Writers who love Amazon (2023)

For most of Prime Day, Amazon's annual sales bonanza, an unfamiliar face has been at the helm of the site.Author RankPage: Mike Omer, a 39-year-old Israeli computer engineer and self-published author whose profile picture is a candid photo of a young blond man wearing sunglasses sitting on the grass. He was, and still is at the time of writing, via J.K. Rowling (#8), James Patterson (#9), and Stephen King (#10) in sales of all their books on Amazon.com. His most recent book ranks tenth in the Amazon charts that Amazon published thereafterLos New York Times stopped sendingE-book rankings and measurement of individual book sales on Amazon. (The company doesn't disclose the metrics behind Author Rank, which is still in beta.)

Omer is among a growing number of authors who have discovered that self-publishing on the Amazon platform is very lucrative. While he may not be as well known as the great authors marketed by traditional publishers, and he may not have as many book sales overall, Omer makes an enviable living from his writing. selling your first e-book,Spider web, and its aftermath, allowed him to quit his job and become a full-time writer. Now he earns more money than as a computer scientist. "I make a very good salary, even by American standards," he said.

Following the success of Omer's first book series, Thomas & Mercer, an Amazon imprint, published his latest book, A Mystery Calledthe mind of a killer, which was also promoted on Amazon's First Reads, a new subscription service where the company recommends a handful of books and allows subscribers to download them ahead of their official release date. Omer told me that he has now sold more than 10,000 books through Amazon and that his books have also been rented more than 10,000 times from Kindle Unlimited, the subscription service where readers pay $9.99 a month to access more than 1 Pay a million titles on Amazon. "What made this possible is Amazon," he told me. "It can expose me to millions or tens of millions of readers." (Peter Hildick-Smith, the founder of Codex Group, which advises the publishing industry, told me that Amazon's ratings and sales data are unreliable because they also count books on loan, like the Harry Potter books, that are consumed in a other way). way the books are bought.)

For decades, self-publishing was derided as a shameful sign that an author could not make it into the "real" publishing industry, "the masturbation version of the literary world."SalononceLeg is. And Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce site, was portrayed as the authors' enemy with its prices above bookstores. But now its self-publishing service Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) has made it easy for people to upload their books, send them out into the universe, and make money from them. His shop has created a place where readers can quickly and easily find cheap self-published books. The website, which originally radically changed where books are sold, is now changing the way books are published and read.

This, of course, is a threat to the traditional publishing industry, which seems to be in perpetual freefall. Across the industry, self-publishing is gaining readers while traditional publishers are losing them, the study findsauthor merit, a website created by an anonymous marketing analytics expert calling himself Data Guy. The self-published share of paid e-book units in the US increased from 44.7 percent to 46.4 percent between the second quarter of 2017 and 2018, Data Guy told me in an email, while the share of traditionally published units is higher paid e-books down to 43.2. percent of 45.5 percent. (Your data includes both self-published and Amazon-published books, which many traditional data sources do not.)

At the heart of Amazon's Gambit and Paying Authors is Kindle Unlimited. Launched in 2014, the feature was a response to other companies trying to create a Netflix for books, like Oyster, which shut down in 2015, and Scribd, which is slowly gaining acceptancebig fiveEditorial. Authors can sign up for KDP Select, which automatically places a book on Kindle Unlimited and can be very lucrative. Amazon reserves an amount of money each month that it distributes to KDP Select authors based on how many of their pages are read each month by Kindle Unlimited subscribers and readers of the Kindle Owners' Lending Library, allowing Prime members to purchase a book borrow one month free. The payout is a little less than half a cent per page, the authors told me, but those who read the most can also get monthly bonuses of up to $25,000. Last year, Amazon paid out more than $220 million to writers, the company told me. Regardless of participation in KDP Select, authors who self-publish through KDP on Amazon also receive a 70% royalty on books priced between $2.99 ​​and $9.99, and a 35% royalty on books priced between $2.99 ​​and $9.99 cost more or less.

