I’m supposed to be writing, presently.  Had two really strong days and then sat down to work today and just wasn’t feeling it, so you’re getting this instead.

If you have no idea what ‘attendant drama’ I’m talking about, or what a KU payout rate is, this post is genuinely not for you.  This is author-business stuff, and apparently authors have started bringing it to their readers and, presto, drama has happened.

Panic begets blame, and blame begets counter-accusation, or guilt, or disconnect and avoidance.

And authors are panicking.

(They do this.)

(I am sincerely not even remotely innocent of it.)

(Just not in this case.)

You’re welcome to hang out and read, if you’re curious, but… my business is my business, which makes it my problem and not yours.  I make decisions based on various things, including how much income I think I’m likely to make based on those decisions (though hardly exclusively: see the randomness in my back catalogue…), and some of those may inconvenience or bother some readers.  I’m routinely told on my Facebook ads that I ought to be boycotting Amazon because they’re evil.

I continue to sell on Amazon regardless.

I love my readers, I appreciate them immensely, and I often do things simply because I imagine those things making a certain subset of readers happy, but I am also tasked with running a business whose purpose is to make money that I spend on things that are important to myself and my family.  I don’t get to blame anyone else for the things that don’t go the way I’d hoped they would – unless someone actually cheated me – and I don’t get to get angry about it, either.

I presume that that good faith goes both ways.

If I change something, you, the reader, understand that it’s because I need to, to try to make the most of my business, of my writing, and of my life-energy.

I am not, at present, changing anything.  (This is not an announcement; I wouldn’t have excused the disinterested reader if it were.  Promise.)

But there are authors all around who are, because the payment structure of Kindle Unlimited is attempting (wittingly or otherwise) to boil the frog slowly.

Let me explain.

I’m not going to go back to KU1.0, where authors were paid for every book that got borrowed from Amazon (henceforth: KU), regardless of how long it was.  That was an epic disaster of unintended consequences, and while it makes a wildly amusing story to tell, I’m longwinded enough by nature, and I’m going to excise that bit from this story.

Kindle Unlimited 2.0 (and all other subsequent revisions) paid authors per ‘page’ that was read.  There was complexity in how ‘pages’ were counted, when ebooks… don’t have those, but they made up a formula and kept it super-duper-top-secret, assigning a total number of pages to each book that I and every other author upload to Amazon to participate in KU.  At some point, they went back through and re-calculated these, dropping most of my books by about 20%.  This annoyed me, because it did somewhat feel like cheating, because I don’t recall getting an e-mail from Amazon or seeing a press release disclosing that they were doing it, but perhaps I missed it.  I do try to keep my head down.

In short, though, Amazon keeps track of every page that you read of any book you happen to borrow through KU, and they pay the author/publisher of that piece for each of those pages.  The incentives here are reasonable.  Good books that keep readers reading are paid; bad books that people don’t enjoy and don’t read don’t get paid.  Cool.

The first problem comes in the fact that Amazon waits two months to tell us how much they’re going to pay us for those reads.  And the number, like the number of pages in my books, is a super-duper-top-secret calculation.  It’s not predictable, outside of some seasonal gyrations that are somewhat reliable.  (Even those aren’t something you *rely* on, but you might plan for them.)

So every reader that I go hunting for (and I am, ultimately, a professional reader-hunter…) costs me time and energy, but I don’t know how much I’m going to make from those readers – even the ones who read a book or four books or sixteen books – until two months later.  This makes profit calculations very challenging, especially as the ebook market has grown rather tight and profit margins for authors who are still working to break out are smaller than they used to be.  (I’m not going to get into my exact numbers, nor estimations of the industry at large, because quite frankly I have no idea where I sit in the industry at large, whether I’m doing rather well or quite poorly.  I just know that more and more authors are spending more and more on advertising, and this is our reality.  Readers don’t find books for free, in numbers that I or most authors can count on.)

This is a problem, but this is a publicly-stated problem, one that I knew about, going into KU.  (You’ll find that every *other* problem fits this category, as well, as I go on.)

The second problem is of exclusivity.  KU expects me, as a self-published author, to restrict my content to Amazon, in exchange for the priviledge of being in KU.  Putting my work for sale on other platforms means giving up KU payments (which total about 75% of my revenue, with some rather significant variation from series to series).  It annoys me that other publishers and other authors are able to negotiate this away, that Amazon allows their books to be in KU and on other platforms, but I don’t know what contract they actually got, what payment model is used for their books, and *I agreed to this situation*.  I am free to leave.  My KU term is 90 days, and then it automatically re-enrolls me unless I unclick a checkbox.  It’s that simple to get out.  Most/many trad-pub contracts were historically for like 10 years and are now for the life of the copyright; ACX contracts are for 7 years.  I do not feel like Amazon is taking unreasonable advantage with the terms of the contract they offer me.  I am a small fish in an enormous ecosystem, but I am largely free to make the best of the decisions available to me.

