Tag: books

Yesterday I was crusin’ FB a little bit and a strange thing popped up in my feed from an Author’s Group that I do not belong to. Here and Now I must say; “Thank you FB, without your algorithm I never would have seen this notice.”

I stared at it for a while because as we’re all aware there’s a lot of scammy crap goin’ around. Eventually I thought; What the hell?

I had just opened my KDP account the day before and there wasn’t a notification for me. I did not receive this in an email unless Google also thought it was a scam and kicked it to my spam box.

Well, ok, then. Let’s check it out.

Right-o, let’s do that.

Went to KDP, signed in with my new password….it made it me change the damn password again! But…ok….did that. Looked for a notification. There wasn’t one.

I took a deep breath, looked up, said a little prayer, and opened “Genesis” which I know I totally forgot to hit DRM on on all those years ago. KDP would not let me change it. Nope, it was like the title or the author name or ISBN….you can’t change those things after you hit ‘publish’.

OH! There it WAS! The DRM box was OPEN!

Quick, quick!

Yeah, baby!

I hit the DRM box and hit ‘publish’ just as fast as it would let me. KDP wanted me to be sure I didn’t want my stuff thrown into these new formats.

Yes, El Jefe, I’m positive. Thanks anyway.

I went through every single book and made double sure DRM was checked, where it wasn’t I put it on there and hit ‘publish’.

Back to those Author’s Groups. I am a member of a few. I haven’t been to them in ages because they all came off very cliquey. You know? There were a bunch of blowhards trying to tell everyone how to do everything. No one was listening. They were just arguing. If you said anything that went against someone who thought they were really were someone you could get hounded by their “fans”! No joke. The internet is a very strange and volatile place. In fact, in the one Author’s Group I recently joined and is allowed to show up in my feed, they’re still arguing over Indie Authors vs. Traditionally Published. Twenty friggin’ YEARS of that. You’d think they could get over it by now. Of course the new thing flooding the Author’s Groups is AI vs. You’ve Got Talent.

Anyway, I do like that one group so I made my first actual post there. I put up that pic with a note saying, you know, “Just FYI”.

I did my Good Deed.

Yes, you did.

Mostly those folks are confused as to why Kindle would do this.

That’s simple; they’re losing market share and need to expand at your expense, as always.

El Jefe, when he smiled at us beleaguered Indie Authors two decades ago, opened his arms, and welcomed us to platform which is was just beginning, told us to USE DRM as it would help prevent our books from being pirated. Which, of course, was something none of us wanted. In effect, he offered us a ‘safe haven’…a home, for crying out loud, where we would be valued. Yeah, Amazon was built on the backs of the thousands of Indie Authors who flocked to El Jefe and his promises, if you don’t believe me you can Google that shit for yourself. Amazon didn’t start being AMAZON until Jefe bought Mobi Pockets Books.

Anyway, Jefe wanted us to use DRM. It was twofold, of course, it would benefit us by making our works harder to pirate but it greatly benefited HIM more because he would take a hefty percentage of those new legitimate sales from Indie books that could not be uploaded to pirate sites. In short; if you want it BUY it.

The cry of all Small Businesses around the globe; If you want it BUY it!

Don’t steal it.

That’s right.

Then Jefe gave the world Kindle then Kindle Unlimited. That shit is a whole other post.

However, I mention it because it’s starting to fail. Indie Authors were finally able to shut down the Kindle Lending Library which you were FORCED into if you sold you book for more than $0.99. Yeah, he’s the one who pimped you out hard with the whole; well, it’s just an e-book so it’s only worth about a buck. BS.

Look, I know the format is different, not as expense, so MAYBE the e-book shouldn’t cost as much as the paperback BUT, did you know, that if you DOWNLOAD A GAME from Xbox it costs EXACTLY the SAME as the disk you’d buy in the store? Yeah, it does. So I guess Microsoft found a flaw in El Jefe’s design. You know what else? People pay that price for the games because they don’t have another choice if they want to play. Did you that, Once Upon a Time if you bought a CD or DVD you could not return it at all? Nope. You could only exchange for a new copy of that exact item.

It appears to me that enough Indie and Traditionally Published Authors finally saw how they were being ripped off with Kindle Unlimited which pays fractions of a penny per “normalized page read”…READ. If you think that, when you finish that book, the author got the same amount of money from your cheap Unlimited Self as they would have if you’d plunked down a few bucks to buy their book, you are sorely mistaken. Yes, some authors made a lot of money in Unlimited.

Think of how much more they could have made without it if people valued those books at less than $0.99.

It was a bad deal. A lot of us saw it from the start though we gave it a shot. We didn’t see much RIO for our exclusivity to El Jefe. He should have treated us better when we joined more would have stayed.

As they say; When enough of the Many rise up against the Few the Few must take notice.

Bye-bye Lending Library.

Bye-bye way too liberal Read and Return policy.

For the most part, bye-bye $0.99 ebook.

And, oh, look, sales are doing great on Nook, Kobo, iBooks (oh I love iBooks! My second biggest sales channel), GooglePlay, and literally hundreds of other ebook retailers around the world. Why? Authors got out of Unlimited and went to true Wide Distribution. Kindle is losing sales, losing MONEY! They must correct course.

Be nice if they had told ALL of us though, huh?

Look, I don’t really mind the .ePub thing, it’s not a horrible idea at all, but no no no a million times no to the .PDF thing!

That is how so many of us got illegally uploaded to pirate sites where we lost thousands upon thousands of dollars to unscrupulous assholes and now we find ourselves unwittingly embroiled in this Anthropic Class Action Suit thing.

I ask you; As authors, have we learned absolutely NOTHING over the last 20 years????

That’s crazy.

Baby, you might as well just put your book up on your website in the same .PDF and just give it away. Oh, ok, at first, maybe you could sell a copy or two for that lovely $0.99, but it won’t be long before you find your books on those pirate sites. Hours after download. Baby. Hours.

Not days.

Not weeks.

Those people who send you those nasty scammy emails about their Reader Communities or their Marketing Skills or oh how they loved your book! Those jerks? Yeah, they cruise your site. How do you think they found you? They found your site. They found your Amazon page. They plugged you into ChatGPT or similar, then they sent you an email trying to scam you out of your money and your book.

Now they won’t have to email you. They’ll just get the book in their preferred pirating format and off they’ll go with it. The BEST thing they can do with it is just upload it in a half a million places for others to download FREE. The WORST things they can with it are:

1-Open an account on a retailer where you are not available
Upload your book under their name or yours even (such fun)
Collect YOUR money

2-Change the ENTIRE book JUST ENOUGH…not too much now
Upload to a legitimate ebook retailer
Collect YOUR money

Which one of those are you willing to open yourself up to for the sake of making $0.35?

That’s your take on the sale an ebook priced at retail for the lovely $0.99.

Guess who’s getting the rest of that little bit of change plus, maybe, a tiny ‘download fee’.

El Jefe.

Ooooo….I love you so!