) and then farmed out the ‘reading’ of them. So, if a ‘farm worker’ had 10 accounts with Amazon, he could ‘borrow’ that big book on each account, jump to the last page, and the ‘author’ would be paid for 60,000 pages read – about $280. If the ‘farmer’ had 10 such ‘workers’, he would quickly earn $2800. If he put up 10 such books, $28,000.

That had to stop, so Amazon put new rules in place. Maximum size of a book: 3000 pages. That helped.

But everything Amazon does seems to have unintended consequences -- like the above. Now, several of us have noticed that we’ll occasionally get a 'one page read' report. It would seem that someone opened our book, and that was it: thus, one page read. Perhaps they didn’t like it; perhaps they opened it and then went off-line, and we’d get the rest of the pages when they next synced with Amazon … or maybe not. Naturally, some authors did some experimenting.

It now appears that if you read my 350 page book, page by page, all the way through and then return to page one (as many of us often do) before going on-line again and syncing with Amazon, Amazon will see it as One Page Read and pay me one-half of one cent (approx).

A lot of authors are kinda upset about this. Amazon uses our book to get subscriptions, and allows borrowers to read our books, but has no way to check how much they’ve read, and fail of paying us our due. (If you are a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, and use your kindle to read off-line, please, please, do not return to page one. Leave the book open to the last page read so that the author can get what is due. Please.)

Many of us, including me, have pulled our books out of Select – even though this hurts us visibility-wise (and thus monetarily, as well). If we’re not going to get paid for pages read, and if we’re prevented from trying to sell our books through other distributors, what’s the point?

It’s very depressing, as Amazon, through Kindle Unlimited and other means, seems to have a stranglehold on the market. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you don’t go in, you lose money. If you do go in, like as not you get cheated ... and Amazon's hold on the market becomes a little bit firmer. So, do you stay out as a matter of principle, or do you swallow your pride in order to be able to feed your family? Thanks, Amazon.

In my case, selling as little as I do, I can afford to stand on principle. Thus, my next book (due out very, very soon – within the next day or three), “Not With A Whimper: Producers” will NOT go into Kindle Unlimited.

I wonder if it will sell anything.