The Infected: Underground. Live. That's right... It's alive!!!

[PS Power]

All right!

I added that (taking less time than thought it would!) and it is uploading to Amazon right now. It can take up to three days (normally about six hours though, from what I've seen) to start showing. The book will still be available as it has been, the entire time.

If you want the updated copy before that, or if Amazon won't update you, I have a kindle copy I can send along. Just write me at:

power_dale@yahoo.com

And let me know what you are looking for, so I don't send the wrong thing.



(How cool is that? Try asking George R.R. Martin for something like that... I bet he won't even answer you, much less fix the issue!)

[mhbooth]

Ha! That's service. Well...

I primarily use Kindle on my Windows 10 system to read books and I checked today and it (Underground) was missing! The 'Zon pulled it back. I checked Kindle on my iPhone and it was there, but no TOC. I used the Manage Content in Amazon to re-download the book to the PC, but still no TOC.

The takeaway is Amazon is capricious as always, and the Kindle for PC is still treated as the Bastard Step Child. I'll check again in a few days.

[pieter]

I just buy KU, that is my budget for books for the month, with the dollar to rand exchange and the amount I read, I can't really do it another way.

This is the first book I bought from Zon and not in KU in probably 5 years.
And it is not even in my favorite P.S Power series (young ancients).

It is a pity that Amazon is so closed about how they do stuff. I know a lot of authors who are very happy with KU and some who aren't and some who have horror stories of things gone wrong. With Amazon not giving the necessary details and stats to authors nobody really knows if anything goes wrong and Amazon don't fix it.

It is sad for readers when the Authors they follow feel they have to leave KU, but every Author have to decide for themselves whether KU is worth it both in terms of money and effort.

Thanks Dale for being open with what is happening, and thanks for all the great stories so far.
We support you

[Ronald Dukarski]

When I read the post from Pieter, I said damn, when did I write this post?! So-ditto. That's exactly what I did and felt. Good luck with patreon. I hope it works out better than KU.

[PS Power]

Pieter and Ronald: Thanks, both of you.

Remember, if the budget get's too hard, just get in touch with me when the new books come out. I understand that KU is a great service for people that like to read books. Really awesome in fact.

The problem isn't even that the payouts have dropped. They were up front about the idea that there was a set amount in the pool for payouts that everyone shared equally. No, the problem is that, as they dropped the per page payout, they also kept pushing up the "size" of a page.

For instance: On Kobo, Barnes and Noble and pretty much every other site in the world, Underground is counted as being around 256 pages. On the Zon they count is as 135. Nearly half of what everyone else does. Which they didn't used to do.

Then, as mentioned, they lowered the price paid out per page as well. So, you get a bit less every time a book is sold.

Hey, money is nice. I mean, give me tens of thousands per month, right? That isn't my real driving force though. No, I was always in this to reach a lot of people. Even to the point of giving things away that I easily could make money on. (So, sure, I'm a little selfish, but that self interest looks different than people would expect. What I want is to have a chance to impact lives through my work, if even only in a small way.)

What Amazon is doing, not just to me but to hundreds of thousands of people is to make it seem like we are failing as authors when...

Well, given the factors above and a little math, the truth is that my sales haven't fallen off at all over the last five years. I kept thinking no one was reading my stuff, but the truth is, more people have been. It varies from book to book, sure, but... I was actually doing well, and Amazon made it SEEM like I was failing, that whole time. Each year the sales indicators showed less and less impact, less reach and poorer performance when that wasn't happening at all!

What happened was that, rather sensibly, more people were going through KU. It's cheap and a real bargain. Heck. I had everything, all hundred and twenty odd titles in KU (Most of my work is still there.) and most of my "sales" are through there.

Which means, as they tightened the screws, playing drastically with page counts (KU pays per page read, keep that in mind) and lowering the amount per page, just a little bit, like a frog in water about to be boiled, I watched it and desperately scrambled to make everything work.

And for some reason (the one you now know) everything slowly faded from my grasp. It took me a long time to understand what was going on, and really, it was noticing that Amazon has cut their own page counts for books as much as they have for me to really start to put it all together.

Now, I don't for a moment think that I'll make as much going other places. I might, or I might not. It's going to be a lot easier now than a few years ago though, since Amazon has been being a bit creepy about what they are doing. You still need the sales for things to work though, which might be impossible without them at this stage.

Which is why, if you, anyone can do the Patreon thing, that would be great. Even just letting me know that you're on my side and care is wonderful! Trust me, it can feel like you're all alone pretty fast in a situation like this, were it seems no one is reading your work anymore, as an author, no matter what you do.

*It hasn't hit me that I still have the same or greater number of actual readers, yet as at the statistical high on the charts. Hopefully that comes into play soon as well, because I'll need the incentive to keep going.

**Don't for a minute think these are the only Amazon tricks being used. We've heard how they treat their warehouse workers. Given that, I shouldn't have expected them to be better with anyone else.

