Consider the following scenarios:
1) I walk into a restaurant and order a steak, fries, coca cola, and dessert. I only take one bite of the steak and don’t touch anything else. I tell the waiter, “I’m only paying for the bite I’ve eaten.”
2) I buy a movie ticket for this summer’s best blockbuster. After a few minutes, I leave the theater, deciding that the movie is not to my liking. I visit the ticket desk and demand that they refund me for the unwatched part of the film.
3) I’m watching my favorite cable TV show in the evening. After 15 minutes, I fall asleep. I call up my cable company and demand that I get reimbursed for the 45 minutes of the show I didn’t watch.
All of these sound like absurd scenarios to me. And yet this is exactly the model that Amazon is proposing to roll out soon for people who self-publish through their market. And let’s be clear about this. This is a nasty, sinister model that devalues authors. Forget for a moment the arguments about the potential change this might bring about in creative works when authors feel they absolutely must hold the readers’ attention. This turns the author into nothing more than a battery.
Amazon wants to maximize readers turning pages, which is laudable. But when we tie an author’s profit to eyeballs per page we are saying that the book itself is a frangible object, a divisible entity, that it is not complete only as a whole, but can be broken down like an electrical supply or gasoline into salable units. Amazon is essentially saying that a book like Stephen King’s The Stand is not a complete object, but exists a series of pages that can be sold to you individually.
No, it most certainly is not. And here is why:
Authors tell stories, not pages.
You pay for the labor of the author creating the entire work, even if you happen not to like some or even all of it, in the same way that you must fully pay for the steak dinner or the full movie price or the full cable TV bill because some person worked hard to make the entire creative object, and not just the small piece you enjoyed. And as such you need to pay that person for her time and effort, even if you only sample a little bit. That’s the deal. Anything else is quite simply theft.
June 23, 2015 at 10:48 am
This is a difficult debate, but I just finished reading Chuck Wendig’s write-up, which I’m inclined to agree with. The problem with the model before is that under the KU model, authors were paid the same, regardless of book price or length of work, if someone simply got to the 10% mark. The pages bit tries to take into account that someone who has published a 200-page novel has “more” of a product to offer than a 2,000 word short story published as a single edition for KU. But, Wendig offers some good, further adjustments for KU.
Whatever they do, it doesn’t really matter for me, because I am not an exclusive-to-Amazon author, so it doesn’t affect me at all, since to be in KU you can ONLY publish on KDP.
June 23, 2015 at 11:05 am
Thanks, Alex. I agree with some of Chuck Wendig’s points, but I still feel that tying profit to the fraction of the book read is a dangerous path to take. It suggests that readers are not buying whole stories, but fragments. When I sit down to write a book or short story, I do not plan to sell individual pages to readers. I am not creating a mortgage security that can be divided and subdivided ad infinitum. I am creating a complete object. I don’t expect everyone to like every story or novel I produce. But I do expect them to pay for the whole thing, not just the part that they read.
My argument stands. If you want to break your book up into chapters and sell those, fantastic. But that is the author’s choice. It is not the bookseller’s place to do so, nor is it their place to further subdivide the author’s work to maximize profit. Authors who opt-in to this model are devaluing their own work, and this model should be rejected by all self-respecting authors.
June 23, 2015 at 7:28 pm
I agree with you on purchase models, Matthew. Absolutely. But Kindle Unlimited is a rental service. The customer isn’t buying anything but a period of time with which to view the product.
Basically, a public library that paid every author $1 per rental. However, the “shelves” soon became inundated with leaflets (short stories) over books (novels) and the “money pool” cut dwindled. I think this is Amazon’s way of trying to be fair, and also make sure the “pie” is distributed evenly.
But I agree with you, as I said, when it comes to pay-to-purchase models.
June 23, 2015 at 8:02 pm
The model itself is obviously broken, but that’s not the fault of authors. Scalzi says it best when he says publishing should never be a zero-sum game, among other things:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/06/21/amazon-tweaks-its-kindle-unlimited-system-it-still-sucks-for-kdp-select-authors/