# New KENPC payout cap



## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

Noticed this on a box set I published:

The maximum number of KENP Read that an individual borrow can earn is 3000. 

It's right after the KENPC count. So, box-setters, looks like it won't be as profitable to publish above 3000 KENPC.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

David VanDyke said:


> Noticed this on a box set I published:
> 
> The maximum number of KENP Read that an individual borrow can earn is 3000.
> 
> It's right after the KENPC count. So, box-setters, looks like it won't be as profitable to publish above 3000 KENPC.


Wait, that's not clear. Are they saying that any one product can't have a KENP higher than 3000, or that any one product can't earn more than 3000 page reads? I'm guessing the former as the latter would melt the internet from the cries of foul play.

EDIT: Was looking at the Royalties in Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners' Lending Library:



> KENPC v2.0 also introduces a change to how we handle extremely long books like dictionaries and long reference books. Under KENPC v2.0, authors will be able to earn a maximum of 3,000 Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENPs) read per title per customer. While this change impacts a fraction of a percent of KDP Select books, we believe it will result in a more equitable distribution of the KDP Select Global Fund. Each time your book is borrowed and read, you will receive credit for up to 3,000 pages.


So I guess it's been there all along. Really long books cap out at KENP 3,000.


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## Saul Tanpepper (Feb 16, 2012)

Jim Johnson said:


> Wait, that's not clear. Are they saying that any one product can't have a KENP higher than 3000, or that any one product can't earn more than 3000 page reads? I'm guessing the former as the latter would melt the internet from the cries of foul play.


The latter. There's a 3000 KENPC cap that any title can earn from any single borrower.

I suspect a whole bunch of people are now scrambling to check their KENPC. Based on my estimates, 3000 KENPC may be as few as 350,000 words.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

Saul Tanpepper said:


> The latter. There's a 3000 KENPC cap that any title can earn from any single borrower.
> 
> I suspect a whole bunch of people are now scrambling to check their KENPC. Based on my estimates, 3000 KENPC may be as few as 350,000 words.


I misunderstood it. I read it as 'any one title can't earn more than 3000 pages read'. Meaning that once a title picks up 3000 pages read in a month, it can't earn more. Which would be looney tunes and would really make a lot of authors unhappy. So, my bad for misreading a poorly worded statement from the 'zon.


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## Lydniz (May 2, 2013)

Yes, mine have dropped too, by quite a bit.


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## Rick Gualtieri (Oct 31, 2011)

Not seeing much change in mine.  I see the 2.0 notice, but no idea if this is a rolling change or not.  Definitely will be checking my dashboard religiously over the next several days.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

Looks like mine did go down 10-20%. I suspect they did some algorithm tweaking. If I were the Zon, I'd make sure formatting differences didn't inflate or deflate page count. For example, a book formatted with a half-line between paragraphs shouldn't magically have more KENPC. I'm sure there were formatting tricks that increased KENPC; I remember seeing them discussed somewhere, though not here.

Not saying anyone actually did anything like that; just that the Zon may have decided to change the way they calculate, and naturally some will drop, some won't (or not as much).


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

My page counts went up for the time being. I have no idea how Amazon's calculations changed, but I guess it can help, too. 

My books have very basic formatting, for the record, and are produced with InDesign. 

Nick


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## Saul Tanpepper (Feb 16, 2012)

Just checked the first ten Select books in my dashboard. These are titles ranging from as little as 35 KENPC to as large as 550. Without having made any changes to any of the files, every single one has dropped from 10.5% to 25%. 

#amnothappy


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

This just hit my inbox (I guess it was pure luck I checked the KENPC and found this out before the email):

Hello,

Today we announced KENPC v2.0. This release makes a number of improvements to how we standardize font, line height, and spacing used to normalize the length of each book relative to one another and handles an edge case around extremely long books like dictionaries and long reference books.

Under KENPC v2.0 authors will be able to earn a maximum of 3,000 Kindle Edition Normalized Pages read per title per customer. We believe this change will result in a more equitable distribution of the KDP Select Global Fund. While this change will impact a fraction of a percent of KDP Select books, you are being notified because you have at least one book enrolled in KDP Select with a KENPC v2.0 over 3,000.

You can find more information about KENPC v2.0 here https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=AI3QMVN4FMTXJ.

Best Regards,
The Kindle Direct Publishing Team


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## Jeanne Lynn (Nov 19, 2012)

Where do look in the dashboard to see your KENPC? We got the email. My son writes very long war novels. One of his novels is 2100 pages and 1.5 million words. I'm guess this is going to hurt.


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## Rick Gualtieri (Oct 31, 2011)

Jeanne Lynn said:


> Where do look in the dashboard to see your KENPC? We got the email. My son writes very long war novels. One of his novels is 2100 pages and 1.5 million words. I'm guess this is going to hurt.


At that size, it's almost definitely affected. From your KDP dashboard click on "Promote and Advertise" for the book in question. KENPC count should be near the bottom of the resulting page.


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## TessOliver (Dec 2, 2010)

Yep, looks like they changed the formula. There's been a significant drop in KENPC. Not cool.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

This 3000 limit is such bad timing for me!  Trying to organize a ten novel bundle. We'll probably lose half our pages.

In theory, the new KENPC calculations don't matter much IF everyone is down. We're paid out of a pool. But these seems like a rather transparent attempt to get the page rate up without actually paying us more for our work.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

I had all my KENPC handy because I just switched to Vellum and wanted to compare KENPC (was using Word before). My new KENPC with Vellum are still the same. From what I can tell, those using Calibre and Jutoh are the ones seeing differences. Can anyone confirm or deny that?


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## 80593 (Nov 1, 2014)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> I had all my KENPC handy because I just switched to Vellum and wanted to compare KENPC (was using Word before). My new KENPC with Vellum are still the same. From what I can tell, those using Calibre and Jutoh are the ones seeing differences. Can anyone confirm or deny that?


I can't speak to Calibre or Jutoh but saw drops of about 12% on all five of my books, using Word. (Edit: and my counts were already low compared to some Vellum-using friends with similar-length books, so I'm annoyed as all get-out.)


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Jen Rasmussen said:


> I can't speak to Calibre or Jutoh but saw drops of about 12% on all five of my books, using Word. (Edit: and my counts were already low compared to some Vellum-using friends with similar-length books, so I'm annoyed as all get-out.)


Over 74 titles I saw only a net gain of 36 pages when I switched from Word to Vellum. It's all very interesting.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

I formatted my books in Scrivener and it looks like they got the modest KENP hit. I'm not worried about the rejiggering--I just want to figure out how to get more KU readers.


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## Quiss (Aug 21, 2012)

I took a 20% hit on my books, which are short and single spaced. So what the hell is going on?

At the CURRENT payout per page, a borrow is roughly the same as a sale, or slightly less.  At this 20% ripoff I'm out of KU.  I'm SO DONE with this crap.


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## 80593 (Nov 1, 2014)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> Over 74 titles I saw only a net gain of 36 pages when I switched from Word to Vellum. It's all very interesting.


Mine were always a bit low compared to some others I've talked to. My longest book is 84k, had a KENPC of 442, now down to 392. I haven't been all that fussed about comparing but now I'm aggravated if the gap has only gotten wider, with some people's counts staying the same.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

Jeanne Lynn said:


> Where do look in the dashboard to see your KENPC? We got the email. My son writes very long war novels. One of his novels is 2100 pages and 1.5 million words. I'm guess this is going to hurt.


Split the book into two or three...


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## Guest (Feb 1, 2016)

The Oblong One said:


> Did anyone else have their KENPC page counts drop by 20% or more on every book in their account?


I've lost 25% off every KENPC 

I use Jutoh to format my e-books


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Jen Rasmussen said:


> Mine were always a bit low compared to some others I've talked to. My longest book is 84k, had a KENPC of 442, now down to 392. I haven't been all that fussed about comparing but now I'm aggravated if the gap has only gotten wider, with some people's counts staying the same.


My 93K book has a 490 KENPC (for comparison's sake) with Vellum.


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## Wired (Jan 10, 2014)

I use a .docx file with simple formatting. My KENPC dropped from 326 to 289.


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## Quiss (Aug 21, 2012)

So does it seem that people using Calibre for conversion are getting dinged? Is it a margin thing maybe?
I'm going to try to upload different version to see if I can get on a paying basis again.


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## Rick Gualtieri (Oct 31, 2011)

Word to Calibre to epub, then convert to Mobi with Kindlegen here.  Possible I lost some, since I didn't have the numbers memorized to begin with, but they all look roughly about where I remember them.


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## Erratic (May 17, 2014)

I have a 26k novella that I know for a fact was 157 KENPC. It is now 135. Not much difference since it's such a short book, but it adds up. Now let's see....135 x 15 books in my series = approximately 2025 KENPC for the finished bundle. And that would be about 390k words. So it seems that bundles can still be quite large without hitting the cap.

I wonder if they decreased our pages to keep the rate per page steady? They don't want the amount per page to drop off a cliff or people might panic. Seems an underhanded way to do it if you ask me.


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## 80593 (Nov 1, 2014)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> My 93K book has a 490 KENPC (for comparison's sake) with Vellum.


Thank you! They kind of seem to be all over the place, with no discernible pattern. I indulged my urge to give a little feedback and wrote to KDP support, because honestly I just can't understand why they can't count words and call it a day. But when they inevitably respond that it's all working as intended and it's totally okay really, I'll let it go. Even when we're all being paid out of the same pool, I think it still makes the most sense to make my KU decisions based on my own situation, books, and wider market potential, without beating my head against the wall fussing about whether someone else is making more or less money for the same length book.


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## Evan of the R. (Oct 15, 2013)

> "Under KENPC v2.0 authors will be able to earn a maximum of 3,000 Kindle Edition Normalized Pages read per title per customer. We believe this change will result in a more equitable distribution of the KDP Select Global Fund."


How is this more equitable? A page read is a page read, no?


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## bobfrost (Sep 29, 2013)

Amazon just announced KENPC 2.0:

https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=AI3QMVN4FMTXJ

They changed the way they normalize page counts and they put a cap on the total pages in a single book.


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## mach 5 (Dec 5, 2015)

Crystal_ said:


> This 3000 limit is such bad timing for me! Trying to organize a ten novel bundle. We'll probably lose half our pages.
> 
> In theory, the new KENPC calculations don't matter much IF everyone is down. We're paid out of a pool. But these seems like a rather transparent attempt to get the page rate up without actually paying us more for our work.


I'm not in any box sets and any single author bundles I have are not above this cap, but I find this extremely unfair. A page read is a page read as long as no one is cheating and using some program that flips pages (or mechanical device that flips pages). Half a million words was about 5400 KENPC uploading a mobi made from calibre. Certainly that's dropped the 20% or so. But that's still over 1000 pages that despite being enjoyed the author will not be compensated for.

I wonder if they are trying to discourage both boxsets and certain genres from bundling (like fantasy and SF authors)


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## bobfrost (Sep 29, 2013)

Evan of the R. said:


> How is this more equitable? A page read is a page read, no?


I suspect they made this change because of abusive authors...

For example, lets say you published a book with twenty thousand pages into KU, then had some people you definitely probably didn't know come along and "read" that book in KU.

I could be wrong though...

Hell, maybe Amazon just wants to keep bundles under 3,000 pages for delivery purposes.


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## Saul Tanpepper (Feb 16, 2012)

I've used a variety of methods, from directly submitted in Word, .mobi (kindlegen, mobipocket, D2D), Word to ePub (D2D, Calibre), Sigil... I'm seeing drops across the board, and I don't use any fancy formatting.


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## Erratic (May 17, 2014)

mach 5 said:


> *A page read is a page read *as long as no one is cheating and using some program that flips pages (or mechanical device that flips pages).


I agree. The cap doesn't make sense to me. So what if a bundle is 4k KENPC? So long as people are reading it, the author(s) should get paid.


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## JalexM (May 14, 2015)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> I had all my KENPC handy because I just switched to Vellum and wanted to compare KENPC (was using Word before). My new KENPC with Vellum are still the same. From what I can tell, those using Calibre and Jutoh are the ones seeing differences. Can anyone confirm or deny that?


 [crappy] time to be on windows. 
Lost about 20%. With that decrease along with lower pay per page. Kindle select is looking less and less interesting to me. I might try to go wide before my next major release.


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## Saul Tanpepper (Feb 16, 2012)

bobfrost said:


> I suspect they made this change because of abusive authors...
> 
> For example, lets say you published a book with twenty thousand pages into KU, then had some people you definitely probably didn't know come along and "read" that book in KU.
> 
> Basically, by capping things at 3,000 pages they keep people from trying to make money by putting out "20 novel megabundles" and keep people from abusing the system with giant piles of words.


I'm sure this abuse exists, but, seriously, how many "friends" can a person have? I doubt this is a serious concern or a major problem. The 3000 KENPC cap is just wrong, especially to be implemented without prior warning. Clearly, they're trying to stuff books into a certain size, just like they've done with their 70% royalty rate.


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## 75845 (Jan 1, 1970)

I guess that scuppers George RR Martin's plans to publish the completed Game of Thrones series to Select in time for Christmas.


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## J.A. Cipriano (May 27, 2014)

I'm sure they capped it because it's really easy to put a whatever page book in KU and put a link at the front people click to go to the last page. This at least caps how much this "costs"

I use word to mobi pocket to caliber and I'm seeing 20% drop across the board.

Theoretically if almost everyone has a 20% drop then you should make more per page, right?


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## mach 5 (Dec 5, 2015)

JA, amazon knows when you turn a page, they certainly know when you also click a link that sends you to the back of a book. Many books are bookmarked, especially in non-fiction and it's highly unlikely KENPC v1 didn't already account for that.


Mercia - you're kidding that he had such plans, right? Anyway, I think they would have offered the publisher and GRR a huge lump sum plus KENPC amounts or similar and it sounds like they have way of exempting certain books exceeding 3000 KENPC.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

mach 5 said:


> JA, amazon knows when you turn a page, they certainly know when you also click a link that sends you to the back of a book. Many books are bookmarked, especially in non-fiction and it's highly unlikely KENPC v1 didn't already account for that.
> 
> Mercia - you're kidding that he had such plans, right? Anyway, I think they would have offered the publisher and GRR a huge lump sum plus KENPC amounts or similar and it sounds like they have way of exempting certain books exceeding 3000 KENPC.


You would think that but people were putting links in the front of 25,000 KENPC books and sending readers to the back and triggering a full read. People were bragging about it in certain circles.


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## dragontucker (Jul 18, 2014)

So doesn't this basically lower everyone's KU income by 10-20% depending on the drop? Also, does this mean an author can't profit from a individual reader after 3,000 page reads? Say Tom joins your email list right? You have 20 books written and he reads all 20 books in KU. The total page count for these 20 books is 5,000 pages. Does the author only get paid for the first 3,000 page reads and that's it?


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## Erratic (May 17, 2014)

J.A. Cipriano said:


> Theoretically if almost everyone has a 20% drop then you should make more per page, right?


Nope. Do the math. 1 read for 135 pages is worth less than a read for 157. I bet the rate per page continues to decline as well, making KU 2.5 far less profitable. It still isn't enough for me to go wide, but we shall see. For now, I'm just going to keep writing.

Edit: Realized I misread the question. But no, I don't think the pay per page rate will go up. I think it will go down.  I didn't expect them to rock the boat again until July...


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## Wired (Jan 10, 2014)

J.A. Cipriano said:


> Theoretically if almost everyone has a 20% drop then you should make more per page, right?


Let's hope so. If not...it's obviously 20% pay cut.


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## Erratic (May 17, 2014)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> You would think that but people were putting links in the front of 25,000 KENPC books and sending readers to the back and triggering a full read. People were bragging about it in certain circles.


What circles are you in I never heard anything about this.


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## Guest (Feb 1, 2016)

dragontucker said:


> So doesn't this basically lower everyone's KU income by 10-20% depending on the drop? Also, does this mean an author can't profit from a individual reader after 3,000 page reads? Say Tom joins your email list right? You have 20 books written and he reads all 20 books in KU. The total page count for these 20 books is 5,000 pages. Does the author only get paid for the first 3,000 page reads and that's it?


No, that capping only applies to single titles.


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

mach 5 said:


> JA, amazon knows when you turn a page, they certainly know when you also click a link that sends you to the back of a book. Many books are bookmarked, especially in non-fiction and it's highly unlikely KENPC v1 didn't already account for that.


I can tell you with absolute 100% certainty that just flipping directly to the end, skipping most or all of the book, still resulted in payment for a full read as though the reader looked at each page. I tested this extensively myself with a book that didn't get many borrows, and in a private Facebook group with 30+ other authors who also had some stagnant books to test it on.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

I took about a 30% hit in terms of KENP per title.  I think likely because I have my titles formatted with double-spacing.  Recently updated my indent from .5 to .3 and saw a loss of pages that way, too.  I format in Word.


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

Erratic said:


> What circles are you in I never heard anything about this.


There was an author right here on Kboards who said she was going to do the new release of her next series title as part of a box set--never release it as a single book, but rather put it in a box set after three books that readers had already read, so that they would have to flip past those to get to her newest book. A disappointingly large number of people here thought that was a swell idea.

Why do the people gaming the system think Amazon isn't going to notice? If we all spent less time trying to figure out how to eke out more KENPC per book and just wrote more damn books, everyone would be considerably better off.


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## Keith Soares (Jan 9, 2014)

I'm not going to complain too much, as my page reads went up by quite a lot last month, which will mean a big increase in income from that stream. Still, I am seeing my KENPR down by 15-25% on those books that have new numbers. Some of my books simply said that the new KENPR was still being calculated.

Still, why does it always feel like _this_ when these things change?
K.


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

Keith Soares said:


> Still, why does it always feel like _this_ when these things change?
> K.


LOL, yes, so much this.


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## Erratic (May 17, 2014)

lilywhite said:


> There was an author right here on Kboards who said she was going to do the new release of her next series title as part of a box set--never release it as a single book, but rather put it in a box set after three books that readers had already read, so that they would have to flip past those to get to her newest book. A disappointingly large number of people here thought that was a swell idea.
> 
> Why do the people gaming the system think Amazon isn't going to notice? If we all spent less time trying to figure out how to eke out more KENPC per book and just wrote more damn books, everyone would be considerably better off.


Oh yeeeaah, I remember that. I didn't think she was actually going to do it. It was a terrible idea.

*sigh*


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## JumpingShip (Jun 3, 2010)

The Oblong One said:


> Did anyone else have their KENPC page counts drop by 20% or more on every book in their account? Mine are all down by that much. One that was 735 is now 579. No changes to the book at all.


Mine dropped by a lot. Don't make me do math.  I had one that I *just* put in KU last week. It's 93k and was given a 550 KENPC. It's now down to 420

My other books, which have been KU since last April and not changed at all since KU2 rolled out (ie, I didn't reformat them with the exception of one I published in July--because it was low compared to another one of my books of the same word count.) Well, now they've gone down from the 470ish range, to 406. So, maybe 15%? Overall, the effect is as if Amazon had taken away about one and a half books from my KENPC totals.

Fwiw, I formatt just with Word for the most part. One book was hand coded by a formatter. That's the one that dropped over 130 pages. I'm going to reupload my own version and see if that helps.


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## Rick Gualtieri (Oct 31, 2011)

Erratic said:


> Oh yeeeaah, I remember that. I didn't think she was actually going to do it. It was a terrible idea.
> 
> *sigh*


Yes! BONUS! Free dictionary included at the beginning of every novella.


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## Midnight Whimsy (Jun 25, 2013)

I saw a 20% drop as well across my books. The first in my series is 96k words and dropped from 575 to 480 KENPC. However, that puts it around the same as Amanda's 93k word book at 490 KENPC. So maybe Amazon actually is just evening it out more fairly.

M.W


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## Gone 9/21/18 (Dec 11, 2008)

My books were all done taking plain html through MobiCreator. Every one of my books has taken a 22% hit. Except the mystery. Amazon claimed they couldn't get a calculated KENPC for it and assigned it the generic 500. All of a sudden they are miraculously able to calculate KENPC for the mystery, and it's 30% down from the generic assignment.

I now have Vellum but haven't uploaded anything done with it yet and didn't plan to redo the older books with it. I think I'm going to redo one of the older ones and re-upload just to see.

I always believed Amazon would not continue to pay more for borrows on full length novels than for sales. With the original payout, all my books paid more for fully read borrows, and with the monthly reductions, 3 still did. Even so, for some reason this annoys me in a way that lowering the per page read payout never has. I think because it strikes me as sneaky. I never would have checked KENPC again if I hadn't seen this thread, and it seems to me the kind of change we should have received an email from Amazon about.


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## Guest (Feb 1, 2016)

I have no idea if this is correct, but in some circles they seem to think that KENPC has been recalculated to earn a little bit less than a sale. What that would mean is that if your prices are on the higher end, you should not be affected too much.
Can anyone confirm this?


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## Keith Soares (Jan 9, 2014)

My next book is a 2,999 page "Where's Waldo?" adventure, where Waldo is always on the last page, and all the other pages just say "He's not here!"

K.


