More evidence, if any were needed, that the Kindle Unlimited model of selling books by subscription ($9.99 a month for all-you-can-eat) is pretty darn author-unfriendly, especially if youre a self-publisher. As Scalzi describes it, its a zero-sum-game cage match, where -- because of the way a fixed pool of money is disbursed -- any one authors success automatically becomes another authors misfortune. Oddly, this is a little bit similar to the whats happened to royalty disbursements to Canadian writers from Access Copyright and the Public Lending Rights Commission.These royalty schemes exist to compensate writers in one case for photocopying and digital use of their work, and the other for the use of their books in public libraries. Theyre not profit-driven at all, but like the Amazon scheme, they have fixed (or shrinking) pools of money to disburse to a constantly growing pool of authors. So the inevitable happens. My annual Access Copyright royalty is now less than half of what it was ten years ago, for example. The difference, of course, is that Amazons funding pool is capped arbitrarily to maximize the companys bottom line, while Access Copyright and the PLRC have minimal or no control over their year-to-year funding.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 22:28:20 +0000
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