2013 edition of ‘Self-Publishing for Smart Cookies’ available on…SMASHWORDS!
Jeff Bezos (Amazon innovator) has Sweetened, for the second time in recent weeks, the pot of money available to authors who sign an exclusive agreement to sell their ebooks ONLY through his eCommerce store front.
I’m kind of a cause-and-effect gal, so let me entertain you with the causality, and effect, of his move to offer authors additional money over the standard $700,000 fund, for signing an exclusive with kdp Amazon.
First, a quick refresher on what (some of) the terms are for IndieAuthors who sign up to get what amounts to $1.71 for each ‘borrow’ of their eBooks. (I say ‘IndieAuthors’ because no Big Six, or Medium Six is foolish enough to sign up for an exclusive with Bezos!)
Terms:
1. You must not share an excerpt of said signed eBook on ANY other website – not on Goodreads, not on BookBuzzr, not on your OWN website. Even Tweeting salacious sentences of your signed eBook can be seen as an infraction of the terms of agreement. The Amazon Bot is watching you more closely than the Government in Orwell’s 1984 [BTW – there’s some irony to this, for trivia and publishing-history buffs look up "Amazon" and "Orwell" "2009".)
2. Authors signing up for kdp Amazon Select have a 3-month lock-in period.
Yadda, Yadda, let’s go over just these two terms for brevity.
An infraction of Term 1 can result in Amazon dismantling and discarding your WHOLE Amazon eBook Library – eBooks signed, eBooks NOT signed – no income possible there from the largest eBook distributor. Can you hold to this Exclusivity term? It’s not that easy to tout your new eBook on blog tours, etc. without an excerpt! Think about it. Imagine the mechanics of rolling out an eBook without promotional snippets, and passages of the ‘…And then…" sections. No! No!
Term No. 2 is what F**ked up most IndieAuthors in Q4 2012. And I do not use that bomb loosely. But say that one of Jeff Bezos famous ‘Technical Glitches" hits your author’s account. Like, maybe you’re selling an eBook about Medieval England – your eBook is a little hotcake over in the British Isles but your UK Sales Reporting Board suddenly disappears! It takes you a few days to realize that you are not selling in the UK, you submit a maintenance ticket, it takes another two days for the Tech Minions to tell you that it will take another 3 days to just LOOK at your problem. Maybe two weeks, or maybe three weeks later you are up and running and once again your UK sales are reporting. Well, you’ve just lost three or more weeks of income, and three or more weeks of platform building. Your auto-tweets, your FB posts, your news releases have all pointed toward a book that is not registering any sales. No! No!
Simply: There is NO reason why a Mega-Mogul would entice new Contract Serfs more money unless his kdp Amazon Select library was decimated by the departure of the last Contracted Serfs.
Think about it. The pot for hand-cuffing one’s self to the kdp Amazon Select program has been $600,000 to $700,000 each month. WHY the seemingly generous increase of $700,000 Bonus $1.5 million GLOBAL BONUS if your colleague authors were filling the ranks of a fairyland-wonderful eStore?
Then remember the fate of Pinocchio as he was being tantalized away from his rightful path toward a Land of sweets and carnivals. Sweets and Carnivals is NOT the way it turned out – is it?
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