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## writerbee (May 10, 2013)

Jeanne Lynn said:


> Where do look in the dashboard to see your KENPC? We got the email. My son writes very long war novels. One of his novels is 2100 pages and 1.5 million words. I'm guess this is going to hurt.


 Never mind the KENP, he should seriously consider publishing something this long in several parts. Many readers are intimidated by huge epics, and yet love series - trilogies, or a trilogy of trilogies ;-D
And the benefit is that he will have several books out instead of just one, which increases the visibility of his novels.


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

lilywhite said:


> There was an author right here on Kboards who said she was going to do the new release of her next series title as part of a box set--never release it as a single book, but rather put it in a box set after three books that readers had already read, so that they would have to flip past those to get to her newest book. A disappointingly large number of people here thought that was a swell idea.
> 
> Why do the people gaming the system think Amazon isn't going to notice? If we all spent less time trying to figure out how to eke out more KENPC per book and just wrote more damn books, everyone would be considerably better off.


Actually, she put the new book *first* and the other books in as bonus at the end. I recall that thread and that a bunch of people misread what she was doing. New book was in the beginning though, pretty sure. So she was basically bundling the books together as a set with the older books as bonus. Nothing really that sketchy about that imo, it's just like making a box set of a trilogy or whatever, only new book comes first.

As for the new KENPC, my titles all dropped 10-15%. I've heard some people report some titles went up 5-10% though. So we'll see how the payments shake out, I guess.


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## JumpingShip (Jun 3, 2010)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> My 93K book has a 490 KENPC (for comparison's sake) with Vellum.


I have a 93k book that just dropped from 550 (although that was the day the book was first enrolled in KU last week. It might have adjusted down since then as first counts aren't always accurate.) That book is now down to 420. I haven't done a thing and it was hand-coded. Just had it reformatted in November. (it was perma-free then.)


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

SummerNights said:


> I have no idea if this is correct, but in some circles they seem to think that KENPC has been recalculated to earn a little bit less than a sale. What that would mean is that if your prices are on the higher end, you should not be affected too much.
> Can anyone confirm this?


No. I have a book that is 5.99 and the KENPC dropped just like it did on my 3.99 and .99 titles. I earn far less than a sale on a read-through of the 5.99 title (less than half as much, actually).


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## Guest (Feb 1, 2016)

Annie B said:


> No. I have a book that is 5.99 and the KENPC dropped just like it did on my 3.99 and .99 titles. I earn far less than a sale on a read-through of the 5.99 title (less than half as much, actually).


Thanks, Annie.


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

I called this the moment they said not only were they paying by the page, but paying based on a magical pretend fairy definition of a 'page'. They can change what the pages are at will and no one will ever understand the formula of how it works.

By reaping most of the Select authors' page counts, they can not reduce the payout this month or even raise it a tiny bit and convince a few more people this isn't a screw-job.


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## jazzywaltz (Jan 3, 2016)

Mine went up by about 10%, and my book is under the 3000 KENPC threshold so I likely didn't get an email.

For those of you who think Amazon is being malicious, here's what I'm seeing:

1. Amazon first rolls out KDP select and pays authors a set amount of money per story. Many authors in the system start rolling out bunches of short stories so they can try to capitalize on this. Because of this Amazon doens't feel the system is financially viable and also readers are being fed mostly short stories instead of longer works which cheapens the service. In response, they...

2. Come out with KENPC, where everybody gets paid per page read, out of a pool of money put into the monthly pot by Amazon. This encourages authors to post longer works of fiction, therefore upping the value of KU for readers. Unfortunately, this backfires for Amazon again because as time goes on the monthly number of pages read keeps on going up, therefore diluting the amount Amazon can pay per page. This is because a) more authors are enrolling in KDP select and b)many more authors are enrolling omnibuses and multi-author sets in KDP select. And so, to try and fix this they...

3. Come out with the lastest version, where each individual title can't earn money on more than 3000 KENPC per title. To them, this is the best of both worlds -- higher payout per page, and longer titles that readers can enjoy (3000 KENPC is roughly 350,000 words which is probably fair).

To those of you who write monster-length novels, my suggestion is that you go back through them and figure out how to republish them in two parts rather than one (or do so going forward). That way you can hopefully continue making the same amount of money. For those of us who write shorter novels anyway this seems to be a boon as my pages read went up slightly and in theory (if Amazon is sincere in their announcement that the reason for doing this is to achieve a better payout) I should make more money per page read.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Erratic said:


> What circles are you in I never heard anything about this.


I'm in quite a few circles. I heard it from a few people who were in another group and that was the new scam being bandied about.


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## Chrissy (Mar 31, 2014)

jazzywaltz said:


> *Mine went up by about 10%,* and my book is under the 3000 KENPC threshold so I likely didn't get an email.
> 
> For those of you who think Amazon is being malicious, here's what I'm seeing:
> 
> ...


How did you upload/convert your books? Calibre? Jutoh? Vellum? Docx file? HTML?


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## Guest (Feb 1, 2016)

jazzywaltz said:


> For those of us who write shorter novels anyway this seems to be a boon as my pages read went up slightly and in theory (if Amazon is sincere in their announcement that the reason for doing this is to achieve a better payout) I should make more money per page read.


Except most people's pages dropped, they didn't go up.


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## jazzywaltz (Jan 3, 2016)

SummerNights said:


> Except most people's pages dropped, they didn't go up.


Right because most people are writing longer novels. And the one sentence you picked out of my entire post really wasn't the point I was trying to make...


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## jazzywaltz (Jan 3, 2016)

Chrissy said:


> How did you upload/convert your books? Calibre? Jutoh? Vellum? Docx file? HTML?


I had someone else format my book, and I uploaded an ePub file.


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## Monique (Jul 31, 2010)

jazzywaltz said:


> Right because most people are writing longer novels. And the one sentence you picked out of my entire post really wasn't the point I was trying to make...


I'm not sure what the longer novel issue has to do with anything. Few of us actually hit the 3k limit.

You're happy because you'll do better. That's fine, but for a lot of us it's far from as rosy.


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## Scottish Lass (Oct 10, 2013)

SummerNights said:


> I have no idea if this is correct, but in some circles they seem to think that KENPC has been recalculated to earn a little bit less than a sale. What that would mean is that if your prices are on the higher end, you should not be affected too much.
> Can anyone confirm this?


My DIY Covers book was at 99c* so 35c per sale. Its KENPC has stayed at 91; at 0.46/page approx 42c per read. So a read under KU earned slightly more than a sale.

*I've just put it up to 1.99 today, so this is no longer true


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## Sonya Bateman (Feb 3, 2013)

J.A. Cipriano said:


> Theoretically if almost everyone has a 20% drop then you should make more per page, right?


Yeah. Sure, we will. 

But what you said about people putting a link at the front of books for people to skip to the end... ugh. I'd say I can't believe people are doing that, but unfortunately, I can.

/today's dose of cynicism


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## Guest (Feb 1, 2016)

jazzywaltz said:


> Right because most people are writing longer novels. And the one sentence you picked out of my entire post really wasn't the point I was trying to make...


No, length doesn't have anything to do with it. From short stories to novellas to novels to bundles, most people's pages have gone down, sometimes even more than 20%.


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## ToniD (May 3, 2011)

All of mine went down, from my shortest (60K words) to longest (250K words box set). 

No fancy formatting. Word > mobi via D2D.


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## Allyson J. (Nov 26, 2014)

What a drag. I have a KU pen name and the first book (50k words) in my series' KENPC dropped by almost 100 pages! I write on scrivener & use calibre to change it over to a mobi file.


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## Saul Tanpepper (Feb 16, 2012)

jazzywaltz said:


> Right because most people are writing longer novels. And the one sentence you picked out of my entire post really wasn't the point I was trying to make...


Nothing to do with length. As I mentioned up thread, short or long, ALL of my titles dropped. In fact, my shorter works have been affected worse than my longer ones.



Saul Tanpepper said:


> Just checked the first ten Select books in my dashboard. These are titles ranging from as little as 35 KENPC to as large as 550. Without having made any changes to any of the files, every single one has dropped from 10.5% to 25%.
> 
> #amnothappy


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## Queen Mab (Sep 9, 2011)

Since I just got reads for one of my books today, I was able to check it. Old=174. Version 2.0 is 130.

Pretty glaring. 

Thanks for the thread. I might not have noticed this.

It's a simple Word file with filtered HTML.


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## tomwritesabit (Jan 16, 2016)

Interesting. I use word to convert to simple html. I noticed a 4- 5% increase on my books between 85 and 100 thousand words, but a drop of about 10 on a shorter one >50K. I guess I won't complain.


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## RinG (Mar 12, 2013)

I've lost about 30 pages each on two different books, nothing on the other 8-9. A couple have gone up by a page or two, but that could be from changing backmatter since I recorded my numbers.

No idea why 2 have changed and not the others. The formatting is identical, both formatted with Sigil, both with the same settings. It's bizzare.


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## tomwritesabit (Jan 16, 2016)

Midnight Whimsy said:


> I saw a 20% drop as well across my books. The first in my series is 96k words and dropped from 575 to 480 KENPC. However, that puts it around the same as Amanda's 93k word book at 490 KENPC. So maybe Amazon actually is just evening it out more fairly.
> 
> M.W


I might as well add that that appears consistent with one of my novels which is at 93K. It's now at 479, up from 457.


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## Bbates024 (Nov 3, 2014)

I guess this could be the thing that raises that payout number again. I'm sure all kinds of people had their little tricks for increasing KNEP. I read one author on kboards said she had a 20k book and that it was over 250 pages. I couldn't believe it.

I use Jutoh to format my books and I haven't seen a decrease in my KNEP, they are all the same as far as I can tell. I'll be writing them down now just to check against future updates. All i know is my KNEp is still longer then the pages is my print book, so they have their own way to determine length and it seems to be pretty equitable across books as a whole.


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## Erratic (May 17, 2014)

Gabriella West said:


> Since I just got reads for one of my books today, I was able to check it. Old=174. Version 2.0 is 130.
> 
> Pretty glaring.
> 
> ...


That sucks. My novella dropped 15%, which isn't that bad compared to you and several others here. I export to epub with Scrivener and just upload that. Seems like word docs are seeing the higher decreases.


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## jazzywaltz (Jan 3, 2016)

Monique said:


> You're happy because you'll do better. That's fine, but for a lot of us it's far from as rosy.


No, I'm happy because I'll do better than most of the others who've said their KENPC dropped. BUT, the majority of you who are freaking out because your KENPC dropped are forgetting that the whole reason Amazon is doing this is so that they can pay per page (which they've said themselves). So in all likelihood the amount of money you'll make won't change much.


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## scottnicholson (Jan 31, 2010)

It's a zero-sum game in which Amazon controls every factor, quotient, and addend, as well as the sum.

Alchemy is pretty sweet.


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## Sever Bronny (May 13, 2013)

Just wanted to report in that I also saw a drop commensurate with what others are seeing. I used Calibre. My books are a bit long (beyond book 1 they range from 166k to 195k ish) but I'm not too upset. i feel lucky to be doing this full time regardless


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## Monique (Jul 31, 2010)

jazzywaltz said:


> No, I'm happy because I'll do better than most of the others who've said their KENPC dropped. BUT, the majority of you who are freaking out because your KENPC dropped are forgetting that the whole reason Amazon is doing this is so that they can pay per page (which they've said themselves). So in all likelihood the amount of money you'll make won't change much.


Okay, so you're happy that others got yoinked and you will get rewarded? All right. 

They were already paying per page. No is forgetting anything. Although some seem to be missing what's really going on. They've adjust their arbitrary and controllable-by-them page count to manipulate the number of pages read and the payout. KENPC and the pool have always been tools at their disposal to change the payouts.


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

I can't say if going with a link to the end will count, I am not a writer. But what I can say is that I found a bunch, and I mean bunch of titles in romance that have very specific instructions at the beginning and doing what is instructed, in bold and large, will get the reader to the end of the "book". Many of them have lots of pages as they are just filled with garbage stuff that does often not relate to the suppose titles. The titles are keyboard stuffed with some of the currently very popular subgenres in romance. 

Many of them look identical in type of cover, type of title stuffing. Names are different but they all use a type of link to get to to click at the beginning. When I say I seen bunches, I really mean that. Reviews reflect that, the fact that the actual story after the link is just like 3% and they didn't like it, but by then they already gotten to the end of the book. 

Again, the getting readers to click in is framed in a very distinct way and the fact that there are so many names and so many similar type books piped in targeting specific sub genres, tells me somewhere someone is talking about this scam.  Lots of them apparently. 

And the rankings on those things are really not bad so if it counts, they are raking in the money with this scam. Again, I  have no clue if it counts. They'd be better of trying to curb those type of scams overall I think first. Romance is a huge popular genre in KU and those reader can read 30 books a month easy in it.


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## JalexM (May 14, 2015)

jazzywaltz said:


> No, I'm happy because I'll do better than most of the others who've said their KENPC dropped. BUT, the majority of you who are freaking out because your KENPC dropped are forgetting that the whole reason Amazon is doing this is so that they can pay per page (which they've said themselves). So in all likelihood the amount of money you'll make won't change much.


Don't expect the pay per page to increase much. 10-20% is alot for authors who made a living joining Amazon's ecosystem. Your mistake is thinking that amazon actually value us writers that much. They were already paying per page. First at .0058 now down to way less than that. They are only making changes that benefit them.


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## jazzywaltz (Jan 3, 2016)

Monique said:


> Okay, so you're happy that others got yoinked and you will get rewarded? All right.
> 
> They were already paying per page. No is forgetting anything. Although some seem to be missing what's really going on. They've adjust their arbitrary and controllable-by-them page count to manipulate the number of pages read and the payout. KENPC and the pool have always been tools at their disposal to change the payouts.


Okay first of all just because I'm happy that I'm going to do better doesn't mean that I'm happy others aren't. Excuse me for getting a little excited because I didn't get hit with a page drop.

Also, that was a typo -- I meant to say "MORE" per page. I already know that we're getting paid per page.


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## EC Sheedy (Feb 24, 2011)

Atunah said:


> I can't say if going with a link to the end will count, I am not a writer. But what I can say is that I found a bunch, and I mean bunch of titles in romance that have very specific instructions at the beginning and doing what is instructed, in bold and large, will get the reader to the end of the "book". Many of them have lots of pages as they are just filled with garbage stuff that does often not relate to the suppose titles. The titles are keyboard stuffed with some of the currently very popular subgenres in romance.
> 
> Many of them look identical in type of cover, type of title stuffing. Names are different but they all use a type of link to get to to click at the beginning. When I say I seen bunches, I really mean that. Reviews reflect that, the fact that the actual story after the link is just like 3% and they didn't like it, but by then they already gotten to the end of the book.
> 
> ...


Sometimes I just despair of this internet world . . . When people have nothing better to offer yet than another scam. Surely it frustrates the h*ll out of Amazon people, too. 

Sorry for those writers seeing their page counts drop. In my case, I never recorded the originial KENPC so I can't tell if they dropped or not. My bad. (I recorded them today, though.)


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

Annie B said:


> Actually, she put the new book *first* and the other books in as bonus at the end. I recall that thread and that a bunch of people misread what she was doing.


How I remember it was an author came in here, posted a link to the author doing what you're saying (new book at the beginning, bonus books at the end) and said SHE was going to do the same except put the new book at the back. I agree that what you've outlined above is totally kosher.


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## Logan R. (May 13, 2011)

No changes in my page count. I use Vellum.


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## Guest (Feb 1, 2016)

My main thought on this is that Amazon, given these new rules, needs to be more transparent. They now need to show up how many BORROWS we got in addition to pages read. 

Why?

Because lets say you have a boxed set with 6000 pages and now they will only pay you for the first 3000 read. Well, how do we know that most people aren't only reading 2k-3k pages to begin with and not wanting to read the rest in a selection. With this new set up, they could easily just start paying half of what they paid before...even if actually the pages being read per borrow have ALWAYS been 3000 or less before a reader had their fill.

Also, if a reader borrows a collection one month, reads half, then borrows again, reads the other half... what is the consensus there? Is it 3000 pages per reader EVER or per month? Because the reader is paying for both months, so should the author not be paid for 3000 per reader per month also?

This isn't really saving Amazon any money, but it does make you wonder. Think about it:

"We are changing how Select works because readers want longer books."
"We are changing how Select works because your boxed set has too many long books."

I mean, they will push people to making collections of shorter stories...which is against their claim that their original changers were due to readers want longer books instead of short readers. Not that I'm surprised Amazon is lying. But that would bring us back to point number 1: If they weren't honest before, then with these new changes, we need more transparency as to how many downloads we are getting. Otherwise, they could just start paying us half and SAYING we got half as many pages read because only half as many pages count now...but that doesn't mean that's what's actually happening.

Anyway, it sucks people will lose money because of this. And if people don't start making more per page...then something is up. Because tell me how you can have the same PAYOUT amount and cut out millions of pages you plan to pay for...and the amount per page stay the same. I get there are always new people enrolling into KDP, but look at the previous trend. We saw the amount per page dropping in SMALL amounts. So they didn't have THAT many people signing up. So I really think we ought to see the payment per page go up. Otherwise, I have my suspicions  that it's POSSIBLE they aren't being honest about their payouts.


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## Rick Gualtieri (Oct 31, 2011)

Atunah said:


> I can't say if going with a link to the end will count, I am not a writer. But what I can say is that I found a bunch, and I mean bunch of titles in romance that have very specific instructions at the beginning and doing what is instructed, in bold and large, will get the reader to the end of the "book". Many of them have lots of pages as they are just filled with garbage stuff that does often not relate to the suppose titles. The titles are keyboard stuffed with some of the currently very popular subgenres in romance.


Wow. Scummy, but at the same time not even remotely surprising.


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## Cherise (May 13, 2012)

The Oblong One said:


> Did anyone else have their KENPC page counts drop by 20% or more on every book in their account? Mine are all down by that much. One that was 735 is now 579. No changes to the book at all.


My three 60k word books in KU now have lower KENPC 
while my 180k word omnibus has higher KENPC.


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

I forgot to say that I wont post the links to those books here, for obvious reasons. But in case anyone wants to see what I am talking about they can send me a pm and I'll send a couple of links. Its very obvious. 

I can't say I don't have any dogs in this fight as I am a KU subscriber. So its important to me also to have the authors and books that I like reading, stay in the program. And if they aren't happy, they might not stay in.


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## Guest (Feb 1, 2016)

Just doing some basic math here.

Let's say, using easy numbers, Amazon has a fund of $100 to be divided among total pages read. The total limit is 30 pages read.

Old System: 100 pages = $1 per page
Author A has a 10 page book: $10
Author B has a 20 page book: $20
Author C has a 70 page book: $70

Under the new system, the $100 won't be divided between 100 pages because only 30 pages of the last book counts. So the $$, still the same amount, is being divided between 60 pages.

New System: $1.67 per book
Author A has a 10 page book: $16.70
Author B has a 20 page book: $33.40
Author C has a 70 page book (but only 30 pages count): $50.1

Now, if Authors A and B are still making $10 and $20 and Author C stars making $35...that's gonna look fishy to me. And again, that assuming that people are reading the WHOLE collection. We don't know that. Maybe people only read half of a boxed set, in which case, we should see NO change in boxed set royalties. But without borrowing data being transparent, they could just give us a cut even if we never went over the 3,000 to begin with. Just a thought.


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## jazzywaltz (Jan 3, 2016)

TheForeverGirlSeries said:


> My main thought on this is that Amazon, given these new rules, needs to be more transparent. They now need to show up how many BORROWS we got in addition to pages read.





TheForeverGirlSeries said:


> Also, if a reader borrows a collection one month, reads half, then borrows again, reads the other half... what is the consensus there? Is it 3000 pages per reader EVER or per month? Because the reader is paying for both months, so should the author not be paid for 3000 per reader per month also?


This. 10000%. I would definitely like to know more about what's going on behind the curtain here.


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## Guest (Feb 1, 2016)

This is NOT saving Amazon money (unless Amazon is lying). It's just distributing the money differently. Same amount of money to the same amount of authors. So I get why they are doing it. Too many boxed sets means the price per page gets diluted and solo authors jump ship. Then amazon has less to offer to KU subscribers and subscribers leave. I'm PRO BOXED SET and this sucks for me BIG TIME, but just have to say, as long as they aren't lying, I understand what they are trying to do.

So while KENPC on individual titles may have gone down, you SHOULD be making more per page, and since there is no page cap for books under 3000 pages, then you should make more of the same per title, even with your lower page count. If you aren't, something else is going on here... Just saying ,because it's a pool and it's divided by whatever pages they count. That means if they count less pages, the price per page should be more. If it's not, I call BS on their end.


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## Guest (Feb 1, 2016)

jazzywaltz said:


> BUT, the majority of you who are freaking out because your KENPC dropped are forgetting that the whole reason Amazon is doing this is so that they can pay per page (which they've said themselves). So in all likelihood the amount of money you'll make won't change much.


For me to make the same amount as before, the payout per page will have to increase by 25%. I can't see that happening.

And I wasn't gaming the system or doing anything funky to increase KENPC. I format my books with Jutoh (with a very simple/basic layout) upload to Amazon and walk away.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

It may be saving Amazon money. If they target their payout by page instead of by overall pool, this could mean less for everyone.