[qHnED7SnYgQs]

Assuming they always pay each month: (total money pool / total pages read) * author pages read, and they use the same algorithm to calculate page count for everyone, then it is totally irrelevant if your book is calculated to have 100 or 600 pages for the final amount that is paid out.

If they hadn't changed how they calculate page sizes (resulting in less pages), then you would have instead just seen a more steep drop in the money per page.

What you are seeing is probably a combination of the following effects:
- after having become familiar with KU, more people make use of the steep discount amazon offers when subscribing for a year or two instead of paying month by month
- after having become more familiar with KU, and with significantly more books available via KU, people are now reading more pages of KU books per month (more pages, while cost remains the same, results in less money available per page read)
- more scammers become better at gaming the system (e.g. books filled with huge amount of useless filler, then a link at the beginning of the book, to a TOC at the end of the book, which when followed make Amazon count all pages in the book as having been read, because the "pages read" metric only depends on the highest page number people have reached) which greatly inflates the total number of pages read (resulting in a drop of payouts to real authors if the number of their pages read, and the total monthly money pool remains relatively constant).

In fact, as far as I'm aware, changes to their page count calculations are a direct reaction to that last one, as they now counter things like increased font size, empty lines, and a lot of other tricks scammers used to inflate page count.

Now, I obviously can't guarantee you that Amazon isn't increasing their own cut of KU income that they take out before putting it into the money pool from which KU authors are paid. But it's more likely that what you are actually seeing is simply the fact that people are paying less per month into KU (discounts from long term subscriptions) and at the same time reading more pages per month (be it from really reading more books using KU, or because scammers successfully inflate the total number of read pages).

[PS Power]

You keep hitting this and keep missing the point.

They hid that the payouts were smaller per page (Which people had figured out by comparing notes as to payment) over time. Yes, there are more books in KU, more users as well. That's apparent.

The relevance is to the fact that everyone was using the old page per book numbers, which were quietly changed over time. Sure, it showed up on the landing page for the book... But you know what I don't check every day? The page counts on the books. It wasn't until I noticed the latest book being so "short" when it wasn't elsewhere that I put it together.

What this dis was "trick" me into thinking my sales had fallen off, even in KU. Regular book sales were down (more people in KU, great deal, so why not?) but at first I was getting as many books read in page counts. Then it cut in half or more over time... Making it seem like I wasn't getting the book reads that I used to.

At the same time, they've also expanded the program, so there is more competition for books being read, and the pool was never large enough to start with. It's a fraction of the ten dollars that people pay into the system, for ten book loans per month. If you read them all, and they are long books, then the amount paid to each author goes down. A lot.

That IS the system they spoke of to begin with. It's only the fact that instead of counting the pages as they did originally, they quietly altered that. I nearly quiet, writing, several times because I figured that no one was interested in the books.

When I adjust to the new lengths,(reducing the number of pages per book) all those people are suddenly back, even if I'm only making a fifth of what I used to.

I'm not claiming they've done anything illegal. Just that they used accounting tricks in a way that ticked me off, because they didn't announce the changes made. KU isn't working out as a program and probably couldn't, long term for me. The pool size was always off, compared to the initial payouts. (They use a fraction of what you pay in for that, probably about two dollars of it, for the pool. Hence, with KU being bigger and well used, the payouts shrink. At first, it was richer than that. That's all on the money side. For that portion of things, at least.)

I don't even think that Amazon is doing to to save money or take a bigger cut like you seemed to think I was saying. They simply hid that people were making less, by making everyone (not just me, a million or so people, ) think they simply weren't cutting it any longer.

As far as I can tell, they've dealt with the scammers, eventually. Cutting page counts is NOT in any way a response to that though. Why would it be? That wouldn't help their algorithms at all, in particular. My guess is that they cut the page count to keep people in KU. (The authors.) It was to hide how little people are making in these later days that way.

*I tend to get what are considered large numbers in KU page counts, even with the reduced pages per book being used. They've also been paying less. At a certain point, that means authors are going to leave KU, because it becomes more cost effective to go wide, instead of all in on Amazon. (They force an exclusive contract, if you want to be in KU.)

For instance, the other day I had 40,000 page reads. If my average book is (the old numbers) 450 pages, then that would be about 88.8 books read, plus about fifty regular sales. If the average for what Amazon is counting is 200 pages (for a 100,000 word book) that's 200 books read in KU and fifty in regular sales.

I know that it's a psychological difference, but that, plus the lag of page reads (meaning my books, popular in KU don't trend as well all the time, without a large advertising push, and then I still don't make as much as I used to, since KU is paying less and less...) gave an impression that is very different than reality.

My sales haven't particularly dropped at all. In fact, they've gone up over the years (as far as readership goes) which is wonderful!

On the other hand, at the current rate of dropping, being in KU even with that readership, will mean that my monthly income will probably drop to about a thousand a month or so. I would have some struggles living on that at present.

Hence trying new things! I would have to expect a lot of people leaving KU, as this happens. many already have, I hear.