Readers reply: “We authors are all in this together”

Kindle Unlimited works just like Amazon's other big subscription service, Prime: Just as Prime users often think shipping is free even if they pay a monthly or annual fee, Kindle Unlimited readers can start thinking about books as free , even if they pay a monthly fee, because each additional book they read on Kindle Unlimited doesn't cost them anything extra. This can be a boon for new authors: readers unwilling to pay outright for books by unknown authors will read those books on Kindle Unlimited, where they feel "free."

"I really don't think people would read as many of my books if they weren't available on Kindle Unlimited," Samantha Christy, who decided to write romance in 2014, told me. Christy's writing career at Amazon has been so successful, for being so successful She keeps her four children and her husband, who left his job two years ago, to run her IT, tax and publishing businesses. Christy, who usually writes three books a year, spoke to me from Hawaii, where she was vacationing with her family, before traveling to Comic-Con International in San Diego to speak at a panel on self-publishing.

Kindle Unlimited has its downsides. Amazon requires exclusivity from its KDP Select authors, which means they can only sell their books on the Kindle Store and not on other digital bookstores, not even on their own websites. The pay structure means that writers who produce a lot of pages, even if they're not particularly good pages, make more money than writers who write concisely. Almost since the launch of Kindle Unlimited, Amazon has been fighting "book fillers," authors who publish hundreds of pages of content on Kindle Unlimited, some of which are inconsistencies, some of which trick readers into switching to the latest book page. So the book counts as read and you get paid. Self-publishing on Amazon platforms benefits authors in a number of genres, including romance and mystery, where readers can read and write books that don't take much time versus those who spend years writing novels or the thoroughly researched ones write nonfiction. Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild, told me.

And Kindle Unlimited authors have to work hard to market themselves and attract new readers in a crowded market; one, TI Lucas, told me he works 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Part of it is writing (he's published 21 full-length novels in three years) and part marketing. "You have to be willing to run a business at the same time," said Rasenberger. Christy tries to respond to every message she receives on Facebook, gives lots of free giveaways, and frequently hosts question and answer sessions and other events. Many writers buy ads on Amazon, effectively paying their employer to get more customers.

Kindle Unlimited's structure also means that authors must create oneChargeContent Since 2014, Lea Robinson and Melissa King have published more than 100 novels and romances on Amazon under the pseudonym Alexa Riley. They told me on the phone that they make most of their money from KDP Select payments while people read their list of titles on Kindle Unlimited. This motivates them to keep producing; The more pages they have on Kindle Unlimited, the higher the chance they'll be the most read authors and earn them tens of thousands of bonus dollars from Amazon. Every woman tries to write 3,000 words a day, and Alexa Riley typically publishes three books a month.

Still, King and Robinson said that writing for Amazon isn't necessarily more hectic than any other job. Everyone writes every day from nine to five and never on weekends. Both recently left their full-time jobs (Robinson in banking, King as CFO) to write books about Alexa Riley. They have a formula (sexy men, stubborn women, happy endings) that pleases both them and their readers. "It's a production with us," King said. "We don't deviate from how we write and we know there are important points to hit and we don't change our formula." This formula helps them because once people discover a book, they tend to search Alexa Riley's list of previous books on Kindle Unlimited for more of them, which will generate more revenue for King and Robinson. If they publish a new book and make $10,000 a month, they estimate that only $3,000 of that income comes from selling the new book on Amazon; the rest comes from Kindle Unlimited payments.

Of course, there are some things that KDP Select doesn't offer, such as: B. Printed books and shelf space in bookstores across the country or the opportunity to get into the bookNew York Timesbestseller lists. But King and Robinson tried the traditional route and found it less lucrative than Amazon. In 2016, they published their first book with a "real" publisher, Carina Press, an imprint of Harlequin, a division of HarperCollins. see your bookall for you, on the shelves it was satisfying - Robinson cried when she saw the book at Barnes & Noble - but working with a traditional publisher was a change. Almost a year passed from the completion of the book to its publication; at Amazon it usually takes about two weeks. The book was much longer than his traditional works at 95,000 words, but the money was about half what it was on Amazon. "It felt really prestigious and good for our careers," Robinson said, "but the money wasn't the same as Amazon." After that experience, they decided to return to self-publishing.