For example (make this easy) last month before the change there were 2,000,000,000 pages read and the pool was 10,000,000 the payout would be 0.5c per page (I think I did that math right...)

But if this month there are 1,600,000,000 pages due to the revisions, and Amazon make the new pool only $8,000,000 because they are trying to keep it at 0.5c per page, everyone gets paid less.

Only if they leave the pool at the (example) $10,000,000 does everyone get the same amount of money, because the per-page payout would rise to 0.625 per page, exactly compensating for the page reduction.



As Tilly says above, if your page count drops, per-page earnings have to rise to compensate, which will only happen if Amazon doesn't reduce the pool of money.


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## Sever Bronny (May 13, 2013)

David VanDyke said:


> It may be saving Amazon money. If they target their payout by page instead of by overall pool, this could mean less for everyone.
> 
> For example (make this easy) last month before the change there were 2,000,000,000 pages read and the pool was 10,000,000 the payout would be 0.5c per page (I think I did that math right...)
> 
> ...


Here's to hoping it's your last point!


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## Guest (Feb 1, 2016)

David VanDyke said:


> It may be saving Amazon money. If they target their payout by page instead of by overall pool, this could mean less for everyone.
> 
> For example (make this easy) last month before the change there were 2,000,000,000 pages read and the pool was 10,000,000 the payout would be 0.5c per page (I think I did that math right...)
> 
> ...


That's precisely it. And since the pool is completely arbitrary, no one can say with certainty if it will stay the same or not. My guess is not.


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## Guest (Feb 1, 2016)

I'm sure they WILL drop the pool, but if they do, it will be very telling. They want to make this sound like they are trying to help out authors who aren't in boxed sets, but really, they just want to pay less overall and to do that need to cut some of the sets. I hope I'm wrong.


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## Monique (Jul 31, 2010)

I suspect the payout will go up a smidge, not nearly enough to make up for the loss many will suffer. Then it will slowly slide down to nearly where we are today. A slow bleed.


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## Guest (Feb 1, 2016)

Monique said:


> I suspect the payout will go up a smidge, not nearly enough to make up for the loss many will suffer. Then it will slowly slide down to nearly where we are today. A slow bleed.


Sounds about right. Ultimately they want to save money and trying to make it SOUND like this is to help other authors make more money.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

I just want it to really be transparent to formatting and the answer is to do it by word count. Why Amazon continues to monkey around instead of using word count is beyond me. 

Hopefully this is at least better than the last version.


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## Incognita (Apr 3, 2011)

I'm definitely not a fan of the constant changes, but I checked two of my books (formatted in Vellum), and they're still the same, even the boxed set.


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## BGArcher (Jun 14, 2014)

I'm about to hit publish on a another novel in KU (well, on Wednesday), and I'm totally fine with this. I'm actually up across the board, and I format with Scrivener as well.I haven't been trying to game the system, because it seems like a pointless battle. What actually seems to work is to create loyal readers that want to read your stuff, and keep turning that out.


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## Lisa Grace (Jul 3, 2011)

Quiss said:


> I took a 20% hit on my books, which are short and single spaced. So what the hell is going on?
> 
> At the CURRENT payout per page, a borrow is roughly the same as a sale, or slightly less. At this 20% ripoff I'm out of KU. I'm SO DONE with this crap.


Beware: They are penalizing books that are not in KU by immediately dropping your rank, and not counting sales nearly as much as they count KU reads. Visiblitly is less, and stickiness is less.

A box set I know of, had a payout of $17 when read, now with the 3,000 KENPC pay out it will be a max of $13. They're ripping it off for $4.00.

Amazon squeezes authors, again.


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## Lisa Grace (Jul 3, 2011)

BGArcher said:


> I'm about to hit publish on a another novel in KU (well, on Wednesday), and I'm totally fine with this. I'm actually up across the board, and I format with Scrivener as well.I haven't been trying to game the system, because it seems like a pointless battle. What actually seems to work is to create loyal readers that want to read your stuff, and keep turning that out.


Amazon standardizing formatting, great. However, having a box set or a long read and penalizing it by saying we're not going to pay you the measly .0046 per page read on nything beyond the 3k--is stealing the money on those page reads. It took longer to write these books. They're being read, they should be compensated. Anything less is Amazon stealing money.

_Edited weird formatting issue. --Betsy_


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## 77071 (May 15, 2014)

Sigh.

Okay, last time we had the mysterious page count questions, here's the KENPC I had for one title, all fairly normalized but with different formats:

259 (when uploading .docx file)
355 (when uploading a MOBI file)

Now this piece has

270 KENPC (2.0)

with no further changes on my end at all.

That means it's slightly higher than it would've been just uploading a word file, but is lower than when uploading a MOBI file previously.

If this new way of counting KENPC works across the board and for everyone, I'll see a drop in "pages" read but no particular drop in earnings.

We shall see.

I agree that it's creepy and gross that authors would have the whole book count for a click on a single link, but it seems like that should be addressed directly if it's true (I'm not doubting you guys, just didn't know that was happening before), because even with the new KENPC count, if you can convince readers to click a link and get 3,000 pages read in one go, it's still a huge bleed on the system.

I agree the word count would be a better way for e books that aren't picture books. I wonder if that change will ever happen or if we'll be stuck in the mystery no-man's land of this formula they tweak as desired.

I didn't like knowing there was a difference in page count because of what *FILE TYPE* I uploaded, but I don't know if this will solve that problem or not.

It does feel like a squeeze, but we won't know till payout if it actually is or not. The MOBI vs. WORD thing was [expletive]ed up. And unfortunately, it seems like formatting is still in play if there's so much variety in the changes.

We won't know till word count comes into play, if it ever does, for KENPC 3.0, whether they're judging us all by the same ruler or not. And that, I think, is the worst of it. Not knowing if they're being fair, while realizing that some people are ruthlessly trying to wring money out of the flaws in the system with that linking thing.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

How many non-bundled KENPC 3k/350,000 word books do the people complaining have?


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

I'm so clueless, I didn't even know about the bundling and the putting the new book at the end and all that stuff. Never occurred to me. 

Now that I've heard what folks were doing, I'm all good with this. I don't do boxed sets, though. I mean, I write the book, I put the book up, and if people want to read it, they buy or borrow the book. 

I'm fine with their standardizing KENP also, as long as it IS standardized. I HAVE heard the stories about people reformatting to get higher KENPs, and it frosts my cupcakes. So if they're fixing that--terrific. I'd just like a non-gamey approach and a darned level playing field, please.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

> I'm fine with their standardizing KENP also, as long as it IS standardized. I HAVE heard the stories about people reformatting to get higher KENPs, and it frosts my cupcakes. So if they're fixing that--terrific. I'd just like a non-gamey approach and a darned level playing field, please.


The point people have been making here is that it's NOT standardized. it's completely random. I mean--page counts vary according to the software you use to produce the book, FFS. It's completely and utterly at the mercy of Amazon's secret shenanigans. You could be fine with that, but that's what it is. Amazon decides how many pages your book has and how much you get per page. Amazon. Decides.


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## mach 5 (Dec 5, 2015)

Rosalind James said:


> I HAVE heard the stories about people reformatting to get higher KENPs, and it frosts my cupcakes. So if they're fixing that--terrific. I'd just like a non-gamey approach and a darned level playing field, please.


[ETA Rosalind clarified (thank you) that she meant increasing font sizes, etc., and not uploading a different file type - so my response is no longer relevant in direct relation to her post, but I'm leaving it up because I imagine there are people who have a problem with someone replacing all their epub uploads with mobi uploads to get a higher KENPC.]

I don't feel like reformatting to get higher KENPCs should frost your cupcakes (but they are your cupcakes, not mine). When the original KENPC came out, someone with say 800,000 characters (which it should be by character, not word as some suggest, because "antidisestablishmentarianism" is not the same as "a" which is a word as well as a letter) came to the forum reporting a KENPC of say 500 KENPC and someone reported their 800,000 character story was 640 KENPC. Because Amazon is not transparent with why set A of 800,000 characters is fewer pages than set B, it's impossible to know if set A (and thus its author) is being unduly penalized or if set B and its author is being unduly rewarded. So people tried different format uploads until they were getting results back that matched with the higher KENPC reported by other authors.

Any author not figuring out which file format best serves them without detracting from the reader experience is doing themselves a great disservice in my opinion. Any author making the effort to reach an ideal standard format for upload isn't gaming in my mind, they are just evening out a playing field that none of the players but Amazon can actually see.

Any animosity is better directed at Amazon and its lack of transparency rather than an author trying to get the same KENPC for the same # of characters as other authors are reporting.


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## Guest (Feb 2, 2016)

Rosalind James said:


> ...I HAVE heard the stories about people reformatting to get higher KENPs, and it frosts my cupcakes. So if they're fixing that--terrific. I'd just like a non-gamey approach and a darned level playing field, please.


Please don't assume that everyone who saw their KENPC decrease was "gaming the system" or doing something scammy.

I used Jutoh to format my e-books, much like many other people. My e-books are basic, with a simple layout. I don't "pad" or do anything else to increase KENPC. I use Jutoh to convert a simple .docx into a mobi and an epub. I don't constantly tinker with my files trying to increase page numbers, I upload the file and walk away. I've now found my page counts slashed by 25%. Thanks for making me feel like a scammer who deserved it


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Tilly said:


> Please don't assume that everyone who saw their KENPC decrease was "gaming the system" or doing something scammy.
> 
> I used Jutoh to format my e-books, much like many other people. My e-books are basic, with a simple layout. I don't "pad" or do anything else to increase KENPC. I use Jutoh to convert a simple .docx into a mobi and an epub. I don't constantly tinker with my files trying to increase page numbers, I upload the file and walk away. I've now found my page counts slashed by 25%. Thanks for making me feel like a scammer who deserved it


I don't assume that. I never said anything like that. I was referring to people who deliberately went out and changed line spacing and made huge fonts and things like that (things I've read about) in order to artificially inflate their page count. Not somebody who uploaded via Calibre instead of Word.

But--yeah. If somebody DID make huge fonts and increase line spacing and such things? I think that's gamey. I was referring to how somebody formatted, not how they UPLOADED.

Perhaps I should have been clearer. But I'm normally a pretty reasonable person, I think. I like to think I've earned the benefit of the doubt on something like that.

And my own page counts seem to have dropped slightly, by the way. I suppose I figured that that was due to a better process that would have been QC'd, as Amazon normally seems to do.


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

Patty Jansen said:


> The point people have been making here is that it's NOT standardized. it's completely random. I mean--page counts vary according to the software you use to produce the book, FFS. It's completely and utterly at the mercy of Amazon's secret shenanigans. You could be fine with that, but that's what it is. Amazon decides how many pages your book has and how much you get per page. Amazon. Decides.


I agree with Patty. There hasn't been anything "standarized" about this from the beginning. It's always been a crap shoot.

I keep my KENPC, word and character counts on a spreadsheet. I haven't checked all of my stuff but I'm seeing a 10% drop. I format with Scrivener and upload the mobi file. I don't do any weird formatting, just TNR, 12 pt (headings 14), single spaced with a slight lead on paragraphs, which does not affect word count nor character count in any way.

Anyway, looking at my large bundle, I've lost 49 pages, which is a whopping two cents loss at .0045 per page, if I get a full read of the bundle. It's not much, but I believe this isn't the first thing like this we'll see.

So, thanks, all you scammers and cheaters. You've continued to ruin things for the rest of us. But, hey. I guess we can still blame it on the short story writers and all those nasty people doing erotica, so take heart!


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

Rosalind James said:


> Perhaps I should have been clearer. But I'm normally a pretty reasonable person, I think. I like to think I've earned the benefit of the doubt on something like that.


For what it's worth, I read your post in the spirit you intended, because it was you. So you've earned the BotD at least from me. 

But tempers are high when people fear their incomes are taking a hit over something they can't control. 

Edited because I can't type!


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

lilywhite said:


> For what it's worth, I read your post in the spirit you intended, because it was you. So you've earned the BotD at least from me.
> 
> But tempers are high when people fear their incomes are taking a hit over something that can't control.


Well, as I noted, my own page counts seem to have dropped some, too. But most of my frustration goes toward the people who always find a way to work the system, whether by increasing font size or putting 10 extra books in or whatever. I would guess that they're the reason the All-Star bonuses are harder to get, for one thing (another example of people's incomes taking a hit).


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## 56139 (Jan 21, 2012)

Lisa Grace said:


> Beware: They are penalizing books that are not in KU by immediately dropping your rank, and not counting sales nearly as much as they count KU reads. Visiblitly is less, and stickiness is less.


I guess it's a matter of perspective. I don't think they penalize me for not being in KU but they do give a higher rank to books that are in KU. I have published enough books to know which one will land where on release day with no pre-order and every single book last year (save one when this KU ranking bump first went into effect in April) did exactly what I expected. I am still pissed off about that one book though. 1700 sales on release day and didn't even make Top 100. Although it did drop in a few days later. Still, 1700 on release day usually gets me to an entrance rank of about #80.


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

Rosalind James said:


> Well, as I noted, my own page counts seem to have dropped some, too. But most of my frustration goes toward the people who always find a way to work the system, whether by increasing font size or putting 10 extra books in or whatever. I would guess that they're the reason the All-Star bonuses are harder to get, for one thing (another example of people's incomes taking a hit).


Yeah. I said upthread somewhere that we'd all be a lot better off if people would worry less about how to squeeze a few extra KENPC out of existing books and just write some more quality books instead.

That said, though, I do have friends who jumped through the hoops to get the extra KENPC because it seemed (it was) unfair that a certain line-height made a difference, or using Vellum > Calibre > Scrivener. They were just trying to stay competitive and get page-read payouts commensurate with everyone else's, and I get that too. The only reason I wasn't doing it with my books is I'm lazy and all that switching between programs is time-consuming, particularly on my ancient MacBook. If I had something lightning-fast and a set-it-and-forget-it mentality about my books, I'd probably have zipped them through calibre at least, to fix the line height.

NOT THAT WE SHOULD HAVE TO. This magical secret way of measuring pages is just outright stupid. There's got to be a better way.


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## Rick Gualtieri (Oct 31, 2011)

Rosalind James said:


> I would guess that they're the reason the All-Star bonuses are harder to get, for one thing (another example of people's incomes taking a hit).


I very much doubt this part. My guess is the scammers are the types trying to make their quick buck...but probably many more fail than succeed. The huge amount of reads needed to get to the all star state points, to me at least, to big sellers and/or decent sellers with huge catalogs.


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## 77071 (May 15, 2014)

KENPC 1.0 was flawed. We all knew it. But KENPC 2.0 seems to be just as weird and not really addressing the problem of the scamming. This change isn't really enough to tackle those scams, if that's the purpose.

If the purpose is to keep us guessing, and worried, then I'd say they're succeeding admirably. Look, I think all of us here probably are trying to do it right, you know? Not scamming, just doing our best, writing things people want to read, releasing as frequently as we can, etc. This is like, who we are -- writers. But these changes, however they're meant, do affect us in our job. When it feels like they're being run by a monkey pulling a lever somewhere (not saying Amazon employees are in any way monkey-like, just that the changes seem so random sometimes), *it does affect our confidence in Amazon and their policies.*

_While doing nothing to scare away the people who are explicitly in the field to scam.
_
We need transparency if they want this to work. Clearly it's working in the short term, but these are serious issues. If we all end up happy with our payout and keep earning good money, the lack of trust and transparency will STILL affect us all.

Things need to improve -- and not just in counting of "pages."

/soapbox


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## BeeGee (Feb 10, 2015)

I'm fine with their standardizing KENP also, as long as it IS standardized. I HAVE heard the stories about people reformatting to get higher KENPs, and it frosts my cupcakes. So if they're fixing that--terrific. I'd just like a non-gamey approach and a darned level playing field, please.
[/quote]

Based on my new number of pages, I think maybe standardizing is exactly what they are doing. I have four novels, and the one I published in November is 20,000 words longer than the other three, but it always showed 100 less KENP. With the adjustment, the other three went down by a little bit, but the new one went way up, making the words/pages ratio a lot more accurate across the four books. So that makes me think they've at least found a way to count the pages more consistently. It's just a bummer that the new standard seems to be set to make sure most books lose instead of gain.

ETA the top paragraph is a quote from another post.....


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## hunterone (Feb 6, 2013)

Saul Tanpepper said:


> The latter. There's a 3000 KENPC cap that any title can earn from any single borrower.
> 
> I suspect a whole bunch of people are now scrambling to check their KENPC. Based on my estimates, 3000 KENPC may be as few as 350,000 words.


That makes sense and is ok

If most books are around 60 to 90k. 300,000 would be like having 3 books together, really high word count.

Most of mine are around 60k


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## PermaStudent (Apr 21, 2015)

Joining this thread late, but I use Word on all my uploads, and I had one book drop from 161 to 155, and another go from 163 to 187.  Whatever, Amazon. 

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk


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## mach 5 (Dec 5, 2015)

The Dancing Squirrel said:


> I have two books in Select. I just checked my page counts.
> 
> Novella/short story: Was 60 pages; is now 73
> 
> ...


No. I use a Mac, but I use Pages. If I just exported under the original KENPC from Pages to epub and uploaded that, I was getting as much as 35% less KENPC than if I took the extra step of opening the epub in Calibre, converting it to Mobi and then uploading the Mobi file to KDP instead. Other people use Macs but are creating in word and doing filtered HTML or hand coding. Mac on its own isn't doing anything to the file, it's Word versus Pages versus Epub versus Mobi and so on based on all the anecdotes on the various boards and the conversations I've had with other Mac users.


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## Saul Tanpepper (Feb 16, 2012)

hunterone said:


> That makes sense and is ok
> 
> If most books are around 60 to 90k. 300,000 would be like having 3 books together, really high word count.
> 
> Most of mine are around 60k


On the contrary. It makes NO sense. Let's say I hypothetically publish several 100K novels, each having a KENPC of 1000 (for ease of numbers). Now I bundle six of them together for total of 600,000 words and a KENPC of 6000. Now I'm only getting paid for the first 3000 pages read; the reader gets the last 3000 pages at my expense. How is this fair?

Now, before you say don't publish a 6-book set with 6000 KENPC, what do you say to those who already have based on the understanding that they would get paid for all 6000 pages? And what do you say to those folks who publish a single epic volume/story (not book set) exceeding 3000 KENPC?

What do you say when six months from now Amazon says, we're capping at *2000 *KENPC?

What do you say when Amazon says they won't pay pay for the *first *100 KENPC?


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

I'm not concerned about the cap.

But I lost 15-20% off the books I've checked so far. There is nothing strange about my formatting, so I consider their claim of the average change being 5% to be propaganda on their part and the hope that no-one checks.

I've emailed KDP to find out exactly when they changed the values, since it impacts on my spreadsheet which tells me totals of full reads on each book and my series. (Which presumably have been wrong for some unknown time).

As far as I can see on my wiggly blue line, this could have occurred a week ago. The reads line has been going down progressively, but a week ago, was a definite drop. I had put it down to rank changes, but maybe it wasn't?

I'm not happy about this. Decrease pages in books by 15-20% and keep decreasing the payout at the same time? It makes a huge drop in income from one month to the next. 

I did a calculation on my longest book - Its dangerously near being under the $2 per full read value now. I'm now assuming all of my other books are now under. The whole financial viability of KU has just suffered a severe earthquake.

Not Happy Jan!


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## My Dog&#039;s Servant (Jun 2, 2013)

MaryMcDonald said:


> I have a 93k book that just dropped from 550 (although that was the day the book was first enrolled in KU last week. It might have adjusted down since then as first counts aren't always accurate.) That book is now down to 420. I haven't done a thing and it was hand-coded. Just had it reformatted in November. (it was perma-free then.)


I can't find my notes on the original KENP, drat it, but it looks like they mostly slid downward, but they're still odd. Comparing two older books formatted in html/mobipocket/calibre about three years ago, the one that's 106,500 words long has a KENP of 597 pages. The one that's 109,000 words long has a KENP of 537 pages. If I recall correctly, the two books had the same odd skew the first time around. I think the longer book tends to have longer, denser paragraphs, which might account for it.

The one book I put up in December, my first formatted through Scrivener, has lost about 20% (that's a rough guess based on a faulty memory). The others, not so much.


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

Lisa Grace said:


> Beware: They are penalizing books that are not in KU by immediately dropping your rank, and not counting sales nearly as much as they count KU reads. Visiblitly is less, and stickiness is less.


That's been the case from the advent of KU, people just kept insisting they weren't.

Can someone please tell me again why they still manage to sway so much blind loyalty when they treat us like this?

_Edited. PM me if you have any questions. --Betsy/KB Mod_


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## RinG (Mar 12, 2013)

Saul Tanpepper said:


> On the contrary. It makes NO sense. Let's say I hypothetically publish several 100K novels, each having a KENPC of 1000 (for ease of numbers). Now I bundle six of them together for total of 600,000 words and a KENPC of 6000. Now I'm only getting paid for the first 3000 pages read; the reader gets the last 3000 pages at my expense. How is this fair?


