As I previously mentioned, I’m getting a lot more traction off the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Lending Library Fund for the two books I have exclusively on Amazon vs the sales I’m getting off of Smashwords (even though it feeds out to multiple platforms). The problem is, unless you agree to go exclusive with Kindle, you can’t take advantage of Kindle Countdown Deals, Free Book promotions, etc. and those things have generated some serious flow for me.

So if you’re a Nook user, head over to Smashwords and download today and get them because they’re going away there after today. If you prefer to read online or via iPad, Kindle has a reader app you can use to read via those platforms.

I’ll still be publishing novellas on Smashwords, and you’ll still be able to access my free reads (and I’ll be posting more of those, I promise).

I really appreciate everyone who’s supported me on that platform, I really do. I just have to do what works best for now. Unfortunately. Amazon is changing the royalty structure on July 1 (and are being a bit vague about how that’s all shaking out, money-wise) so this is kind of an experiment. I’m giving them 60 days and if it’s not doing me any good to make this move, I’ll bring everything back. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Till then, I’ll just get back to writing, if it’s all the same to you.

In case you missed it last week, Amazon is restructuring the way it calculates royalties for its authors in the Kindle Select program. The long and short of if it is that Amazon is losing money on Kindle Unlimited, so they’ve changed the structure to make it more lucrative – for them, anyway- beginning July 1.

In the old program, if your book was part of the Kindle Select program and a reader downloaded and read past 10% of the book, you got a share of the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Lending Library Fund, which is calculated in some funky way that I don’t exactly understand because…math. But anyway, you get paid the rate for the full book, as long as they read past that 10%.

In the new program, even if they read past 10%, you’re only going to be paid for the amount of pages they read. So if they stop in the middle, or they decide to skip your “About the Author” page, you’re not going to get as much as you would before.

Which is, of course, crap. If they bought your paperback at the bookstore, you’d get paid whether they read it all the way through or not. But this ain’t paperback land, and Amazon is unfortunately the big, bad gunslinger in this shootout. They’re holding all the cards.

The biggest problem (or so I thought) about the Kindle Select program is that they require 90 days of exclusivity. You cannot publish and sell that title anywhere else – not Smashwords, not your own website/platform, nada. It’s Amazon and only Amazon, and that kind of sucks.

Or so I thought.

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