People outside of Amazon are warning that Kindle Unlimited and Amazon's publishing model in general are threatening the very foundation of the industry. "It's a cancer. It's going to undermine the entire publishing industry," Mark Coker, founder and CEO of Smashwords, an e-book distributor for independent authors, told me about Kindle Unlimited. Although authors might feel like they could benefit in the short term, he argued, the Unlimited model empowers people to read books for free. "Amazon tips the scales: Customers are happy to pay for books, but sell them even cheaper," he says.

Kindle Unlimited is essentially a Spotify for books, and Spotify made it happenlower incomefor artists; There's reason to believe that Kindle Unlimited could unleash the same chaos in the publishing business. If people only read through subscription services, he says, they will stop buying individual books. Retailers will continue to lose market share and Amazon will gain it. Losing even a small portion of Kindle Unlimited readers could be fatal for retailers. Barnes & Noblereporteda 5 percent drop in sales last fiscal year, for example, which sent the stock plummeting. Amazon, he argues, is creating a marketplace with fewer retailers. Then, when all other options are gone and Amazon completely dominates the market, Amazon will raise prices and charge the author less, and authors and readers will be trapped, he speculated. (In response, Amazon said authors set their own prices for books.)

Amazon has a long history of locking people into products and services and then changing the terms. This year it increased the cost of an Amazon Prime membership from $99 to $119 and it didhigh feeson third parties who rely on Amazon to reach buyers. (An Amazon spokesperson told me that participating in KDP Select is valuable for authors, and 95 percent re-enroll in the program each month.)

But even Coker doesn't claim that Amazon helped democratize publishing. A decade ago, authors who wanted large readerships had no choice but to try to publish through a traditional house that would only accept a small fraction of the books they were offered and would only pay the authors 10 percent of the final book price. Sale. Now anyone can try to reach large audiences without going through the publication's traditional gatekeepers. Authors don't have to pay anything to list on Amazon and have more control over what goes into their books, how their books look, and how (and if) they're marketed. Alexa Riley's King and Robinson told me that a traditional publisher would probably never have accepted their manuscripts because their books were too dirty. Friends who write romance novels for traditional publishers have had to publish kinky sex scenes, they told me, because the publishers weren't happy with the content. It was only after mainstream publishers saw that Alexa Riley's kinky books were selling well that they turned to the authors and let them keep what they wanted.

But have the authors traded one corporate lord for another? That worries Coker from Smash Words. Now Amazon is making the rules, for example banning authors from publishing on both Kindle Unlimited and other sites, incentivizing people to produce large amounts of content, and fomenting a race to the bottom in book prices. Authors who in an e-book utopia could have set their own prices and sold their books online wherever they wanted now have a choice: go exclusively with Amazon and KDP Select, or try to sell their books without Amazon . Authors who get all of their sales from Amazon are playing a dangerous game, Coker said. "In the long term, the perpetrators pledge their independence," he said. "They are no longer independent authors, they are dependent authors."

But for now, self-published authors seem willing to take that risk. Samantha Christy told me that an agent recently approached her about going down the traditional publishing route. You'll meet up with the agent, but traditional mail has little appeal, especially since you'd get a much smaller share of sales that way. "Why give away a piece of the pie if you don't have to?" She said.

At the time of writing, Mike Omer was still the lead writer at Amazon. Now he's trying to get beyond Kindle Unlimited into what he calls "the next level" in the book market, people who sift through a few books a month instead of dozens and are more selective about what they read. This level will get you readers as self-publishing on Amazon makes money. alwaysthe mind of a killerpublished by an Amazon imprint, rather than self-published, has garnered much more attention and boosted sales of his self-published works. "I really can't imagine a freelance writer making money without going through Amazon," he told me.

Omer's experience was like a dream, he told me. But for people in the publishing industry, it can seem more like a nightmare. He bypassed traditional gatekeepers to publish his books online on Amazon, gaining thousands of readers. It bypassed the big publishers in favor of an Amazon-run publisher that attracted thousands more. In fact, it has little interest in the traditional publishing industry. He's a successful author and his whole world is Amazon.