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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When I was nine years old, my older brother had quite the collection of Sci-Fi paperback novels. His favorite writers were Heinlein and Asimov, and he used to get ballistic if I tried to sneak a book off the shelf. Finally, he got tired of constantly coming in my room to retrieve them (I swear, I stole “Tunnel in the Sky” every other day) and he offered me a book that he just so happened to have two copies of.

“Keep this one,” he said. “You’re going to want to, anyway.” Continue reading →