My guess would be that if clicking to the end of the book triggers a full read, then if one of your readers has already read, say the first three books in your set, and clickes through to number 4, the one they haven't read, and reads through to the end, then you're still getting paid for a full read. Or if it's a multi author bundle, and an author reads only 2 out of the 10 books, but one is near the end, then Amazon is paying for a lot of page reads that aren't actually being read.

Of course, the solution to this seems to be to find a better way of calculating pages read, but given that a lot of people read off line, I'm not sure how possible that is?


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## My Dog&#039;s Servant (Jun 2, 2013)

Atunah said:


> I can't say if going with a link to the end will count, I am not a writer. But what I can say is that I found a bunch, and I mean bunch of titles in romance that have very specific instructions at the beginning and doing what is instructed, in bold and large, will get the reader to the end of the "book". Many of them have lots of pages as they are just filled with garbage stuff that does often not relate to the suppose titles. The titles are keyboard stuffed with some of the currently very popular subgenres in romance.


That just plain sucks. Readers deserve far better. So do serious writers who don't cheat.

I'm going with the Jean Luc, "This is why we can't have nice things." Shame on every single so-called writer who pulled this [email protected]


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## caarsen (Aug 28, 2015)

Vaalingrade said:


> That's been the case from the advent of KU, people just kept insisting they weren't.
> 
> Can someone please tell me again why they still manage to sway so much blind loyalty when they treat us like this?
> 
> _Edited quoted post. --Betsy_


Limited options?

My husband and I have been self-employed most of our married life. We've farmed, logged, been in construction, ran a sawmill and I've been writing for a couple of decades. No matter what we did somewhere along the line someone was trying to push us into a corner, hold my backlist captive, cut back our quotas, cut our rates, ......whatever. Sure we were self-employed, but we were still at the mercy of many things beyond our control including weather, disease and markets. And, often, we had limited options so we had to go with whatever came our way.

This is strikes me as no different. I'm not in KU (yet). I'm not burning up any lists on any of the other vendors. Barely even creating a tiny bit of warmth, let alone a spark. OTOH I've given away and sold a lot more on Amazon since I put my books out. Right now, it's the gorilla on the block. And I'm thinking of moving into the neighborhood. Because I'm not seeing a lot of other options.


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## Lisa Grace (Jul 3, 2011)

I have a five book series I was going to combine into one to SAVE my buyers money. I would charge 9.99 which is less than buying four of them at 2.99 each. 
If I put it in KU, each book is 62K to 70K long. I'll lose money by putting the book into KU. 

For those of you who do not write series or participate in box sets, this isn't an issue, but for those of us who do, it is. Apocalyptic Fears I (which is NOT in KU) has just under a million words. 14 full-length novels. FEARS II is in KU. It's only fair those authors are being paid for their novels that are being read. No one is gaming the system. The readers are getting a heck of a deal, and the authors are hoping to gain new fans for our other books. 
$4 less a book is huge when you're talking thousands of sales to be split among several authors.


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## Northern pen (Mar 3, 2015)

How's apple these days? Going wide is looking better all the time...

If the pot stays same or grows, I won't get my panties in a knot but if they start cutting back on the total amount I'll take the hit to not be reliant on amazon any more...  Time will tell.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

3,000 KENPC is not going to be 3 books unless you write reallllllly gigantic books. Like 200K gigantic.

500 KENPC on my books is about a 100K book. Not exactly but about. (I have seen that my KENPCs do seem to be more calibrated to my word counts, so at least they're consistent within my own books. For what that's worth to me.)

So 1,000 KENPC is 200K, or two long books. 3,000 KENPC is 600K, or six long books. 

Using Lisa's example of five books at 60-80K or whatever, that's going to be more like 2,000 KENPC. She'd have to put eight or so books into a boxed set to reach 3,000 KENPC.

Just clarifying. This would affect the gigantic multiauthor boxed sets--the ones that have 12-20 books or whatever. Yeah, those folks will be affected.


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## new_writer (Feb 2, 2016)

I have my books professionally formatted by someone else and I upload mobi files and I've lost anywhere from 10-15% KENPC pages as well.  One of my books, which was once 980 KENPC pages is now 855 KENPC pages and I've seen similar drops on all my books. 

I think this was bound to happen. Amazon had to know they were paying out way more than some books' sales prices. As a result I was making more on KEPNC pages than sales. About a 55-45% ratio. It's been like that since KU2 came out, with the exceptions being months where I release a new book.


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## new_writer (Feb 2, 2016)

Rosalind James said:


> 300,000 KENPC is not going to be 3 books unless you write reallllllly gigantic books. Like 200K gigantic.
> 
> 500 KENPC on my books is about a 100K book. Not exactly but about. (I have seen that my KENPCs do seem to be more calibrated to my word counts, so at least they're consistent within my own books. For what that's worth to me.)
> 
> ...


I'm seeing similar numbers. One of my books is 173K and its KENPC is just under 900 pages. Previously it was (from memory) 1050-or so KENPC pages.


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## 75814 (Mar 12, 2014)

Vaalingrade said:


> That's been the case from the advent of KU, people just kept insisting they weren't.
> 
> Can someone please tell me again why they still manage to sway so much blind loyalty when they treat us like this?


Because as has been said numerous times before, it's got nothing to do with loyalty and everything to do with opportunity. If Apple did something with Booklamp to make a book discovery search engine that could trump Amazon, I'd pull my entire catalogue out of Select in a New York minute.

But they aren't doing that. And staying on those platforms year after year with a flatline sales graph (including free titles) is certainly not helping either my visibility nor my income, nor is it doing anything to convince them to change anything.

When I pulled out of the other platforms, I made sure to let those platforms know EXACTLY why I was going exclusive to Amazon. I said if they improve their discoverability for indies, then I'd definitely come back. And everyone should do the same thing. They won't change if they don't have a reason to.

Right now, it seems there are only four ways to gain traction on the other platforms:

1. Already be a best-seller on Amazon or have a big enough platform.
2. Have a friend on the inside.
3. Get a Bookbub.
4. Be very lucky.

Of those three, only the first two are achievable. But for a Bookbub, you need enough reviews before they can ever look at you. That means getting my books in front of as many eyes as possible. And KU provides me with the best chance to get my book in front of as many eyes as possible.

I'll go wide again when either the other platforms get their act together or I'm eligible for a Bookbub, whichever comes first.

Until that time, being in KU gives me more money, more visibility, and sends a message to the other platforms that they need to provide more for my partnership than promises of "just be patient." I was patient for three years and all I had to show for it were crappy sales and even crappier rankings.

_Edited quoted post. --Betsy_


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## Lisa Grace (Jul 3, 2011)

Rosalind James said:


> 300,000 KENPC is not going to be 3 books unless you write reallllllly gigantic books. Like 200K gigantic.
> 
> 500 KENPC on my books is about a 100K book. Not exactly but about. (I have seen that my KENPCs do seem to be more calibrated to my word counts, so at least they're consistent within my own books. For what that's worth to me.)
> 
> ...


350,000 words is only 2,000 KENPC? Maybe. Maybe not.

In dystopian literature, books over a 100k are not unusual, and those authors in the boxsets/series still deserve to be paid. As backlists grow, many authors are deciding to put ther backlists together and just do new releases as singles. Should they be punished for being prolific enough to do this?


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## 75814 (Mar 12, 2014)

Lisa Grace said:


> 350,000 words is only 2,000 KENPC? Maybe. Maybe not.
> 
> In dystopian literature, books over a 100k are not unusual, and those authors in the boxsets/series still deserve to be paid. As backlists grow, many authors are deciding to put ther backlists together and just do new releases as singles. Should they be punished for being prolific enough to do this?


They're not being punished, they just have to rethink their strategy. If you've got a large backlist and before you put them together as box sets, then now you put them out as single titles and make sure those titles are all linked together through series pages or links in the back-matter CTA.


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## Rick Gualtieri (Oct 31, 2011)

Lisa Grace said:


> 350,000 words is only 2,000 KENPC? Maybe. Maybe not.


Seems to be that way. My box set is roughly 360k and tops out just over 2000 KENP.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

I lost 10-20% of my KENPC across the board. I suspected I would as I saw higher KENPC with mobi uploads vs epub uploads even when the content was the same. This will make it a lot harder to measure my growth or stagnation from January onwards but I suppose that's one of the many fun things that comes with being I'm Select.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Perry Constantine said:


> Because as has been said numerous times before, it's got nothing to do with loyalty and everything to do with opportunity. If Apple did something with Booklamp to make a book discovery search engine that could trump Amazon, I'd pull my entire catalogue out of Select in a New York minute.
> 
> But they aren't doing that. And staying on those platforms year after year with a flatline sales graph (including free titles) is certainly not helping either my visibility nor my income, nor is it doing anything to convince them to change anything.


This. I've said it before and I'll say it again. My permafrees dropped to single digits and that means no follow-through sales. At least with KU2 if the first book in the series is read, I get paid. B&N and Kobo flatlined and Apple wasn't much better.

I left my children's books wide and last month, I had five sales, which a few days later dropped to three sales. Now that the month has ended, I'm only showing one sale for December. That's pretty disheartening.

The few books I checked lost KENP. I use Word, single spaced, no extra spaces between paragraphs, 0.3 first line indent. Nothing fancy at all.


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## UnicornEmily (Jul 2, 2011)

Thank you so much for starting this thread, David VanDyke.  I looked, and all my KENPC have dropped by almost exactly 20%.  My husband's very long epic fantasy novel, however, has stayed exactly the same (not one page changed up or down).  I had always thought it was insane that my longest book, which was half the length of my husband's, had only 100 KEPNC fewer.  Now it has 250 KENPC fewer.  I guess, as long as payouts per page don't decrease, I can't really complain: his book SHOULD have more KEPNC.  It bothered me that it didn't.


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## Quiss (Aug 21, 2012)

Vaalingrade said:


> That's been the case from the advent of KU, people just kept insisting they weren't.
> 
> Can someone please tell me again why they still manage to sway so much blind loyalty when they treat us like this?


Because they're still the biggest single vendor in town, with the best search engine, features and promo opportunities.
They know what they've got. 
Instead of offering authors pennies a page right off the bat, they come up with some new scheme every six months to whittle away at it.

What burns my waffle is that I've been a big holdout for so long, advocating that authors go wide to help prevent a monopoly and to keep their eggs out of that single basket.
And then I finally give up and go "all in" to KU only to find myself hosed royally. Without changing a single word in my books, they are suddenly a hundred "pages" shorter. In what world does that make sense?

_Edited quoted post.. --Betsy_


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## Maia Sepp Ross (May 10, 2013)

Saul Tanpepper said:


> I've used a variety of methods, from directly submitted in Word, .mobi (kindlegen, mobipocket, D2D), Word to ePub (D2D, Calibre), Sigil... I'm seeing drops across the board, and I don't use any fancy formatting.


I hand-code my ebooks, and I've lost about 11% on the one that's in KU.

ETA: It went from 395 to 351 and is about 80k words. My ebook formatting is very very simple, no images, nothing fancy.


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## VEVO (Feb 9, 2012)

It will be interesting on March 15 to see February KU payout.  This only affect from Feb 1st onward right?  


2014

KOLL/KU Global Fund for July was $2.785 million  (average payout $1.80), 31 days of KOLL, 14 days of KU  --------1.547 million borrows
KOLL/KU Global Fund for August was $4.7 million (average payout $1.54) full month of KOLL and KU--------3.052 million borrows
KOLL/KU Global Fund for September was $5 million (average payout $1.52) full month of KOLL and KU-------3.29 million borrows
KOLL/KU Global Fund for October was $5.5 million (average payout $1.33) full month of KOLL and KU ---------4.14 million borrows
KOLL/KU Global Fund for November was $6.5 million (average payout $1.40) full month of KOLL and KU--------4.64 million borrows
KOLL/KU Global Fund for December was $7.25 million (average payout $1.43) full month of KOLL and KU --------5.07 million borrows

2015

KOLL/KU Global Fund for January was $8.50 million (average payout $1.3 full month of KOLL and KU -----------6.15 million borrows
KOLL/KU Global Fund for February was $8.00 million (average payout $1.41) full month of KOLL and KU ------------5.67 million borrows  (28 days February)
KOLL/KU Global Fund for March was $9.30 million (average payout $1.34) full month of KOLL and KU ---------------6.94 million borrows
KOLL/KU Global Fund for April was $9.80 million (average payout $1.36) full month of KOLL and KU -----------------7.21 million borrows
KOLL/KU Global Fund for May was $10.8 million (average payout $1.37) full month of KOLL and KU -----------------7.88 millon borrows
KOLL/KU Global Fund for June was $11.3 million (average payout $1.35) full month of KOLL and KU-----------------8.37 million borrows

KOLL/KU Global Fund for July was $11.5 million (average payout per KENP is $0.005779)---------------------------1,989,963,661 pages (KENP) read
KOLL/KU Global Fund for August was $11.8 million(average payout per KENP is $0.00514)--------------------------2,295,719,844 pages (KENP) read
KOLL/KU Global Fund for September was $12.0 million (average payout per KENPC is $0.00507)--------------------2,366,863,909 pages (KENP) read
KOLL/KU Global Fund for October was $12.4 million (average payout per KENPC is $0.004809) ---------------------2,578,498,648 pages (KENP) read
KOLL/KU Global Fund for November was $12.7 million (average payout per KENPC is $0.00492) --------------------2,581,300,813 pages (KENP) read
KOLL/KU Global Fund for December was $13.5 million (average payout per KENPC is $0.00461) --------------------2,928,416485 pages (KENP) read


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Lisa Grace said:


> 350,000 words is only 2,000 KENPC? Maybe. Maybe not.
> 
> In dystopian literature, books over a 100k are not unusual, and those authors in the boxsets/series still deserve to be paid. As backlists grow, many authors are deciding to put ther backlists together and just do new releases as singles. Should they be punished for being prolific enough to do this?


Well, for me, books over 100K aren't unusual either.  I have 8 or 9 out of 16 published that are over 100K.

I guess this means that different decisions will be made about boxed sets. Just as authors made different decisions when writing very short books wasn't the smart decision anymore, with KU2.

I don't think it's about punishing, honestly, It's just things changing and authors adapting to the change. Why do authors put their books into huge boxed sets & then into Select? I assume because it's been lucrative, especially with KU2. Now it isn't. It keeps changing. Maybe we wish it wouldn't, but it does. That's the nature, certainly, of publishing on Amazon. (Edited to add: I'm guessing authors will go back to pricing multiauthor sets at 99 cents and making them available wide, which worked well for lots of people. And that authors who were doing gigantic bundles of their own books for Select will reduce the size of the bundles. Which doesn't seem that hard to do.)

I would calculate 350,000 words at 1,750 KENPC, not 2,000 KENPC, using my own books and their KENPC as a guide, since that's the only data I actually have access to. So you'd have to have 600,000 words to be 3,000 KENPC. I haven't seen anybody's data that would contradict that hugely. Have you seen something different? I certainly may have missed something. For my own books, I'd have to put 6 of them into a boxed set (which would be ridiculous from a "buy" point of view) in order to get to 3,000 KENPC.

I'm not trying to argue, just understand the new reality and adapt, like most folks, I'd assume. I'm not surprised they changed it--they said all along that this was "version 1.0." I hadn't anticipated the length limitation, but I guess it makes sense, if lots of people were putting big boxed sets into Select for the borrows.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Quiss said:


> Without changing a single word in my books, they are suddenly a hundred "pages" shorter. In what world does that make sense?


Not this one.

My books were already pretty lean.

My take on what they changed, was to remove the paragraph indent completely, remove all blank lines, and standardize the line spacing to zero.

That's the only way they could remove 15-20% of the pages from my books.

My guess is, the books which gained, were the ones with long paragraphs, which were the ones missing out to start with. Less to prune from them.

edit: Well my take was wrong. My novels have all been pruned 15+%. If my take was right, my non-fiction should have been much much smaller, but not so.


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## susan_illene (Aug 10, 2014)

I always use Jutoh to format my ebooks.  The one novel I have in KU was 502 KENPC before today, but it is now showing as 503 KENPC.  So it went up a page.  It's at about 101k words.  Before, it always seemed low compared to other books with similar word counts.  Looks like now it's close to the same as others of that length.  It could be that they did try to normalize it, but I suppose we'd need more data to be sure.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

With 10 minutes left in the New York day, and it being very unlikely KU will be updated again...

...I can conclusively say my total reads for the day has dropped 20%. 

I've been fairly consistent for the last week, with just a slight downcline. This is a big drop, consistent with the KENPC having changed 15-20% on all my books.

Now we wait to see if our ranks are affected proportionately, or if everyone is hit the same way and ranks stay unaffected.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

TimothyEllis said:


> My guess is, the books which gained, were the ones with long paragraphs, which were the ones missing out to start with. Less to prune from them.


Nah. Most of my paragraphs are three to four sentences, tops, and I have hundreds of lines of dialogue which are typically one line, maybe two. But I also publish other authors who write in longer paragraphs, sometimes close to an entire page.

The KENP for my titles went up by about 10 - 15% across the board. I mentioned earlier in the thread that I use InDesign. I export straight to EPUB and then upload that to Amazon.

So it's got something to do with the underlying HTML being generated. My designs are really simple, but InDesign doesn't put out the cleanest code when exporting to EPUB. Could be that this is tripping up Amazon's KENP reader, or it could be that it finally figured out how to sort it correctly and adjusted accordingly. Dunno.

Nick


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

TimothyEllis said:


> With 10 minutes left in the New York day, and it being very unlikely KU will be updated again...
> 
> ...I can conclusively say my total reads for the day has dropped 20%.
> 
> ...


Ranking has nothing to do with reads. You get the ranking boost when your book is borrowed -- whether it is read or not -- and page reads do not play a part.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Ok, this is really odd. All but 3 of my non-fiction are unchanged. And the 3 which have changed are only minor.

The difference? My non-fiction has few reads. 

Its like they targeted the books getting the most reads.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

I must admit, slashing people's incomes by 20% was something worth of an email to everyone!

-1000% PR bonus to Amazon for ruining a lot of peoples day without even bothering to say anything official.


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

Perry Constantine said:


> Because as has been said numerous times before, it's got nothing to do with loyalty and everything to do with opportunity.


That's not what I'm talking about here. I know exactly why people constantly fall into the obvious trap that is Select.

My question is how, in the face of all this, people can still defend them with fannish reverence. I'm talking about the people who talk about how 'smart' and 'great' and 'good to me' Amazon is or starts screaming 'DERANGEMENT' whenever someone doesn't gently lick Amazon's nethers when the company pulls crap like this basically every six months like clockwork.

It's not about a willingness to do business with the devil--you have to do that to work with any corporatio--this is about a lack of willingness to call them on thier abusive practices.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> Ranking has nothing to do with reads. You get the ranking boost when your book is borrowed -- whether it is read or not -- and page reads do not play a part.


There has been an immediate rank drop to go along with the pages drop.

I dont know why, but its very suspicious that 20% less pages pulls the plug out my ranks as well.

I dont know about other people, but I feel gut punched by Amazon today.


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## Abderian (Apr 5, 2012)

My plan was to pull my books out when I publish book three in my series. That plan definitely won't be changing!


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Abderian said:


> My plan was to pull my books out when I publish book three in my series. That plan definitely won't be changing!


That's a surefire way of getting negative reviews from those who KU read 1 and 2.


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## Abderian (Apr 5, 2012)

TimothyEllis said:


> That's a surefire way of getting negative reviews from those who KU read 1 and 2.


I don't think I'll be at much risk of negative reviews, or else writers with series in Select would be locked in forever. I regularly read of writers taking books out and going wide without repercussions. And my books are cheap and not - yet - widely read. I think for Mission Improbable I've had about 10000 page reads since publication. For big hitters like yourself it might be different.


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## 75845 (Jan 1, 1970)

As an ebook formatting purist I won't use Juoth or Scrivener because of the junk they put in. Calibre has improved on that front, but I still clean up to code in Sigil. As people were getting larger PC KENs in Jutoh it would appear that PC Ken Allo was using the raw html code and PC Ken Allo Allo is using the plain text.

In Jutoh each main paragraph instead of being topped and tailed with

would have

. Scrivener is worse because it defaults to using styles like

. InDesign is a complete and utter mess for epub. If PC Ken Allo Allo now uses the plain text that is a lot of reduced character count, especially in a dialogue heavy text.

What's the bet some people had code like this?

"Allo, allo, what's going on 'ere, then?"

"Officer Ken, where's Barbie?"

"None of that cheek now. Off with you young scoundrels and more respect for the law in future.


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## Raquel Lyon (Mar 3, 2012)

TimothyEllis said:


> Its like they targeted the books getting the most reads.


I'd be interested to see if this fits with anyone else's experience. I have four books in KU, all have the same word count (give or take a hundred or so). I used the same Word template for them all. They previously all had the same KENPC (with one either side). Now, the two that get hardly any reads have dropped by 10%, but the two that are read occasionally have dropped by 20%. I find that strange.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Boyd said:


> better than Nether licking to me.


