Given the recent kerfuffle over Amazon temporarily suppressing site-wide rankings for erotica, I figure it’s time to express my opinions about the behemoth that seems to always be on the minds of erotica writers.
Sure, Amazon is the biggest ebook retailer out there. You would have to be a fool not to attempt to sell your ebooks there. But I’m a firm believer that you should always “go wide” in your effort to sell your work, especially if you write in sub-genres that Amazon doesn’t accept, like I do.
In particular, I believe that Kindle Unlimited is ultimately destructive to the industry. Obviously, Amazon runs the program because it benefits them to do so, for two reasons:
- They are using it to establish dominance, if not monopoly, over the ebook market by pulling readers and books from other retailers.
- They profit more from it than from just selling ebooks.
What’s wrong with that? From Amazon’s perspective, it’s great for them. It steals books from the “inventory” of their competitors, draws more readers to them, helps them sell Kindles and makes them money.
Why is KU bad for authors? First, we have to understand that KU is ultimately decreasing how much money reaches the hands of writers overall by decreasing the number of books sold, which can only decrease the numbers of writers who can make a living from writing (I don’t, at this time, but hope to). Second, it pushes writers into a quantity vs quality decision that makes it harder for anyone to build a real audience, so glutted is the marketplace with “free” books. Why put out the extra effort to publish 10 really good books in a year, when it seems you have to put out 50, no matter how quickly they were written and edited, just to get noticed? Books that wouldn’t deserve to be bought at any price, whether from quality or length, still get read under KU because it costs the reader nothing but their time and if they give up in disgust half-way through, so what? It was free for them. Third, it forces authors who aren’t enrolled in KU to lower the price on their books to compete with the “free” books, further depressing earnings for everyone. Everyone but Amazon.
Why is KU bad for readers? You’re paying less to have books to read, aren’t you? That’s what it looks like in the short term, but if you’re effectively discouraging writers from writing their best book, whether their output is decreased because of the time spent in a day job they wish they didn’t need or from pumping out more books that aren’t as good as they could write if they put more effort into polishing each one, aren’t you missing out on the experience of reading the book they could have written with more time and effort? I would rather reward the best writers than read an endless stream of bad writing for semi-free. I can find better writing on a truly free erotica site like Literotica than some of what I see pumped out on Amazon. I hope my readers see the effort I put into my books, even if they’re still not as good as I want them to be.
Why is KU bad for the industry? If it enables Amazon to achieve a monopoly, you’ll see royalties drop even more, rules about what is acceptable get tighter, and on and on. We need Amazon to have competitors. And that means those competitors need books to sell. Be the authors who provide them. Be the readers who buy from them.
So, whether as a reader or a writer, I believe we should support as many retailers as possible, for the overall health of the industry. I’ll buy from Amazon those books that I want to read that might only be available there, when I get a gift card, but I’ll mainly support Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Streetlib and other retailers so we have a vibrant publishing industry for years to come. Join me?
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NOTE: I have been writing erotica for just over two years. I still consider myself in a “Build an audience” stage, hoping to support myself on my writing combined with retirement savings at some point in the future. I’m currently 55 and recently unemployed and would love, love, love not to have to find another job, but that might not be possible to avoid this year.
My output (roughly 600,000 words) to date has been published in 26 ebooks of varying lengths, with one work-in-progress posted to WattPad that I plan to get back to writing soon. 16 of these ebooks contain incest, so the 10 non-incest works are published to Amazon through their KDP program but none are on KU. All 26 are available on Smashwords, which distributes the same 10 ebooks to Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Apple, among other retailers. 24 are published to Streetlib, which distributes eight non-incest ebooks to Google Play and other retailers, where I try to not overlap with Smashwords’ list. 23 ebooks are also published to Excitica, which welcomes the taboo. The bulk of my royalties come from Smashwords, such as they are, with Amazon coming in second.
Four of the longest incest books have been converted to paperback editions via Streetlib, which happens to distribute them to Amazon without asking whether they contain incest, so if you search Amazon for “Leenysman”, you’ll see a total of 14 titles listed, 10 ebooks and the 4 paperbacks. Four incest ebooks managed to survive on Barnes & Noble after their purge last year, although not the same four, so you’ll see 14 titles there, too.
See M.R. Leenysman Links for a set of links to my pages on various retailers or Books by M.R. Leenysman for an overall list of books.