I give up opportunities to be in KU.  I cannot sell at Barnes and Noble or Apple; I cannot open a webstore and sell my own content, notably even repackaged, because I have agreed that *that* content will only be available on Amazon.  (One major exception here is reviewer copies; I am allowed to give away reviewer copies without infringing on this agreement.  Just… fyi.)

But I give them up with full information and the freedom to control my own outcomes as I choose.

These things are nobody’s fault, and they are nobody’s problem but mine.

Enter the drama.

Every month, Amazon announces the per-page payout for the reads from two months back.  These payouts have been progressively dropping, year over year, since the program debuted (and keep in mind the 20% cut to pages which acts like a stealth-drop in payout, along the way), and authors are constantly facing the crucial question: how much further can rates drop before the value of KU is exceeded by the opportunities I have elsewhere?

And that’s a scary question.

Building an audience outside of KU, especially when you’ve been cultivating a KU audience for years, sometimes, is a lot of work.  It is unknown.  It is risky and scary and everyone (including me) would much rather everything just keep working the way it has been, or at least the way it used to, where they could count on a certain behavior and a certain return on successful behaviors.

The drop in rates last month was not that big, in the grand scheme of things.

But for the first time, it dropped below 40c per 100 pages read.  (This is the unit I’ll use in discussing the actual rates, because it’s something you can actually understand.  Amazon publishes the rate per page, which is hard to scale to make sense.)

For context, my books tend to run 400-700 pages, which means that I’m getting $1.60 to $2.80 per full read, at this rate.

For further context, I make about $3.50 for a book priced at $4.99, and $2.70 for a book priced at $3.99.

I make less for a KU reader than I do for a purchasing reader, but KU readers, on average, read a lot more of my stuff, and on a per-reader basis, I think that it about averages out.  Either way, I would never ask a KU reader to switch over to purchasing – because I made the business decision to be in KU.  I am inviting them to read my book for no marginal cost to them (they just pay their subscription fee), and I will take the compensation I get from that.

Happily.

(Truly.)

But the day is coming that I may need to change my mind.

Take a look:

After some tumultuous swings at the very beginning, what we have here is a relatively steady downward trend in compensation per page.  Calculated a slightly different way, this is the % shift in compensation based on an (arbitrary) assumption of $0.45 per 100 pages:

What looks like ‘just noisy’ is income, to a writer.  In 2018, KU authors were making 10% above $0.45, while for the last six months, they’ve been making 10% below $0.45.  It’s a drop of roughly 20% of total compensation (ignoring any page-length adjustments; I cannot find evidence anywhere that these were widespread, so they may have just happened to me) over about 5 years.

If you took a job and – having been happy with the pay you expected to make at it – they told you that you ought to expect to take a paycut of about 4% a year, and no one had any proof that those paycuts were going to stop any time soon, and you were a good person, you would work hard, do the best you could at your job, and meanwhile start looking for a job that is going to pay you *more*, every year, or at least not less.

Writers are up against a hard slope, here.  And they deal with inflated costs on *everything*, the same as anyone else.  A quick online calculator says that inflation from 2018 to 2023 is about 20%, meaning that those 40 cents per 100 pages are worth more like 32 or 33.

Amazon, wittingly or otherwise, is boiling the frog slowly, dropping the rate that it pays KU authors month by month and year by year, and some authors are finding that the risk of staying with KU looks like it might be smaller than the risk of trying to sell everywhere.

They’re leaving.

This is a business decision, and I wish them well at it.  Someday, I might make the same one.

Other authors, though, are getting angry and blaming readers.  Here, I have a problem, because KU is a business decision, and you cannot offer your books to KU readers and then get angry at them for taking advantage of that availability.

And in blaming the readers for their declining revenues, they’ve made readers defensive or guilty or disinterested, and that’s a problem, too.

I love my readers.  I appreciate them.  And they should *not* feel guilty for using any avenue that I freely select to procure my books.

Authors are working harder to find readers, and they’re getting paid less to do it.  THIS IS HARD.  But opportunities are not guaranteed to anyone, and being in a creative industry means doing stuff that most people genuinely *wish* they could do with their lives, but as a profession.  Dude, that’s so cool.  I *tell stories*, and people pay me for it.

Awesome.

The creative industries are hard-hard-hard because they’re a dream for so many people.  They’re super-duper competitive, and finding more people who want to be writers is… kind of really easy.  We’re easy to replace, in a commodity kind of sense.

Authors are making hard, risky decisions, now in particular but all the time also, and it’s making some of them emotional and angry, and that’s understandable.  I wanted to capture where that feeling is coming from, and give it a real legitimacy.  Whether or not the pool of KU readers has grown a lot in recent years (it has), non-breakout writers like me are still out hunting for every single reader they get, and doing that profitably takes more and more time, more and more knowledge and energy, and carries more and more risk that something is going to upset things and turn profits to losses.

If you read my work legally?

Thank you thank you thank you.

You don’t owe me a thing.

But if you’re mocking authors for tearing their hair out publicly over a .0001 change in their compensation… mercy, friend.  They’re nurturing a career forged of eggshells, and every frog here is considering making the jump, while worrying about exactly what fire we’re going to land in if we do it.