[pieter]

I don't want to get too involved in amazon arguments, but a couple of things to remember, they gave indie authors a place to put their work before almost anyone else and they pay much higher than trad pub royalties.

My biggest gripe with them is never what they do, but how they make proper tracking impossible and don't give enough info, even so everyone is free to use or not use amazon to sell books and to use or not use KU. The thing is companies that want to show themselves as the champion of their partners (in this case authors) should be open about what they do. E.G. if you are an author in KU it would be a lot more difficult to complain if their contract states what percentage and or minimums / maximums goes into the pool for authors, what amounts gets made by ku payouts etc, so that there partners can see how the pool, page count, payout /page etc is calculated.

I have seen authors with no sales on there dashboard that had users post/email them about buying books. Even when they show amazon receipts they very often gets a brush of and it doesn't get fixed. I have also seen authors who report a problem and amazon going out of their way to solve it. With such a big company you are unfortunately going to get good and bad employees. But they make it very difficult to check if there is problems, because they hand over very little data.

If i partner with somebody even if it is as a sales channel or affiliate and not a very close partnership i would expect them to notify me if they change anything that would affect my income.

KU is a business decision for an author, and a very complex one, because it is very difficult to calculate loss from other sources because of the exclusivity clauses. It is also difficult to know how much normal sales gets boosted because of higher rankings that KU contribute to.

Unless you don't need income from your books, authors needs to treat it as a business decision and trust is always a big part of business decisions. It doesn't matter if amazon is doing something wrong if they appear to be doing something wrong and they can't be bothered to explain it to their partners.

I've been a KU reader for years and basically do not read anything else, I read 20 to 50 books a month with KU, most is indie authors, a lot of it is random stuff i find. But if between 5 and 10 authors that i read most leave KU, i would probably cancel and end up reading a lot less, but there is some authors that I will read.

I might not be an average reader, but i am what is termed a whale reader, and they are what makes authors successful.

BTW. If i read a series from an author the first time i will always try to read the standalone books, and after that the box sets if available, If the books is good enough for me to read it multiple times, I try to get the author paid at least twice (i have read the standalone books of the new authors edition of young ancients so hopefully you got paid three times from for the young ancients, next re-read, probably in six months, if it is still in KU i will hit the box sets of the new edition.) There is small things you can do to support authors that don't cost you anything.

--- End of rant---

What i actually came here to post about is the new book, which I only have one major problem with. I want more.
Great book. Whatever you need to do to enable you to keep writing, do it.
I love your work and i am not alone.
I know some people only read certain of your series because you have series in different genres, but i like most of the genres you write in.

For the people who love the different genres and how they overlap, there is nothing else available quite like it.
If you need people to post encouragement on your forum for you to carry on, put that in your author notes, let us know, I am not somebody who talk a lot on forums, but if that is part of what is needed for you to carry on i will do it.

If I need to spend a bit more to make sure you keep writing I will do that (as far as a can).

[PS Power]

Thanks!

It is always a good point to recall that Amazon doesn't tell anyone what they are doing. (Possibly the shareholders? If so, they won't talk to us either...) Also that, clearly, Amazon serves itself first.

Which is fairly typical of corporations. It's pretty much they are designed to do. (Which doesn't make it right, only common.)

[qHnED7SnYgQs]

The reduction in page count comes from the fact that they are using larger virtual pages to lay out the text when calculating page count.

This is a direct counter to the scammers that previously laid our their books so that in the old page size they had:

************************************
*

************************************
*

************************************
*

which was one of the tricks to inflate page count.

In fact, author's are complaining now that if they upload the same book with at most minor changes there can be a significant variability in calculated page count.

I'm willing to bet that's because to counter the above, they didn't simply increase the size of the virtual page (which would just be a one time change that the scammers adjust to), instead they probably randomly choose a different page shape (width to height ratio) with the same surface area for each page during calculations.

Also, if you are looking at the page count on the normal book details page, you are probably looking in the wrong place:

Your book's KENPC
You can see your book's KENPC v3.0 listed on the "Promote and Advertise" page in your Bookshelf, and you can also see total pages read on your Sales Dashboard report. Because it's based on default settings, KENPC v3.0 may vary from page counts listed on your Amazon detail page, which are derived from other sources.
(from https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201541130 )

Now, I'm not questioning that the way KU is going, it's not sustainable for you as an author. And I'm fully behind you looking for better ways to turn your work into well earned cash (I was the first one to pledge for your Patreon, and at the highest Tier).

I just don't think that it's fair to attribute any maliciousness to what Amazon is doing in this case.

The global fund / total pages read value is going down because people paying less (by getting discounted longer subscriptions instead of paying month by month) are reading more pages (either really reading more pages, or get scammed using books with inflated page count, or the scammers run click farms to increase their pages read count).

It's in the best interest of Amazon if as much money as possible flows to read authors instead of scammers, so they are trying to combat these last two by changes to how the total page count for a book is calculated, and by other measures to detect click farms and not count them.