Yes! That's what I'm missing. I need more nether licking in my WIP. No wonder its not working properly.


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## LadyG (Sep 3, 2015)

I'm not smart enough to figure percentages and whatnot. All I know is that my little prequel gained 9 pages and most of my other books (all between 35K - 40K) lost no more than 10 pages. Only one book really took a hit: my newest, with similar word count and formatting, somehow lost 40 pages!

I'm not happy about it, but I think it may be a good idea to just hold on and see how it plays out. There may be some adjustments made, or maybe Amazon will follow up with more information.

I just don't understand calling Amazon "scumbags" or talking about licking their "nethers". Nobody's holding a gun to your head.  For God's sake, if you despise Amazon so much, go publish with D2D or Smashwords. Or at the very least, pull out of KU when your 90 days are up. And no, that's not " fannish reverence"; that's common sense. If Amazon's actions make you that angry, that bitter . . . walk away.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

> I've seen a ton of authors who've noted that they saw almost no changes when they formatted and compiled with Vellum.


It was widely known that Vellum did not produce the most KENPC it could have. I knew a few people who stopped using it because they were trying to min/max the KENPC. The notion that I was being dinged for producing books that look really great was more annoying than anyone who went out of their way to get the most KENPC.

But I will note that everyone in this thread who talks about this talks about it in terms of words/KENPC. Once again. Just Use Words. Stop the madness with KENPC. Calculate it purely on the basis of words so a 25,000 word book is half of a 50k book. It's so simple. I cannot fathom why Amazon won't do this.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Speaker-To-Animals said:


> But I will note that everyone in this thread who talks about this talks about it in terms of words/KENPC. Once again. Just Use Words. Stop the madness with KENPC. Calculate it purely on the basis of words so a 25,000 word book is half of a 50k book. It's so simple. I cannot fathom why Amazon won't do this.


Because they do have to take presentation into account.

A map in a book which explores a place, is a valid page. It shouldn't be rejected because its not words.

Picture books dont have many, or any words. But they still have valid pages.

By the time you include all the different things which go into books, you end up with an algorithm a lot more complicated than word count.


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## Jeff Hughes (May 4, 2012)

Between the consistently declining page payouts and the opaque KENPC nonsense - both of which can be changed at will - KU strikes me like going to a day job where the boss pays you what he wants to, and you find out what it is after you've done the work.

And talk about reinventing the wheel... the writing trade has been dealing with word count since forever. Along with fonts and formats and white space and all the rest. KENPC? WTF?! Sometimes you can be too smart by half...

Alas, the sad reality is that Amazon isn't just the elephant in the room. Most the time, they're the _only_ thing in the room. The other options out there pretty much suck.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

> Because they do have to take presentation into account.
> 
> A map in a book which explores a place, is a valid page. It shouldn't be rejected because its not words.
> 
> ...


And does either the KENPC 1 or 2 algorithm correctly work for picture books and make it worth putting them in the program?


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## Guest (Feb 2, 2016)

Jeff Hughes said:


> Between the consistently declining page payouts and the opaque KENPC nonsense - both of which can be changed at will - KU strikes me like going to a day job where the boss pays you what he wants to, and you find out what it is after you've done the work.
> 
> And talk about reinventing the wheel... the writing trade has been dealing with word count since forever. Along with fonts and formats and white space and all the rest. KENPC? WTF?! Sometimes you can be too smart by half...
> 
> Alas, the sad reality is that Amazon isn't just the elephant in the room. Most the time, they're the _only_ thing in the room. The other options out there pretty much suck.


Exactly.

If Amazon had real competition then they wouldn't be able to pull this crap.


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## Anna Drake (Sep 22, 2014)

My page counts are up by a whisker. Previously, the counts were only estimated and were lower than many page counts listed here for similar size books. I write with simple formatting in google docs and upload them as docX files.


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## 75814 (Mar 12, 2014)

Jeff Hughes said:


> Alas, the sad reality is that Amazon isn't just the elephant in the room. Most the time, they're the _only_ thing in the room. The other options out there pretty much suck.


And the annoying thing is these other companies _have the resources to really compete!_ Yes, Smashwords is a small fish, but Apple, Rakuten, Google? These are some of the biggest companies on the planet. But iBooks and Kobo are more focused on the traditional method of acting like virtual versions of bookstores with merchandiser selection and paid placements. I've mentioned it before but it bears repeating--Apple bought Booklamp and in almost two years, have done precisely jack with it.

And Google, well it seems like Google just gave Play to someone's incompetent cousin to manage.

If the other platforms want to attract indies, then they need to step up their game if they plan to compete. Things like higher royalty rates and the way they handle preorders are better than Amazon, but all that means absolutely nothing if authors still can't get their books in front of readers more efficiently than they can do on Amazon.


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## Lefevre (Feb 1, 2014)

LadyG said:


> I just don't understand calling Amazon "scumbags" or talking about licking their "nethers". Nobody's holding a gun to your head. For God's sake, if you despise Amazon so much, go publish with D2D or Smashwords. Or at the very least, pull out of KU when your 90 days are up. And no, that's not " fannish reverence"; that's common sense. If Amazon's actions make you that angry, that bitter . . . walk away.


Absolutely..

Due to Amazon missing earnings expectations, Jeff Bezos lost $7 billion on his holdings over the Christmas holiday, and even more since then. Realistically, the KENPC reconfiguration is not that big of a deal.

It seems like most of Amazon's competitors are asleep. Plus, assuming that other corporations will have more favorable terms is only a fantasy.


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## stoney (May 24, 2015)

Honestly, all I can do is laugh at how what goes around, comes around.

I'm sorry that so many took a hit. It sucks. It really does.

There was some flap before about KENPC and I saw many who defended the way Amazon figured it up, saying it couldn't be a bad thing, right? It's Amazon, right? They're just looking to make money, right? They're not going to mess with their cash cows, right? Oh you people who aren't getting the same KENPC for comparable word counts are just doing something wrong, and Amazon can't be the one who's inconsistent, right?

Then there were those who vehemently insisted that Amazon was not the one in the wrong here. That their KENPC was standard across the board.

Until it was starting to be reported that Amazon's KENPC _was_ inconsistent. Then the advice was trotted out on how to capitalize on getting the most KENPC for the bang. Many people on this board started to fiddle with things to maximize their KENPC, to take advantage of the inconsistency. I've read many books that were trying to increase their KENPC with all the tricks. As someone who'd been privy to those discussions, I knew that's what I was looking at. It was really kind of sad. Their books weren't any better, they were just longer in KENPC. The focus was noticeable.

I can imagine that many authors who got it up the backside without a kiss before and received zero sympathy from many on this forum are sitting back with their fingers laced across their stomachs and nodding and really not all that bent out of shape over it. Some may be generous enough to be sympathetic. Generous, especially when they received none from around here when they were the ones getting scr*wed.

I'll be surprised, very surprised if the per page read payout goes up. Those who are predicting that it will? I hope you're right.

But this is Amazon. Anyone who's sat back and watched them I think knows that's not going to be the case. I wonder when people are going to figure out that Amazon really doesn't care that much about authors, especially indie authors. Their behavior towards us has not proven out. They are not going to do what's in _our_ best interest. They will do what's in _their_ best interest and _if_ it just so happens to benefit authors, you can bet they will find a way to spin it to keep everyone on the hook.

So the best thing an author can do is write good books. Put out a stellar product. Make your readers happy so they come back for more. Make your product the best you can in presentation and go from there. Isn't that the advice that keeps getting used every time Amazon makes adjustments that screw authors over?

Must be pretty sound, then.


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

I agree with Perry. Putting books into KU is a business decision for me. I don't have money to advertise (and not enough product out to make it work for me right now), so to get readers I go where I can get them. I'd love it if these other retailers would step up and actually help me sell books, actually become competitors to Amazon instead of wasting time worrying about getting the DOJ to investigate.

KUv1 benefited shorter works, KUv2 benefited longer works. Those works at either extreme were paid a lot more than the sales price in some cases, which wasn't fair nor an effective business practice. 

I've said all along that something had to give, that KUv3 was coming, and now it has -- or at least the first volley -- hence the cap. I mean, a 3K book earned $13.50 at .0045 per page. Considering these huge box sets (I doubt they were mostly single books) were usually priced at .99, can you understand where Amazon is coming from?

I'm not apologizing nor making excuses, because they brought this on themselves. They deserve every bit of ire coming their way, and then some. But it's the same anywhere you work:  you agree to the terms and you either suck it up, or you find another job.

I'd love to sell books elsewhere, but right now, my market is at Amazon. Hopefully I can build a fan base and move on, but that's a while down the road. I'm not happy with the situation, but I can't make Kobo, or Apple or Smashwords, et. al., compete. There may be hope for Google, if they can pull themselves together soon, but I don't have a lot of hope, to be honest.


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## 75845 (Jan 1, 1970)

Perry Constantine said:


> And the annoying thing is these other companies _have the resources to really compete!_ Yes, Smashwords is a small fish, but Apple, Rakuten, Google? These are some of the biggest companies on the planet. But iBooks and Kobo are more focused on the traditional method of acting like virtual versions of bookstores with merchandiser selection and paid placements. I've mentioned it before but it bears repeating--Apple bought Booklamp and in almost two years, have done precisely jack with it. And Google, well it seems like Google just gave Play to someone's incompetent cousin to manage.


Rakuten only recently rebadged Kobo as Rakuten Kobo and added the Rakuten style bonus point system to Kobo, but the services are not integrated. The Rakuten Store sells ebooks, but it is not a link to the Rakuten Kobo Store. Apple and Google on the other hand have good reason to not go all out on winning a bigger share of the US or UK markets: Amazon is getting close to monopoly-like market share which places a brake on their progress without either smartphone company needing to sell outside their app store.


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## Kenson (Dec 8, 2014)

I know I've come late to this particular party - my bad.
I've just checked my KENPCs and they've dropped by 10-12% (I upload direct from Word)

There are two points I'd like to make.  I fully expect the rate per page to drop again on the 15th and I can just imagine the explosion of ire that is going to be sprayed across this board when it does so.  However, this month's payment will be based on the January reads and the old KENPCs.  As Vevo pointed out upthread, we will have to wait until the 15th March to get the rate per page under the new system.

Secondly, has anyone done the maths of totaling up the KENPCs of each title in a series and comparing it with the ZON calculated figure for the boxed set?  It would be interesting to see if there's a difference.


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## Wired (Jan 10, 2014)

Kenson said:


> I've just checked my KENPCs and they've dropped by 10-12% (I upload direct from Word)


Same here.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

So it looks like they upped the average words per page.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

stoney said:


> So the best thing an author can do is write good books. Put out a stellar product. Make your readers happy so they come back for more. Make your product the best you can in presentation and go from there. Isn't that the advice that keeps getting used every time Amazon makes adjustments that screw authors over?


This. Plus, I'd encourage folks to look at KU bounties paid out as BONUSES, not reliable income to plan expenses on. It's not a day job, not a salaried position, not even a predictable royalty based on numbers of sales. From day one it's been clear that the KU payout would be variable based on Amazon's monthly pool of money, number of pages read, changes to the program, etc. So much of KU is not in an author's control that it is folly to look at it as reliable income. So consider adjusting your budget and plans accordingly.

What you can control is the number of books you have in KU. So write more good books, enroll them, or don't. But I despair for the folks who are tying life expenses to the highly unstable and unpredictable KU payouts.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

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


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

I just found out about this today. All of my books are done in Word, 12pt TNR, and I upload in .doc format. Across the board, my KENP dropped about 13%, and my 5-book boxed set dropped 14%. If I add up the 5 books in the set, figure the difference in back matter, the five about equal the set.

Previously, I made about the same on a full read as on a 3.99 sale, more on a read than a 2.99 sale. At .0046, I now make less on a full read than on a sale across the board.

On the other hand, I just went through and totaled my sales for last year. 88% of my revenue came from Zon. In the first 6 months of last year I was wide with all my titles, and I made as much in 6 months on all other platforms as I made from KU in August alone. About 55-60% of my revenue now comes from page reads. But things fluctuate. Over the past 4 days, I've sold 25% of the total number of books as I did all of January (a good month), but pages read fell off a cliff. I haven't done any promos, so I don't know why the change.


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## Daizie (Mar 27, 2013)

My page count dropped 50%.  I don't know how a 60k-word book is down from 305 pages to only 147 pages. That's crazy. I have nothing weird or cheating about the formatting. Even my first line indent is .25.


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## J.A. Cipriano (May 27, 2014)

Because I'm a crazy anal spreadsheet guy...










This is what I don't understand. Why are some unchanged and others not? I format all my books the same way.


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## IreneP (Jun 19, 2012)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> I had all my KENPC handy because I just switched to Vellum and wanted to compare KENPC (was using Word before). My new KENPC with Vellum are still the same. From what I can tell, those using Calibre and Jutoh are the ones seeing differences. Can anyone confirm or deny that?


I'm using Jutoh and mine are down about 15%. Which... I was already wondering if KU was the right place for my novella. I'll probably give it one more 3-month period to gather a little more data, but early indications are I can earn more outside of Select.


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## TessOliver (Dec 2, 2010)

Phoenix, I was waiting and hoping you'd step in. If you're still around, what are your thoughts or predictions on the pay per page rate? Do you think it's likely to go up?


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## BlinkFarm (Oct 25, 2015)

J.A. Cipriano said:


> Because I'm a crazy anal spreadsheet guy...
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Okay, so unlike my 4 books (a super tiny data set to be sure), your words per page for each book spread out more when compared to the average of all your books. In other words, whereas I had a smaller standard deviation under KENPC v2.0, you have a larger one. I was thinking we might see some kind of pattern where whatever they did was reducing that variance, but now my brain just hurts :/

I do notice that our overall average words per page is much closer under v2.0...pretty much the same. So there is that. Again, this is still a tiny data set, so I'm not making any assumptions.

(Below: Your books put into my spreadsheet, for what it is worth.)


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## Evan of the R. (Oct 15, 2013)

Daizie said:


> My page count dropped 50%.  I don't know how a 60k-word book is down from 305 pages to only 147 pages. That's crazy. I have nothing weird or cheating about the formatting. Even my first line indent is .25.


That's ridonculous. Sending a PM.


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## bobfrost (Sep 29, 2013)

I have to tell you, something seems very wrong right now.

I had my KENPC change pretty dramatically. My books went down in KENPC from 20% to 50% depending on the book. I'm fine with THAT (as fine as someone can be when they wake up and discover their income has been cut massively, obviously). Anyway, yesterday everything looked reasonable. It seemed like they've normalized things and all my books were still falling within a reasonable range that other people are reporting (170-190 words per KENPC).

But... Today my income seems to have plummeted VASTLY more than my KENPC.

On the 31st, here were my top 3 books:

Book 1: 972$

Book 2: 248$

Book 3: 245$

Those were pretty consistent numbers for the last week.

Yesterday, things were different...

Book 1: 977$ (that book is one of the top kindle store titles and it was rising, so I expected significantly more than this based on my historical sales, but I accepted this with less KENPC)

Book 2: 199$

Book 3: 143$

So far, everything seems reasonable. Money cut 20-50% on most of my books as expected.

Today though... WTF?

Book 1: 512$ (ow)

Book 2: 42$

Book 3: 37$

Here's a chart from one of those books to show you what I'm looking at across my WHOLE catalog today:

http://i.imgur.com/iPnO1sK.png

Again, KENPC didn't change all that drastically on these things. It varies from 20% to 50% at absolute worst, so I'd expect money to halve at most. These aren't giant bundles, these are just regular novels.

Right now, I'm looking at dropping from $2,000+ per day to sub-$1,000 days... And the profit margin change is totally blowing my entire marketing strategy apart (the change in KENPC income is equal or greater than my entire post-marketing profit margin).

Basically, this change has completely borked everything I've been working toward.

I'm hoping today is a reporting error, because those numbers literally don't make sense. Every single book in my catalog is reporting numbers too low to be accounted for by even a 50% drop in KENPC.


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## IreneP (Jun 19, 2012)

bobfrost said:


> But... Today my income seems to have plummeted VASTLY more than my KENPC.


Maybe it IS a glitch or slow reporting because my reads dropped off a cliff today - the drop wasn't remotely the same ratio as the KENPC drop.

EDIT: FYI - it seems like my sales are about the same - just my reads dropped suddenly. Although, honestly, I'm only looking at the one book so I can't really make any grand generalizations.


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## Athena Grayson (Apr 4, 2011)

Quiss said:


> What burns my waffle is that I've been a big holdout for so long, advocating that authors go wide to help prevent a monopoly and to keep their eggs out of that single basket.
> And then I finally give up and go "all in" to KU only to find myself hosed royally. Without changing a single word in my books, they are suddenly a hundred "pages" shorter. In what world does that make sense?


If it's any consolation, after revising my, "I'll never go Zon exclusive" stance, when I put my novella series into KU, right in the middle of releasing it, they switched over to the KENP from single borrows. All of a sudden, my novellas which may have dominated (or at least been more of a blip than they were) ended up being drowned in a flood of full-length titles new to KU with the better terms for novel-length works. So on one level, it just doesn't matter--there will always be sand in the sandwich (to use a polite turn of phrase). Be prepared to revise your business plan at any time. The goose will lay golden eggs, until one breaks open and it's a face-eating alien.

My one book in KU went from somewhere around 563 to 503 and it's at 104,000 words. Wasn't moving much anyway. What I expect is happening in the longer term is that payouts will continue to squeak downward (because, "let us adjust back upward from a downturn," said no business, ever - gas has been under $3 here for over a year and there are still "fuel surcharges" on everything from pizza delivery to propane--as if the fuel people need a fuel surcharge!) while the fund will flatline, give or take. Thing is, there are always new authors entering KU, along with easy-payout hunters and scammers, and authors leaving KU as well. That number of pages in the page pool has to be kept consistent or else payouts will plummet or the fund will.

Just be prepared.


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## Wired (Jan 10, 2014)

IreneP said:


> Maybe it IS a glitch or slow reporting because my reads dropped off a cliff today - the drop wasn't remotely the same ratio as the KENPC drop.


Same here. Huge KENPC drop off.


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## Annabel Chant (Feb 24, 2015)

Late to the party, as usual, but, for most of my books, pages have stayed the same. 


The only one to change by any significant margin is book 3 of my series. It is approx. 10,000 words longer than book 2 and, previously, its KENPC was only about 15 pages more. I'd accepted that, and reasoned that it was because it's more densely written, with longer paragraphs. Now, it's shot up by 60+ pages to 337 pages. I can only assume that it's because words (or characters?) are now being given greater weight than page layout. By which I mean that, maybe, long sections of short, snappy dialogue may have upped the KENPC before. 


Obviously, this is only going by my books, but it does seem to have made my KENPC more in line with word count. I format and upload in a Word template. Oh - the horror!


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## Briteka (Mar 5, 2012)

Erratic said:


> I agree. The cap doesn't make sense to me. So what if a bundle is 4k KENPC? So long as people are reading it, the author(s) should get paid.


When this whole page read fiasco first hit, our circles thoroughly tested the mechanics, and "page flips" was never how pages read were registered. I have no idea if this was ever changed, as we never tested again, but I'd trust Amanda on this. Part of me would think they would have fixed it, but another part of me thinks they wouldn't have because they would have to allocate resources to fix it, and honestly, it isn't a problem that costs Amazon money. The pot is the pot.


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## Sonya Bateman (Feb 3, 2013)

For what it's worth, for the folks that are seeing drops in page reads today... Tuesdays have always seemed like the slowest Amazon day of the week. Not that I understand any of this at all (me and the maths, we don't see eye to eye, and I don't understand all this standard deviation and probably couldn't work out a percentage comparison of KENPC on my own numbers if someone had a gun to my head). But I can pick up on patterns, and this one has been startlingly consistent.

In short, maybe the lower page reads are just because it's Tuesday.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Sonya Bateman said:


> In short, maybe the lower page reads are just because it's Tuesday.


I've been seeing these complaints and just rolling my eyes. Within a single month my pages read may vary by several thousand percent from day to day. People aren't reading this week, or if they are, they have their wi-fi turned off. The paranoia on this forum is always interesting ...


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

Tuesday is when new books by publishers come out.


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## Chase-Lambert (Jul 17, 2015)

I think the key here is average words per page and if that has now become more standardized. If so, then that seems to be coming closer to what most have been asking for on this board: an accurate representation of the book length. The last couple pages of this thread included some of this data and it seems to be pointing to that direction, right? My brain starts struggling when the word deviation comes up. Prob & Stats killed me!


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## bobfrost (Sep 29, 2013)

brkingsolver said:


> I've been seeing these complaints and just rolling my eyes. Within a single month my pages read may vary by several thousand percent from day to day. People aren't reading this week, or if they are, they have their wi-fi turned off. The paranoia on this forum is always interesting ...


I'm not paranoid. I have years of statistics and I know how much my catalog fluctuates on a daily basis. I can very accurately estimate day-over-day income.

When you're selling 5 books a day it's easy to have a 100% increase or a 50% decrease. When you're selling hundreds or thousands a day, the relative motion of your catalog is far more predictable. If I have a book making $250 one day, and the next day it makes $30, something is wrong - and it's not the fact that it's a Tuesday.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

bobfrost said:


> I'm not paranoid. I have years of statistics and I know how much my catalog fluctuates on a daily basis. I can very accurately estimate day-over-day income.
> 
> When you're selling 5 books a day it's easy to have a 100% increase or a 50% decrease. When you're selling hundreds or thousands a day, the relative motion of your catalog is far more predictable. If I have a book making $250 one day, and the next day it makes $30, something is wrong - and it's not the fact that it's a Tuesday.


I had a 20% downward change yesterday in pages read, and my KENPC didn't change that much (on the books where I know). More like 5% down on page counts. The pages read is down today also. Before that, my pages read had been trending up, so that's quite a change. (I too have large numbers, so a big change is statistically significant.)

This could just be me, or maybe not. My total speculative guess is that readers had complained about only seeing KU books (because that's been discussed) when they searched on Amazon, so something got tweaked to not make KU books so visible. Total guess. I could be completely wrong.

As I've said--it's publishing. Stuff changes, and we have to adjust. Doesn't matter whether I think any of these changes are a good or bad thing, either objectively or personally. Amazon doesn't care about my opinion of their changes. All I can do is decide what to do in response.


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## Sonya Bateman (Feb 3, 2013)

Atunah said:


> Tuesday is when new books by publishers come out.


Aha! I knew it was something.


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## BGArcher (Jun 14, 2014)

bobfrost said:


> I'm not paranoid. I have years of statistics and I know how much my catalog fluctuates on a daily basis. I can very accurately estimate day-over-day income.
> 
> When you're selling 5 books a day it's easy to have a 100% increase or a 50% decrease. When you're selling hundreds or thousands a day, the relative motion of your catalog is far more predictable. If I have a book making $250 one day, and the next day it makes $30, something is wrong - and it's not the fact that it's a Tuesday.


Personally, I totally agree with your statement. Your have better information on your catalog because of the records you keep, and your apparent volume of sales.

I will say my numbers are drastically shifting in the last 24 hours as well. However, since last night my page reads WENT UP for yesterday, by almost 50%. And I'm not talking like after midnight, I'm talking the difference between this morning at 7:30AM and right now at Noon, when I just checked again. I have a feeling they are still adjusting the system, and in the next few days things will just be... Wonky.


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## Elizabeth Ann West (Jul 11, 2011)

We have no idea how often Amazon updates their pages read information. We've all seen where some authors will report a "stuck" sensation, especially when say they are running a promo so the ca-ching should be rolling, and others saying "My dashboard is humming along just fine." 

That said, despite trying KU again with a pen name late last year, I'm at the point where I don't care if they promise me a sparkly purple unicorn every month for exclusivity. We're done. We're frenemies.  I love math. And no matter how this math works out, it never benefits one author without taking away from another. And we sit here squabbling and gnashing our teeth wanting to know why someone isn't happy someone else is making trunkloads of money? It's because KU IS competitive, I have to get MORE readers to read my stuff over another author and there's only a finite amount of hours in a month. 

I also think from a PR perspective, once again, Amazon has obfuscated the real intent of KENPC 2.0 and that is an overall reduction in pages. I said the same thing when they first announced paying per page, overall, authors would see LESS per book, not more. And lo and behold a 300 page book in KENPC makes $1.44, about what an old KU borrow was. Now, there are fewer books making that. But the announcement wasn't JUST about that, they want to also draw attention to the 3,000 pages only per title restriction to get us all talking about THAT and decide "well, yes, it's really NOT fair for authors to take every book they've ever written and make it into an omnibus, or multiple omnibus, so they get paid for the same content over and over again."

I don't think we can rationalize this as getting closer to a normalized standard. Very clearly certain books were reduced, others were not. I only have two books in KU, same genre, formatted exactly the same, and one was reduced from 198 to 168 and the other stayed at 98 pages. Hmmm, why? The book that was reduced is a bundle of 2 books. It does not make sense that within a publisher's own library, with books formatted identically, some are reduced and some are not. For that matter, why is KENPC different than the Kindle Page Count? Even that has never been explained.

So they reduce everyone's, sorry, certain people's, page counts and then bring up only 3,000 pages will count for earnings. Do I think there were authors with ridiculous bundles of 10+ books working with readers and other authors to get full reads every month? Yes. I've seen it. I haven't reported anyone or anything (edit to add to eb clear, and why would you? what do you say? These authors are asking their readers to read their books?") because I figure it will catch up to them and soon I will be out of KU so it won't affect me. But an author with bundles of 4,000 and 5,000 KENPC pages would make $24 a full read. Get 100 people on your mailing list with KU to read that omnibus to the end to help you out, that's $2400. So as so many liked to blame the short form writers for ruining the per borrow pay out system, looks like when given their chance, the longer writers took just as much advantage of the system, too. And there's nothing quite wrong with asking your readers to read your book, is there? 

I am wide. And have been for over a year now. If anyone wants help navigating those waters, feel free to PM. I am happy to share what I know and have experienced. Hugs to everyone who lost pages and were just trying to keep playing by the rules. 

And this won't matter, so long as Amazon has a program where people only have to pay $10 and convince others with the program to read their stuff, even if it's just to skim it, there will be abusers. It's too lucrative. We always thought "oh this will stop the scammers because you will need too many accounts." Nope. You could take every book you've ever written and tack it on to every book you ever write, so each time you release, you have a higher and higher KENPC. Even capped at 3,000, that's still $14 a full read, just ONE full read of a 3,000 page book (.0048 *3000) is a profit over the $9.99 a month subscription fee. If you have 20 books with that qualification, under different pen names, it adds up quickly.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

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


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Just to point out on the payout rate change: they cut pages for February, but the next payout is for January reads.  So everyone should keep that in mind when they see January's payout number.  If they are going to adjust, it'll be for payout after the next one.  (Which to me means it's less likely to happen.)

Also, my numbers are small, but saw a decided shift in page reads today after being fairly consistent for a few weeks.  Could be the promo effect wearing off, but could also be a hangup with reporting.


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## Linn (Feb 2, 2016)

J.A. Cipriano said:


> Because I'm a crazy anal spreadsheet guy...
> 
> 
> 
> ...


J.A., this is just an observation, but two of my books lost more than 10% of their KENPC while the third remained unchanged. In my case, the two that lost pages both have Enhanced Typesetting Enabled, while the one that stayed the same did not. In looking through the books you have listed, I noticed a similar pattern, with some minor inconsistencies on a couple titles. From what I've heard about the new typeface and hyphenation, it seems like it might have the effect of increasing the number of words per page. I can't say for sure that's what's going on, but maybe it factors into this somehow.


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## Sonya Bateman (Feb 3, 2013)

PhoenixS said:


> When I started this message (multitasking, so I started it awhile ago  ), I was an hour out from when you posted, but our reads seem to be running 55-60% of the day's total right now. For your Book 1, that looks about right. When you posted this, it was at 52% of yesterday's total.
> 
> Books 2 and 3 do look way under.
> 
> ...


Thank you -- you've said "don't panic" much more believably than I have. You have maths. And examples. 

I mostly just don't want to panic, and panic is contagious...


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## Overrated (Mar 20, 2015)

After reading the first couple of pages in this thread, I went and looked. I have four works in KU. One dropped 1 KENPC page. The others either stayed the same or went up 3 or 4 pages. I have no idea why. I haven't changed a thing.

My pen name is not in KU. I like it that way. They are shorter reads, so when KU moved to pages vs borrows, I took them out and went wide, just to see what would happen. They are holding their own, and making me a little extra. Oddly enough, on Amazon as well as other retailers. 

So not a big change here.


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## bobfrost (Sep 29, 2013)

I'm not panicked. Just noticed today seems to be reporting-delayed. We'll see if things improve by the end of the day. If this is a trend that happens for a few days I'll start considering bugging the mighty amazon about it, but for now it's just oddities related to the switch.

Same thing happened when the first KU change happened switching things to pages-read - that first day was my worst day of 2015 by a huge margin. Wonky reporting as things settled in.


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## WRPursche (Feb 18, 2011)

Do any of you who are experiencing lower page reads than normal yesterday and today also have some books that don't have an updated KENPC (to v2)? That might explain some of the delay if there are page reads in books that have not been updated yet. (I have a few titles that still don't have a KU 2 KENPC).


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## TessOliver (Dec 2, 2010)

PhoenixS said:


> It's Amazon. Who knows?
> 
> For a less-flip answer, we can play with some assumptive numbers, but it's all just assumption at this point.
> 
> ...


Thanks for this, Phoenix. I always appreciate your informative and analytical posts.


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## Sonya Bateman (Feb 3, 2013)

bobfrost said:


> I'm not panicked. Just noticed today seems to be reporting-delayed. We'll see if things improve by the end of the day. If this is a trend that happens for a few days I'll start considering bugging the mighty amazon about it, but for now it's just oddities related to the switch.
> 
> Same thing happened when the first KU change happened switching things to pages-read - that first day was my worst day of 2015 by a huge margin. Wonky reporting as things settled in.


That's good -- I hope it is just wonky reporting.  That is a huge chunk of page reads to lose.


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## AndrewSeiple (Jan 3, 2016)

Eh, my main book moved from 320 pages to 281. Since the physical book's around 290, I find the new count a bit more accurate.

I use Openoffice, by the by, and hadn't done any formatting tricks to up KENP. My sales and KENP have been average for a Tuesday, a little higher than usual with the KENP, to tell the truth. (I'm still riding some good publicity.)


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

I had a response from KDP. I asked them when the new KENPC came into effect, and expressed my displeasure at what they'd done.



> I'm sorry for the inconvenience this has caused.
> Please know, KENPC v2 takes into effect from Feb 1.
> KENPC v2.0 makes a number of improvements to how we standardize font, line height, and spacing used to normalize the length of each book relative to one another. It also improves how we handle edge cases around extremely long books, like dictionaries and long reference books. *
> 
> ...


I wrote a very long reply, among other things suggesting how curious it was that the fraction of a percent seemed to contain all the well performing books, and none of the badly performing books were changed at all.

Have people been checking their author ranks?

Mine has gone into freefall! I've been holding my own for weeks now, with a very slow slide. All of a sudden, my ranks are dropping rapidly, and the only thing which changed is this KENPC change. My reads for the 1st dropped by the same amount as my books were cut, and it seems to be holding today. But it was not only total reads which dropped, but number of full reads. The drop seems to have cut the floor out of my author rank.

I suspect the changes which went in Feb 1, were a lot more extensive than we know about. The new cap is being used to hide the fact they changed a great deal more than that.

One good thing....the outrage of yesterday went from me feeling physically sick for a while, to spurring me back to writing book 8. I finally punched through the wall which had been blocking me for weeks.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

I have books that rank sub 10k and books that rank above 100k and they all seem to be changed pretty equally.


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## Guest (Feb 3, 2016)

TimothyEllis said:


> Have people been checking their author ranks?
> 
> Mine has gone into freefall! I've been holding my own for weeks now, with a very slow slide. All of a sudden, my ranks are dropping rapidly, and the only thing which changed is this KENPC change.


You can't jump to the conclusion that a cut in KENPC equals a drop in author rank, more likely it's as simple as your sales/borrows dropping off.

I lost 25% from my books KENPC, but my author rank has spiked upward since Feb 1.


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## Briteka (Mar 5, 2012)

Tilly said:


> You can't jump to the conclusion that a cut in KENPC equals a drop in author rank, more likely it's as simple as your sales/borrows dropping off.
> 
> I lost 25% from my books KENPC, but my author rank has spiked upward since Feb 1.


Especially since I'm quite positive that amount of pages "read" isn't a flag in the author rank algo. Amazon is still treating KU borrows as single borrows and ignoring pages read in their algos.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Tilly said:


> You can't jump to the conclusion that a cut in KENPC equals a drop in author rank, more likely it's as simple as your sales/borrows dropping off.
> 
> I lost 25% from my books KENPC, but my author rank has spiked upward since Feb 1.


Author rank lags by more than a day. The author rank you're seeing tonight is more like how you were doing on the morning of Feb. 1.


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## H. S. St. Ours (Mar 24, 2012)

Thank goodness I stumbled onto this thread. I was completely flummoxed by the recent change. Glad to know it's not me, it's the 'Zon.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

UnicornEmily said:


> Thank you so much for starting this thread, David VanDyke. I looked, and all my KENPC have dropped by almost exactly 20%. My husband's very long epic fantasy novel, however, has stayed exactly the same (not one page changed up or down). I had always thought it was insane that my longest book, which was half the length of my husband's, had only 100 KEPNC fewer. Now it has 250 KENPC fewer. I guess, as long as payouts per page don't decrease, I can't really complain: his book SHOULD have more KEPNC. It bothered me that it didn't.


You're welcome. Though I'm sure that if I hadn't noticed, someone else would have. I just happened to be the first.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

Hey Emily,

Not to threadjack, but how do you calculate your estimate earnings like that? I have a hard time figuring out how the eff to estimate how much my ranking and earnings on any individual title or series will change over time? Feel free to PM me!


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Rosalind James said:


> Author rank lags by more than a day. The author rank you're seeing tonight is more like how you were doing on the morning of Feb. 1.


Jan 31 was actually a better day than average. So in theory, my rank should have been better, not worse.


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## Guest (Feb 3, 2016)

emilycantore said:


> To make the same amount ($699.5, the per page rate needs to rise to $0.0055.
> Hopefully this is what Amazon is doing.


Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I'd say there's a snowball's chance in Hell that the page rate will rise. I think what is more likely is that Amazon will contribute less to the overall pool and the payout per page will continue to drop.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

Tilly said:


> Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I'd say there's a snowball's chance in Hell that the page rate will rise. I think what is more likely is that Amazon will contribute less to the overall pool and the payout per page will continue to drop.


You're not cynical at all. As it has shown to be willing to do over and over again, Amazon is lowering the benefits to see what the market will bear on both sides of the equation: until enough significant authors start pulling up stumps and readers start complaining there is nothing new/books too short/ only particular genres/whatever.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Patty Jansen said:


> You're not cynical at all. As it has shown to be willing to do over and over again, Amazon is lowering the benefits to see what the market will bear on both sides of the equation: until enough significant authors start pulling up stumps and readers start complaining there is nothing new/books too short/ only particular genres/whatever.


I think Amazon has gotten the message that continuing to reduce the payout will cause an author revolt.

So instead, they are changing the ballgame, to achieve the same thing a different way.

They obviously want to pay out 15% less from now on. So they figured another way of doing this.


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## jec (May 13, 2015)

My three titles dropped 12%. For me, that's not a big enough decrease to bail on KU.


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## Gone Girl (Mar 7, 2015)

We miss you, Harvey Chute.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

CarlaBaku said:


> I've been so busy for the past 48 hours I didn't see any of this new kerfuffle. However, I was shocked this afternoon when I saw that my author rank plunged from a steady 21k - 23k for months to over 67k, overnight, despite no appreciable change in my sales or KENPC read. My place on the three primary subcategories I'm selling in have stayed almost exactly the same. My page count was reduced by ~12%, but with relative sales/page reads, why the crash?
> 
> It's one thing to have terms change in some quantifiable way, so that even if things trend to the negative an author can have at least some sense of which way the wind is blowing. It's the mystery algo shifts that madden. That truly blows.


I'm glad I'm not the only one this happened to. Well, not glad. But at least I'm not alone.

But why?


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## Guest (Feb 3, 2016)

CarlaBaku said:


> I've been so busy for the past 48 hours I didn't see any of this new kerfuffle. However, I was shocked this afternoon when I saw that my author rank plunged from a steady 21k - 23k for months to over 67k, overnight, despite no appreciable change in my sales or KENPC read.


Pages read has ZERO effect on author rank. If your rank has dropped its because 1. you sold less books than other authors of the same or similar rank and/or 2. You had less borrows than other authors of the same or similar rank.

Author rank going up or down isn't solely based on what books you have sold/borrowed, it's also comparative to how other similarly ranked authors are selling/being borrowed.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

emilycantore said:


> Perhaps it's because Google Play, Apple and so on aren't viewed as serious money-makers that Amazon can fool around on this point? There are so many stories of all this money people have made with Amazon but not as many for Google Play.
> 
> I made $36,000 with Google Play the first year I was with them. Then it dropped (down to probably $23K or so, don't have figures on hand) because they hit erotica with some sort of ranking penalty.
> 
> ...


I'm sure that would be helpful. However, it's all very YMMV, in my experience and from my observation. I went wide for 7 months. During that time, I think if I made $100/month with Google Play, I was doing well. That was with, I think, FIVE BookBub ads in 7 months, plus other major promo. I was spending $1K/mo. on ads, and getting $100/mo. on Play.

So . . . it's great that you did so well, but maybe that's the experience in erotica, or something. Who knows. From what I've seen, performance on different platforms varies a lot by genre and author. I have an Amazon and a Nook audience. A little older. Not very trendy. I have a young voice and write quite steamy, but my people tend to be more in their early 30s, lots of kids, parents, grandparents, lots of family stuff. That's not an iBooks or Play audience.

But I'm glad that I saw that for myself.  For ME, the difference between Select and wide is literally tens of thousands a month. For others, it could well be exactly opposite.

I'd encourage anybody who's wondering--go ahead and try. See what going wide does for you. (I found it to be not easy at all, personally. Kind of exhausting and expensive, having to change prices everywhere each time you did a promo, etc., plus paying somebody to format for the different sites, upload, etc., in the case of iBooks & Play. Remember if you had something on sale and to change it back. Aaaaaacccckkk!!! I hated it. But if you enjoy the tech part of the business, maybe it's fun.)


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

TimothyEllis said:


> I'm glad I'm not the only one this happened to. Well, not glad. But at least I'm not alone.
> 
> But why?


Because Amazon.

Maybe you haven't been publishing long enough to know that they pull these stunts all the time. At least they have done so at least twice a year since I started in 2011. A slight tweak and look, all of a sudden people see their income drop by half. No, it's never everyone, and sometimes people suddenly do better than before. But the whole KU thing is at THEIR discretion, which is all fine and dandy (and yes, I'm in their sand pit, too) as long as you know you're playing on their turf and have a backup plan.

For me, this involves having built up a really secure and regular $1-2000+ per month income from non-Amazon venues. Could I earn more if I stuck all those books in Select? Maybe, but I'm not going to try, because building up at those sites takes a loooooooooooong time, but once in place, it frees me from having to worry too much about a 20-30% income drop from Amazon.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Tilly said:


> Pages read has ZERO effect on author rank. If your rank has dropped its because 1. you sold less books than other authors of the same or similar rank and/or 2. You had less borrows than other authors of the same or similar rank.
> 
> Author rank going up or down isn't solely based on what books you have sold/borrowed, it's also comparative to how other similarly ranked authors are selling/being borrowed.


Yes, people say this all the time.

But the drop mirrors the cut in book pages.

One could say "co-incidence". Or one could ask why? I'm asking why, because co-incidence doesn't seem to cut it this time.

My biggest drops follow an author rank drop, not precede. So something else is at play here.



Patty Jansen said:


> Because Amazon.
> 
> Maybe you haven't been publishing long enough to know that they pull these stunts all the time.


Yes, I'm less than a year old,as far as novel releasing is concerned. My first novels took off just as KU1 was rolled out in July. So I didn't really see the original KU. I'm only used to KU2v1.


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## new_writer (Feb 2, 2016)

TimothyEllis said:


> I think Amazon has gotten the message that continuing to reduce the payout will cause an author revolt.
> 
> So instead, they are changing the ballgame, to achieve the same thing a different way.
> 
> They obviously want to pay out 15% less from now on. So they figured another way of doing this.


Haha, no. I'm a pretty big Amazon cheerleader (they made me half a million in 2 years, so yeah, I'm pretty pro-Amazon) but even I know Amazon isn't getting any "messages" or fears authors revolting and pulling out.

They've changed KU twice now and not nearly enough authors left to make much of an impact. The # of books in KU just kept going up and many authors, despite a lot of hemming and hawing here and elsewhere, simply changed their game plans to keep up (tons of books collected into box sets in KU, for instance).

But yes, they are clearly moving toward a pay-rate threshold that they have deemed acceptable similar to how they did with KU1 when they eventually reached the rate they wanted and stayed there with minor variations. They're doing it in spurts, which is how they always do things.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

emilycantore said:


> It's true there is some survivor bias going on here. I have a non-erotica series in KU right now that I plan on leaving in until the entire series is complete (or until per page drops). Then I'll have some competing data points.
> 
> I guess I'm always puzzled by the whole stay in vs. go wide question. If you're making very little money (not living on writing royalties) then you can risk going wide. If you're making a lot then you have the money to experiment. Perhaps there are a lot of writers in the middle who are right on the line?
> 
> I experimented going from wide to all in with Amazon. Overall it was the same for the first three months and then dropped off so I went wide again. Eggs in multiple baskets idea.


Or the opposite. If you're making a lot, you're giving up income you know you have now in the HOPE of income you might have down the road. If it works. You can say you have the money to experiment, but really, why would you, if you're making very good money as you are? You're more likely to go wide if your income drops significantly.

I have my eggs in multiple baskets by being a hybrid in several different ways. I agree that it's more comfortable not to be completely dependent on KDP.


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## 75814 (Mar 12, 2014)

emilycantore said:


> I guess I'm always puzzled by the whole stay in vs. go wide question. If you're making very little money (not living on writing royalties) then you can risk going wide. If you're making a lot then you have the money to experiment. Perhaps there are a lot of writers in the middle who are right on the line?


That used to be my thinking as well. But the problem is that if you're making very little money, then the worst thing for you is obscurity. And your books are easier to discover and take a chance on if you're in Select. It's about more than the money for me--it's the discoverability aspect.


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## Guest (Feb 3, 2016)

TimothyEllis said:


> Yes, people say this all the time.
> 
> But the drop mirrors the cut in book pages.
> 
> One could say "co-incidence". Or one could ask why? I'm asking why, because co-incidence doesn't seem to cut it this time.


Let's assume you're right. Amazon has some nefarious plan to cut KENPC and drop author ranks. (I'm not sure why, it makes no sense, so it's a murky nefarious scheme). I lost 25% from the KENPC all my books in Select (a bigger cut than you experienced) and for your conspiracy theory to hold true, my rank should tank at a steeper decline than yours. But my author rank has gone up.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Tilly said:


> Let's assume you're right. Amazon has some nefarious plan to cut KENPC and drop author ranks. (I'm not sure why, it makes no sense, so it's a murky nefarious scheme). I lost 25% from the KENPC all my books in Select (a bigger cut than you experienced) and for your conspiracy theory to hold true, my rank should tank at a steeper decline than yours. But my author rank has gone up.


Too many variables.


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## RinG (Mar 12, 2013)

Linn said:


> J.A., this is just an observation, but two of my books lost more than 10% of their KENPC while the third remained unchanged. In my case, the two that lost pages both have Enhanced Typesetting Enabled, while the one that stayed the same did not. In looking through the books you have listed, I noticed a similar pattern, with some minor inconsistencies on a couple titles. From what I've heard about the new typeface and hyphenation, it seems like it might have the effect of increasing the number of words per page. I can't say for sure that's what's going on, but maybe it factors into this somehow.


THANK YOU! It's been bugging me why 2 of my books have lost KENPC and the others haven't, when they're all formatted the same. I could get some changing less than others, but literally some haven't budged, and 2 have lost about 30 pages each. And yes, the ones that have lost pages have enhanced typesetting enabled, and the others don't.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Another response from KDP.



> The average KENPC will change less than 5%, although individual books' changes may be larger or smaller.


I seriously wonder where they pulled that number from. Certainly it doesn't seem to be reflected here at all.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

> J.A., this is just an observation, but two of my books lost more than 10% of their KENPC while the third remained unchanged. In my case, the two that lost pages both have Enhanced Typesetting Enabled, while the one that stayed the same did not. I


For what it's worth, Vellum books seem to be staying stable and whatever the formatting sorcery the Vellum people use, it seems to prevent the enhanced typography conversion.


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## GoneToWriterSanctum (Sep 13, 2014)

I regret seeing this latest change in the KU controversy. It's a slow squeeze on those authors who have decided to embrace exclusivity.

I had unchecked my renewal boxes, and my work came out of KU in late December/early January. I went wide again. My reasoning was that while I enjoyed the extra income from being exclusive, I couldn't see it lasting. The KU payout rate was dropping, further squeezing authors that trusted Amazon to provide a good income through exclusivity.

Now, the other shoe has dropped. I had a feeling that Amazon wouldn't leave things alone, and that they would continue to squeeze authors by somehow reducing payout. I didn't expect it to happen this quickly. As someone upthread said, I figured it would happen later this year.

Folks, Amazon is a business, and they will continue to squeeze authors until they begin to see that they've gone too far. If it hits their pocketbook, they'll raise payouts in an effort to entice authors back into exclusivity.

Please don't fall for it.

I respect and admire Amazon, and am grateful for the opportunities that they've provided to authors. I will publish to Amazon as long as I continue to author stories.

But I won't go exclusive with them again.

Sure, by going wide, I have taken a big hit in writing income. I have taken a big hit in discoverability on Amazon itself. Ranking for some of my titles are creeping closely to the 3,000,000 mark.

But I don't care. My stories are now available everywhere, even Google Play. And they will eventually begin climbing at those other outlets again.

I simply will not take the risk of keeping all of my eggs in one basket, and I strongly recommend to any author worth his/her salt to at least give going wide a six month to one year try. Yes, you'll take a hit at Amazon. But you just might take off somewhere else, like Apple or Nook or Kobo.

Amazon won't change anything to your favor unless pushed. Going wide with your work is the best way to push them.

Please don't flame me for this opinion. It works for me. Your mileage may vary. But, if you don't try, you won't know.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

Honestly, I don't think this has anything to do with squeezing authors. The cap probably has something to do with fraud and the change in KENPC is irrelevant to payments. 

If they want to squeeze us, crush us, or tear off our heads and... um... you get the idea. If they want to do that, they can do it at will. They wield monopoly power in the market place. They control the pot. They can do whatever they want and we'll go along with it because when the rubber hits the road, we don't really have a choice.

KENPC is just how the pot is divided up. Personally, I think KENPC payments are going down because more novelists are enrolling because KU2 gives them better payouts. More novels = more pages read = lower payment per page. I'm not happy either, but I simply don't think there's some mustachioed villain coming up with ways to shaft us.


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

It's really simple math. The subscription scam only works if the customer doesn't read enough to total $10 worth of payouts. People were producing books that would net them 250% of that with one book.

So they set it up so a) there's a cutoff and b) all books now yield, on average, fewer pages read, thus propping up the scam for another few months. Then in July, they do some other BS that people will rationalize away in the same way Aunt Irma insists that anrgy red growth on her neck is just 'stress'.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

Vaalingrade said:


> It's really simple math. The subscription scam only works if the customer doesn't read enough to total $10 worth of payouts. People were producing books that would net them 250% of that with one book.
> 
> So they set it up so a) there's a cutoff and b) all books now yield, on average, fewer pages read, thus propping up the scam for another few months. Then in July, they do some other BS that people will rationalize away in the same way Aunt Irma insists that anrgy red growth on her neck is just 'stress'.


That's assuming the goal of KU is go make a profit. The goal may be to get customer to the website more often so they will be on Amazon right as they realize the need more pens, toilet paper, hey this printer is a great deal and it's just one click to buy it... You get the idea. It could be worth running the program at a loss if it gets lots of impulse shoppers to the site.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

> KENPC is just how the pot is divided up. Personally, I think KENPC payments are going down because more novelists are enrolling because KU2 gives them better payouts. More novels = more pages read = lower payment per page. I'm not happy either, but I simply don't think there's some mustachioed villain coming up with ways to shaft us.


Agreed.



> That's assuming the goal of KU is go make a profit. The goal may be to get customer to the website more often so they will be on Amazon right as they realize the need more pens, toilet paper, hey this printer is a great deal and it's just one click to buy it... You get the idea. It could be worth running the program at a loss if it gets lots of impulse shoppers to the site.


Based on Scribd and Oyster's experiences, I expect they ARE operating KU at a loss. What they are struggling to do is to hold the losses in line. It's like FB ads ... If you're paying more than the cost of a book for a sale, they still make sense if you can expect a certain amount of sell-thru down the line. However, at a certain point, it still is too expensive.


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## Lefevre (Feb 1, 2014)

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this here already. I read something interesting on another post, I don't know who made the original comment, so I will just paraphrase..

The change made by Amazon was a tactic to stop "double dipping." Which was defined as authors putting the same story in multiple box sets. Apparently skipping around counts as pages read, so in theory the same story can get paid multiple times yet only has to get read once.

If that is true, I definitely admire the ingenuity of this scam, but at the same time I detest it.

Hopefully that adds another dimension to the discussion.


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

Crystal_ said:


> That's assuming the goal of KU is go make a profit. The goal may be to get customer to the website more often so they will be on Amazon right as they realize the need more pens, toilet paper, hey this printer is a great deal and it's just one click to buy it... You get the idea. It could be worth running the program at a loss if it gets lots of impulse shoppers to the site.


Even with loss leaders, you can't just throw millions of dollars down the toilet when you can hit up a bunch of authors.

_Edited. PM me if you have any questions. --Betsy/KB Mod_


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## Lady Vine (Nov 11, 2012)

For those who are convinced that the cap is to stop scammers and discourage big bundles, even at 2999 KENPC, there's still a lot of room for scamming. And very few of the bundles even come close to 350k words.

So not sure where you folks are getting that idea from. More like a business *gradually* trying to lower its costs.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Vaalingrade said:


> Even with loss leaders, you can't just throw millions of dollars down the toilet when you can hit up a bunch of authors.


When iBooks and Google Play can get me the kind of money I make with Amazon, I'll switch. My experimentation in that regard told me that they can't.

Do what you want. But don't tell me I'm stupid for doing something else.

_Edited response to now edited post. --Betsy_


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

TimothyEllis said:


> Another response from KDP.
> 
> I seriously wonder where they pulled that number from. Certainly it doesn't seem to be reflected here at all.


That's because the people talking are the ones affected. Not everyone is talking.


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## Guest (Feb 3, 2016)

TimothyEllis said:


> Too many variables.


But further up thread you were saying Amazon cut your KENPC and your author rank took a corresponding drop, as though it were a simple linear relationship. Which is why I pointed out my KENPC was cut but my rank went up. So now are you saying rank IS affected by other variables? That, just maybe, author rank might be affected by things like... I dunno... sales and borrows? Or maybe even what is happening in your category and the sales/borrows of other similar authors?


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Folks,

I'm out at lunch and Ann is at work.  Be nice to each other so the thread stays open.  I'm going to review when I get home--I'll put people on post approval if I need to.

Betsy
KB Mod


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## Learning by lurking (Jan 17, 2016)

A couple of points I would like to throw my .02 at. 

For the remark about bundling previous works together, implying it is a scam. It seems to me it is so easy to just always blame those other authors. Before Kenp it was the so called scamphlets. Now it is those evil bundlers. The truth is that bundling is in no way a scam. If a customer borrows said bundle and has already read the story, they will probably not bother to read it again. 

To the point about KU being a loss leader, it really is not. I do not have any statistical information at my disposal, but lets say Amazon loses ten million a month on it (being very generous here). I imagine last year indie authors paid out maybe as much as a billion dollars to advertise their various promotions and new releases, all pointing to the Amazon website. And this does not take into account the word of mouth advertising, social media, etc. What an ingenious business model to get others to pay for your advertising.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Learning by lurking said:


> A couple of points I would like to throw my .02 at.
> 
> For the remark about bundling previous works together, implying it is a scam. It seems to me it is so easy to just always blame those other authors. Before Kenp it was the so called scamphlets. Now it is those evil bundlers. The truth is that bundling is in no way a scam. If a customer borrows said bundle and has already read the story, they will probably not bother to read it again.
> 
> To the point about KU being a loss leader, it really is not. I do not have any statistical information at my disposal, but lets say Amazon loses ten million a month on it (being very generous here). I imagine last year indie authors paid out maybe as much as a billion dollars to advertise their various promotions and new releases, all pointing to the Amazon website. And this does not take into account the word of mouth advertising, social media, etc. What an ingenious business model to get others to pay for your advertising.


No one said bundling itself is a scam. People are referring to the scam where you sell one book and tack on 50 after it and then put a link in the front for a "giveaway" and it takes you to the back to trigger a full payout (which is often exceedingly huge). It was much more prevalent than people want to believe. There was an entire group bragging about it. Those people were cleaning up and diluting the pool. Does this fix the problem? No. It's just the first volley. The only way to fix it is have human eyes look at each book upload and to do that Amazon is going to have to hire more people and to do that they're going to have to raise more revenue, like adding a fee for each new book upload (which would also cut down on a little bit of the graft).


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Vaalingrade said:


> It's really simple math. The subscription *scam* only works if the customer doesn't read enough to total $10 worth of payouts. People were producing books that would net them 250% of that with one book.
> 
> So they set it up so a) there's a cutoff and b) all books now yield, on average, fewer pages read, thus propping up the *scam* for another few months. Then in July, they do some other BS that people will rationalize away in the same way Aunt Irma insists that anrgy red growth on her neck is just 'stress'.


Define "scam."


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## scottnicholson (Jan 31, 2010)

via Imgflip Meme Maker


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## Briteka (Mar 5, 2012)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> That's because the people talking are the ones affected. Not everyone is talking.


I'm not sure. If they changed the KENPC algo that gives us our page count (which they obviously did), almost everyone will see changes. I think support is just confused. The 3000 page change affects very few people. This is probably very true. The algo that gives us our page counts was also changed. Perhaps support is just confusing the two.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Briteka said:


> I'm not sure. If they changed the KENPC algo that gives us our page count (which they obviously did), almost everyone will see changes. I think support is just confused. The 3000 page change affects very few people. This is probably very true. The algo that gives us our page counts was also changed. Perhaps support is just confusing the two.


I'm saying that not everyone saw massive page changes and most of those people aren't talking.


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## Learning by lurking (Jan 17, 2016)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> No one said bundling itself is a scam. People are referring to the scam where you sell one book and tack on 50 after it and then put a link in the front for a "giveaway" and it takes you to the back to trigger a full payout (which is often exceedingly huge). It was much more prevalent than people want to believe. There was an entire group bragging about it. Those people were cleaning up and diluting the pool. Does this fix the problem? No. It's just the first volley. The only way to fix it is have human eyes look at each book upload and to do that Amazon is going to have to hire more people and to do that they're going to have to raise more revenue, like adding a fee for each new book upload (which would also cut down on a little bit of the graft).


This is part of what I am not getting. I do not remember where I picked up my assumption, but I thought when Kenp was rolled out the talk was all about how creepy it was that Amazon knew the pages we were reading, and how long we were on the page. I believe this to be true. I have Kindle for my desktop and had to wipe the drive clean and reinstall windows. So needed a new kindle reader for the computer. The Amazon library knew exactly where I was with every book it placed back on the desktop kindle.

If Amazon is allowing what is being described by you, it has been by choice. They know exactly where we are in a book. I do agree if this is actually going on, shame on Amazon for allowing it, and continuing to. Thank you for commenting and sharing about the giveaway link. I had no idea. I have been putting mine in the front, before the TOC hoping if they pass on buying/borrowing, they may at least give me their email to get the free book when they see it in the look inside.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

*Bundles aren't a scam.* They are providing readers with something they want: a curated selection of books at free or next to it. They provide authors with funnels to the rest of their series.

There may have been some people who stuck a link at the beginning that made people hop to the end, but I don't think that happened that much. However, if readers are like me, they skim through the whole bundle to find something they like. It's not a quality issue, I know Rebecca H. and others try really hard to make sure their bundles are high quality. It's just a simple fact of life that not everyone likes every book.

However, if those skims were getting counted as reads, it was diluting the pool.

My guess is that shorter, more targeted bundles will naturally have a higher _percentage_ of page reads.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

C. Gockel said:


> *Bundles aren't a scam.* They are providing readers with something they want: a curated selection of books at free or next to it. They provide authors with funnels to the rest of their series.
> 
> There may have been some people who stuck a link at the beginning that made people hop to the end, but I don't think that happened that much. However, if readers are like me, they skim through the whole bundle to find something they like. It's not a quality issue, I know Rebecca H. and others try really hard to make sure their bundles are high quality. It's just a simple fact of life that not everyone likes every book.
> 
> ...


It was happening with increasing frequency. You would be surprised how many people were doing it.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Learning by lurking said:


> This is part of what I am not getting. I do not remember where I picked up my assumption, but I thought when Kenp was rolled out the talk was all about how creepy it was that Amazon knew the pages we were reading, and how long we were on the page. I believe this to be true. I have Kindle for my desktop and had to wipe the drive clean and reinstall windows. So needed a new kindle reader for the computer. The Amazon library knew exactly where I was with every book it placed back on the desktop kindle.
> 
> If Amazon is allowing what is being described by you, it has been by choice. They know exactly where we are in a book. I do agree if this is actually going on, shame on Amazon for allowing it, and continuing to. Thank you for commenting and sharing about the giveaway link. I had no idea. I have been putting mine in the front, before the TOC hoping if they pass on buying/borrowing, they may at least give me their email to get the free book when they see it in the look inside.


Sorry, I say shame on the authors doing it, not Amazon. They're to blame.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

While I'm not pleased with the reductions in my pages, the consistency of the book lengths now make more sense than the original numbers did. As I remember, everyone was up in arms when KU2 was announced, and then when their KENP counts ended up being considerably higher than their paper page counts, everyone quieted down. Yes, I liked it that my 60K novel was awarded 320 pages, and at .005, it didn't match a sale, but better than the KU1 payout. Now that the book is down to 272 pages with a .0046 payout, things don't look quite as rosy. I think everyone will be waiting for the per-page amount with some interest.


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## MKK (Jun 9, 2015)

Being unpublished, I have no horse in this race but a few things confound me. 

The first being, why doesn't amazon simply tell the world what their algorithm is and then of course, tell their suppliers (the writing community) that any attempt to 'beat their system' will result in a book being either removed or penalized. 

Dear Amazon: According to your website, "KENPC is calculated using standard formatting settings (font, line height, line spacing, etc.)". This is not particularly useful. It's like Home Depot telling me (a screw supplier) that the price they will pay for of a box of screws will be determined based on the average weight and size across all types of screws sold.

I know..I know, folks will have all sorts of reasons why Amazon won't 'talk' —(a) they want their secret sauce protected, (b) they want to be able to screw their suppliers (a digital Walmart) or maybe they're just winging it as they figure this stuff out.

My second and final point is. Perhaps, you all should be sending emails to the Mr. B and his product managers at the ZON. I know if I was selling them something, I'd want a clear idea of how they're going to pay me beyond the gibberish in the sentence I snipped from their website.

Rock on.


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

Vaalingrade said:


> Even with loss leaders, you can't just throw millions of dollars down the toilet when you can hit up a bunch of authors.


I'm not obligated to, nor will I, "stand up" to Amazon, on principle, in a way that is going to cost me what amounts to half of my income every month. I understand people who are deciding to go wide because of this, or have been wide for a while now, but the implication that if you stay in it's because you're a chicken, or too stupid to understand what's going on, really rankles. Maybe--just maybe--people are staying in because, even if it's not ideal, they've done the math and decided that staying in KU is best for them right now.

Like, I have kids to feed. Making a stand on principle isn't a luxury I can afford right now, because principles (while lofty and admirable) aren't very filling.


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## EC Sheedy (Feb 24, 2011)

Vaalingrade said:


> Even with loss leaders, you can't just throw millions of dollars down the toilet when you can hit up a bunch of authors.


Curious . . . What exactly would you have all us battered and abused authors do? 

_Edited quoted post. PM me if you have any questions. --Betsy/KB Mod_


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## doolittle03 (Feb 13, 2015)

I think the 3000 cap was introduced for the reasons given: dictionaries and reference material. At first I thought who the blazes would bother with an ebook dictionary (borrowing, I mean) but there was a Washington Post article where an "author" pulled loads of phrases, etc and published his book as a Spanish dictionary. (it wasn't very useful, apparently). Anyway, I could see reference material getting bloated and $10/mth subscriber burning through $10 on one book, flipping pages back and forth. 

In my uninformed opinion, it would be hard to get 3000 KENP in fiction and harder still to keep a reader on board to the bitter end in one month. My bundled beast is only 1094.

And as others have said, my KENP number went down quite a bit but only on the titles that were formatted single-spaced. brkingsolver's numbers are in line with mine which puts our full-length reads at $1.25/borrow. Kinda makes me long for the good old days of $1.35...


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Briteka said:


> I'm not sure. If they changed the KENPC algo that gives us our page count (which they obviously did), almost everyone will see changes. I think support is just confused. The 3000 page change affects very few people. This is probably very true. The algo that gives us our page counts was also changed. Perhaps support is just confusing the two.


Mine didn't change much. My full-length books are about 100K or higher, and the KENPC seems to be somewhere around 500. My biggest book is 135K and 669 KENPC. That's the only one where I knew the original KENPC: it was about 700. So that's 4% less; not that much.

As Amanda says, the people who didn't have big changes aren't here talking. I do remember Amanda saying (as did I) early on, when there was all the talk about changing formats for a higher KENPC, that she didn't bother--she just formatted the books as always and put them up there. So perhaps, since we didn't do whatever-the-things-were-that-got-you-a-higher-KENPC (changing to Vellum or whatever it was), our counts didn't change much when Amazon adjusted. Who knows.

I did ask Amazon about it. I was told that (a) authors changed their behavior to try to get higher KENPCs in numerous ways, (b) those things led to a worse customer experience and customer complaints, so (c) Amazon adjusted--how they estimated page count, and the 3,000 KENPC cap.

In any case, whatever the reasons were and whatever nefarious purposes may or may not be behind the change--it's here, just as KU 2.0 is here. Stuff is going to change again, too. Betcha anything. Within six months to a year. Who knows what the change will be, but it'll come.


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## Rick Gualtieri (Oct 31, 2011)

doolittle03 said:


> In my uninformed opinion, it would be hard to get 3000 KENP in fiction and harder still to keep a reader on board to the bitter end in one month. My bundled beast is only 1094.


In all fairness, some of those multi-author bundles are pretty huge. Still, considering what I'm seeing with my bundle, we're talking 500k+ words to hit the 3000 KENP limit. Definitely going to affect some, but percentage-wise it's probably a small number.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

> In any case, whatever the reasons were and whatever nefarious purposes may or may not be behind the change--it's here, just as KU 2.0 is here. Stuff is going to change again, too. Betcha anything. Within six months to a year. Who knows what the change will be, but it'll come.


Exactly! So write the next book.


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## writemore (Feb 3, 2016)

Rosalind James said:


> I did ask Amazon about it. I was told that (a) authors changed their behavior to try to get higher KENPCs in numerous ways, (b) those things led to a worse customer experience and customer complaints, so (c) Amazon adjusted--how they estimated page count, and the 3,000 KENPC cap.


It's too bad that some of us that weren't trying to game the system were affected.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

writemore said:


> It's too bad that some of us that weren't trying to game the system were affected.


Agreed. Whenever Amazon cleans house, people get swept up. It could be that people who saw the huge drops in KENPC had inadvertently used whatever software gave you the higher-than-average counts. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) So their counts were artificially higher than others'. I can say that from my limited checking, my KENPC seems to be pretty consistent with word count across my own books, which I don't think it was before. Honestly, though, I've never paid too much attention, as I didn't figure there was anything I could do about it.


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## Rick Gualtieri (Oct 31, 2011)

writemore said:


> It's too bad that some of us that weren't trying to game the system were affected.


This is part of the reasoning why I was arguing in another thread that we should take seriously when others game the system. Because the fallout tends to affect us all. Time and time again this has been proven true.


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## J.A. Cipriano (May 27, 2014)

Rosalind James said:


> Mine didn't change much. My full-length books are about 100K or higher, and the KENPC seems to be somewhere around 500. My biggest book is 135K and 669 KENPC. That's the only one where I knew the original KENPC: it was about 700. So that's 4% less; not that much.
> 
> As Amanda says, the people who didn't have big changes aren't here talking. I do remember Amanda saying (as did I) early on, when there was all the talk about changing formats for a higher KENPC, that she didn't bother--she just formatted the books as always and put them up there. So perhaps, since we didn't do whatever-the-things-were-that-got-you-a-higher-KENPC (changing to Vellum or whatever it was), our counts didn't change much when Amazon adjusted. Who knows.
> 
> ...


Here's my problem. I did the same thing. I dumped my stuff into calibre and made a book. I've done it the same way since KU 1. I never did any of those tricks even though I could have. Now my books shrank 20% or so and I wasn't padding or doing anything. The books I paid someone else to format (polgarus studios) lost a similar amount, and those 5 books haven't changed since March of 2014.

Yes, stuff changes. It's expected. I'm even okay with them duping all our manuscripts into whatever their arbitrary calculation tool is. But I'm still allowed to be annoyed I was just hit with a hatchet job. Not because others weren't, but because I was when I did nothing wrong. We're talking about formatting for books which haven't changed in a year suddenly being worth less, and the sticker, is how this is somehow my fault because I was gaming the system. Not that I am saying you specifically are saying that.

Let's also be real here. You or Amanda make more in a day than I will all month, possibly 2 or 3. That's cool, I'm certainly happy for you. Sincerely.

Under this situation, my best selling book would take 20% longer to earn out. That time isn't measured in minutes, hours, or days for me, but months. Now it will take 2 more months. That's a big deal to me even though the book is profitable. It changes the entire value comparison on some books I wrote or will write. (This is not an invitation to look at my books and tell me what I am doing wrong)

I'm more trying to say that yes, for some people it didn't do anything, but for others it was a nice shave and a haircut, and for most of us, we weren't the ones tweaking things to make an extra few cents.

You know what my thought was when KU 2 came out? I should write longer books. and more books. And work harder. And, essentially, they negated 20% of my work with a penswipe. But hey it's cool, I was scamming. I should have paid a different person to format or bought a mac and used vellum. Got it.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

emilycantore said:


> Is there any evidence that the link to end jump works? I'm in various groups too and the people I've seen talk about it and experiment haven't conclusively generated an answer. We had people publish a new book, borrow it the instant it went live, unpublish and then click to the end. When it updated they had 2-3 pages read... not 300.
> 
> I mean... there was no limit on KENPC so why weren't these scammers publishing entire dictionaries back to back and doing the publish, one read, unpublish method? They'd be able to collect hundreds of thousands of pages per day with near zero effort.
> 
> Personally I think the people claiming a click link to the end somehow net them the entire book read are mistaken.


And other people have done the exact same experiment and registered full reads. People were bragging about it left and right in some groups, saying they made as much as $100 on a single borrow through this scam. It's sad honest authors got swept up, it really is, but the onus of this is on the scammers because they forced Amazon to step in and take action.


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## writemore (Feb 3, 2016)

Rick Gualtieri said:


> This is part of the reasoning why I was arguing in another thread that we should take seriously when others game the system. Because the fallout tends to affect us all. Time and time again this has been proven true.


There isn't much we can do about those that are trying to game the system. At least not that I can think of.



Rosalind James said:


> It could be that people who saw the huge drops in KENPC had inadvertently used whatever software gave you the higher-than-average counts. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) So their counts were artificially higher than others'.


I've considered that. I use Scrivener like many others that have seemed to see the bigger hits to page counts. I'm still hoping that maybe they'll raise the pay-per-page so that I'm back on track, but I'm not going to hold my breath!!


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

EC Sheedy said:


> Curious . . . What exactly would you have all us battered and abused authors do?


At the very least not being okay with this kind of thing and sending in complaints when they make a change that's detrimental to you or your peers instead of, for example, _immediately_ turning on the authors who were most hurt by it (see also short story authors after KU2, box set creators this time around, etc.).

I mean really guys, you can push for better treatment of authors without a boycott. But the first hurtle is acknowledging that we _should_ be treated better.


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## tomwritesabit (Jan 16, 2016)

Rick Gualtieri said:


> This is part of the reasoning why I was arguing in another thread that we should take seriously when others game the system. Because the fallout tends to affect us all. Time and time again this has been proven true.


I agree, and welcome to the real world... and I mean that in the nicest way. But the fact is that companies continually have to change business practices to combat theft, and that type of behavior isn't any different that shoplifting or credit card fraud. It all cost us more money in one way or the other. I was at Wal-Mart the other day, and now they have a security guard check your receipt and basket on the way out. They'll have to raise a price or two somewhere to cover his salary. I don't see this as all that different.

I'm talking about those that game the system, not everybody.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

J.A. Cipriano said:


> Here's my problem. I did the same thing. I dumped my stuff into calibre and made a book. I've done it the same way since KU 1. I never did any of those tricks even though I could have. Now my books shrank 20% or so and I wasn't padding or doing anything. The books I paid someone else to format (polgarus studios) lost a similar amount, and those 5 books haven't changed since March of 2014.
> 
> Yes, stuff changes. It's expected. I'm even okay with them duping all our manuscripts into whatever their arbitrary calculation tool is. But I'm still allowed to be annoyed I was just hit with a hatchet job. Not because others weren't, but because I was when I did nothing wrong. We're talking about formatting for books which haven't changed in a year suddenly being worth less, and the sticker, is how this is somehow my fault because I was gaming the system. Not that I am saying you specifically are saying that.
> 
> ...


I didn't say that. I never said that. I don't know the reasons behind the change--none of us do.

Hey--when KU1 happened and everybody started writing short erotica, I took a huge hit. I could have written short erotica in response, but I didn't. I went wide until KU2 happened. That was my choice in response. I can't blame people for taking advantage of that opportunity. They weren't gaming, and neither are people who have boxed sets. And certainly neither were people who formatted their books with whatever-software, because it was their formatting software.

I do think that people who made gigantic boxed sets BECAUSE of the huge KU2 payout might have known this day would come, though. Just as I don't think it was smart for people to think they could keep writing a 20-page erotica short every day and making $1.35 on every borrow in perpetuity, exactly the same as an author got for a 100K novel. Neither of those situations was sustainable.


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## Ros_Jackson (Jan 11, 2014)

The only book I have in KU is about 151K, and it lost 1.6% KENPC. It's just formatted in Word, nothing fancy. I'm not over the moon, but I recognise others have taken much bigger hits. 

Amazon is about on track, though: they pull this sort of thing every so often, so they were about due to mess with our heads. However, I think at lot of authors won't even notice the reduction in page counts and the new terms, and that's one of the things that will allow Amazon to have the upper hand in their relationship with indie authors.


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## PJ_Cherubino (Oct 23, 2015)

emilycantore said:


> Is there any evidence that the link to end jump works? I'm in various groups too and the people I've seen talk about it and experiment haven't conclusively generated an answer. We had people publish a new book, borrow it the instant it went live, unpublish and then click to the end. When it updated they had 2-3 pages read... not 300.
> 
> I mean... there was no limit on KENPC so why weren't these scammers publishing entire dictionaries back to back and doing the publish, one read, unpublish method? They'd be able to collect hundreds of thousands of pages per day with near zero effort.
> 
> Personally I think the people claiming a click link to the end somehow net them the entire book read are mistaken.


This is a vey good question. I thought on it for a while and came to the conclusion that to Amazon, it doesn't matter.

The end result is that actors in Amazon's market engaged in behavior that had a negative effect.
Actors in any market will always seek to maximize their own advantage. That goes for buyers, sellers and the market owners alike. When advantage-seeking behavior begins to overshadow production that provides value to the buyer, market owners will act.

When I take a step back and look at it this way, Amazon's behavior makes sense.

Most authors are honest actors who just want to earn from their labor. Unfortunately, the "edge cases" who are interested primarily in maximizing advantage are much more visible. So while the vast majority of authors operate within the bounds of ethical self-interest, those who are primarily concerned with achievement in the market have a disproportionate impact on the rest.

Amazon may have made a tactical miscalculation in estimating how far people will go to manipulate minutia to get ahead. It seems like they are sticking multiple fingers into a leaky seawall that is their system of algorithms.

I won't even get in to the subjects of the psychological warfare of the review system and the treadmill of rankings and ratings.

My bottom line is that there is a market out there that presents the opportunity to earn a little bit by doing something I love.

I hope everyone keeps writing. I'm looking forward to reading your words.

PJC over and out.


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## tomwritesabit (Jan 16, 2016)

PJ_Cherubino said:


> This is a vey good question. I thought on it for a while and came to the conclusion that to Amazon, it doesn't matter.
> 
> The end result is that actors in Amazon's market engaged in behavior that had a negative effect.
> Actors in any market will always seek to maximize their own advantage. That goes for buyers, sellers and the market owners alike. When advantage-seeking behavior begins to overshadow production that provides value to the buyer, market owners will act.
> ...


Excellent point


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## Briteka (Mar 5, 2012)

Rosalind James said:


> Mine didn't change much. My full-length books are about 100K or higher, and the KENPC seems to be somewhere around 500. My biggest book is 135K and 669 KENPC. That's the only one where I knew the original KENPC: it was about 700. So that's 4% less; not that much.
> 
> As Amanda says, the people who didn't have big changes aren't here talking. I do remember Amanda saying (as did I) early on, when there was all the talk about changing formats for a higher KENPC, that she didn't bother--she just formatted the books as always and put them up there. So perhaps, since we didn't do whatever-the-things-were-that-got-you-a-higher-KENPC (changing to Vellum or whatever it was), our counts didn't change much when Amazon adjusted. Who knows.
> 
> ...


But it seems that everyone saying not everyone was affected (and using themselves as an example, including you and Amanda) were actually affected, just not as much as other people. I wasn't affected much either. I seem to have lost a few pages on each book, but no big deal. I was still affected though. With an algo change like this, I really wonder how many people actually have all their books sitting at the same page count as they did before this change. If I were to bet, I'd bet that number is somewhere between 1 and 10 percent. The algo was already weird, and it's even weirder now. My manuscripts are already as clean as can possibly be. There is literally nothing I can think of to make them cleaner, and yet, I still lost pages. I suppose there are some authors that managed to get their manuscripts cleaner and lost no pages with this algo change, but I have a very hard time believing that it was a lot of authors.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Briteka said:


> But it seems that everyone saying not everyone was affected (and using themselves as an example, including you and Amanda) were actually affected, just not as much as other people. I wasn't affected much either. I seem to have lost a few pages on each book, but no big deal. I was still affected though. With an algo change like this, I really wonder how many people actually have all their books sitting at the same page count as they did before this change. If I were to bet, I'd bet that number is somewhere between 1 and 10 percent. The algo was already weird, and it's even weirder now. My manuscripts are already as clean as can possibly be. There is literally nothing I can think of to make them cleaner, and yet, I still lost pages. I suppose there are some authors that managed to get their manuscripts cleaner and lost no pages with this algo change, but I have a very hard time believing that it was a lot of authors.


What do you format with? Some of the programs (like Jutoh and Calibre) were artificially inflating page counts because of the coding they use on their end. So, an argument can be made that the authors seeing gains from those programs got extra for a few months. I do know that most people using Vellum saw little to no change. That at least appears to be the case from everything I've seen.


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## 75814 (Mar 12, 2014)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> What do you format with? Some of the programs (like Jutoh and Calibre) were artificially inflating page counts because of the coding they use on their end. So, an argument can be made that the authors seeing gains from those programs got extra for a few months. I do know that most people using Vellum saw little to no change. That at least appears to be the case from everything I've seen.


I use Scrivener for my formatting and the KENPC on almost all my stuff is unchanged. The exception being my serial episodes, which have jumped from 80 to 100 pages.


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## PJ_Cherubino (Oct 23, 2015)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> What do you format with? Some of the programs (like Jutoh and Calibre) were artificially inflating page counts because of the coding they use on their end. So, an argument can be made that the authors seeing gains from those programs got extra for a few months. I do know that most people using Vellum saw little to no change. That at least appears to be the case from everything I've seen.


Yeah, I found these reports very strange.

I have a non-rhetorical question:
How are we sure that the document coding itself has an impact on KENP algorithms?
I know there is a lot of anecdotal evidence here. I also know that the 'Zon keeps their algorithms very well hidden.
Some people have cited bloated document code tagging as leading to increased page count. I'm not sure how that would play out. I would think that kerning and line spacing, margins, indents, etc. would have a greater impact. But then again, I'm noob.

FYI: I published two novels. One tanked due to horrifically poor editing on my part. That one I pulled. The other book went live noon today (a much better product ... I hope ...)

I published both novels using google docs for the drafts and LibreOffice to produce a formatted .docx file.

Specs: proportional line spacing 115% (1.15)
Single space below paragraph
.5 first line indent (for the first book, second uses .25)
Font: 12pt times new roman
Chapter headings were 18 pt font, also TNR with .08 space above and .11 (I think - will check) below.
my TOC is in the same formatting as text body and the only heading I use.

I saved directly from LibreOffice to .docx

The new novel is 77,483 words, including front and back matter, TOC
KENPC stands at 396

The unpublished novel (pre-KENP 2) was 107K words and KENPC was 522


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## writemore (Feb 3, 2016)

Perry Constantine said:


> I use Scrivener for my formatting and the KENPC on almost all my stuff is unchanged. The exception being my serial episodes, which have jumped from 80 to 100 pages.


Well that's frustrating.... Most other Scrivener users seem to be reporting page losses. Such as myself. Do you convert to mobi from scrivener?


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

PJ_Cherubino said:


> Yeah, I found these reports very strange.
> 
> I have a non-rhetorical question:
> How are we sure that the document coding itself has an impact on KENP algorithms?
> ...


How sure are we of anything? Everything I have is from other people, so it's anecdotal. I know people who used the loophole to bulk up their file size in Jutoh and saw massive page count losses this week. That is anecdotal. Most of the people I know using Vellum did not see big losses. That's also anecdotal.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

I lost about 20% almost across the board. But...

It was the same 20% that I gained a few months ago when I switched from straight MS Word-uploads to .mobi uploads that were converted using Callibre. My guess is that the new system seeks to provide a more consistent count that isn't tied to the method of upload.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

MmmmmPie said:


> I lost about 20% almost across the board. But...
> 
> It was the same 20% that I gained a few months ago when I switched from straight MS Word-uploads to .mobi uploads that were converted using Callibre. My guess is that the new system seeks to provide a more consistent count that isn't tied to the method of upload.


Yeah...I would assume that as Amanda says, people with big losses had (unknowingly or not) benefited from formatting that gave them a higher KENPC compared to others who formatted differently. And now, hopefully, we're more level--including with my slightly lower counts.

If anybody wants to compare, I'm getting almost exactly 200 words per KENPC page across my various titles. So a 100,000-word book is 500 KENPC, and a 135,000-word book is 670 KENPC. 200 words per Kindle equalized page.

If others are getting in that ballpark, too, it would seem to me that things have leveled off. If others had 20% more than that before, then they've had 7 months getting 20% more per page than I have, but I won't hold that against them.


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## 13893 (Apr 29, 2010)

Rosalind James said:


> Yeah...I would assume that as Amanda says, people with big losses had (unknowingly or not) benefited from formatting that gave them a higher KENPC compared to others who formatted differently. And now, hopefully, we're more level--including with my slightly lower counts.
> 
> If anybody wants to compare, I'm getting almost exactly 200 words per KENPC page across my various titles. So a 100,000-word book is 500 KENPC, and a 135,000-word book is 670 KENPC. 200 words per Kindle equalized page.
> 
> If others are getting in that ballpark, too, it would seem to me that things have leveled off. If others had 20% more than that before, then they've had 7 months getting 20% more per page than I have, but I won't hold that against them.


all my books are formatted the same, simple Word .doc uploads, no tricks. They all lost about 20 percent EXCEPT for the two books which do not have "enhanced typesetting" - and those two have the exact KENPC as before.


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## writemore (Feb 3, 2016)

Rosalind James said:


> Yeah...I would assume that as Amanda says, people with big losses had (unknowingly or not) benefited from formatting that gave them a higher KENPC compared to others who formatted differently. And now, hopefully, we're more level--including with my slightly lower counts.


Could we know this by creating a chart that compares KENPC to word count? Like a 70,000 word novel = ?? KENPC. Although there are probably still other variables at play I guess.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

LKRigel said:


> all my books are formatted the same, simple Word .doc uploads, no tricks. They all lost about 20 percent EXCEPT for the two books which do not have "enhanced typesetting" - and those two have the exact KENPC as before.


So how many words/Kindle page are you seeing now? That's my question. I'm seeing 200 across all books. 100,000 words = 500 KENPC. If yours is well under that with the 20% cut, then there's still a problem to me. If the 20% cut means that now you're at about 200 KENPC, then it looks to me like we're more equitable.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Folks,

I've been reading through the thread, and not being an author, I have no dog in this hunt or fight whatever the expression is.  But I think that there may be people who discovered a formatting method that got them the largest possible word count.  I also think, knowing people, there are other people who had no idea that a particular method gained them a bonus in KENPC and who are now facing a pay cut.  Let's have some sympathy and assume good faith among our membership, OK?  Let's not make "judgy" statements about people if we can help it.  Factual information is good, and helpful to members and lurkers, though it seems there aren't a lot of facts to be had.

Betsy
KB Mod


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

writemore said:


> Could we know this by creating a chart that compares KENPC to word count? Like a 70,000 word novel =  KENPC. Although there are probably still other variables at play I guess.


Well, I shared mine. They're all 200 words/Kindle page or close.


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## 13893 (Apr 29, 2010)

Rosalind James said:


> So how many words/Kindle page are you seeing now? That's my question. I'm seeing 200 across all books. 100,000 words = 500 KENPC. If yours is well under that with the 20% cut, then there's still a problem to me. If the 20% cut means that now you're at about 200 KENPC, then it looks to me like we're more equitable.


that's a good question. when I get time, I'll check all my page counts vs KENPC counts. My point was that books without the enhanced typesetting feature seem to have been unaffected by the change. No idea if that's a significant factoid though.


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## Tonya (Feb 21, 2011)

OR....the zon figured out some authors are cheating the system and  having readers read their book over and over....THUS, the lower pages read can result in higher pay for pages read.


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## Elizabeth Ann West (Jul 11, 2011)

I only have 2 titles. Both have enhanced typesetting. Only one was adjusted, both have IDENTICAL formatting in Word. One was 20,000 and there were no changes, 98 pages. The one that is 36,030 pages was 198 KENPC and is now 168. So the unchanged one is close to 200 words per page. The changed one was 181 words per page, now 214 if you're going by that.

But even if I look at the pages in word, book 1 is 72 8x11 pages, book 2 is 127, even doing ratios that way, 72 word document pages = 98, 127 should equal 172 pages. Maybe it's adjusted lower because it was "higher" for the 2 months it's been out so there's an adjustment factor. 

Either way, what is infuriating is there is ZERO explanation for WHY one book was adjusted and the other wasn't. They didn't email me to say "The line spacing and blah blah blah in Book 2 resulted in an adjusted KENPC of XXX" Again, I don't really care because both books expire this month, are not renewing, and I haven't decided yet if the pen name will live on. LOL. It's just another reminder that no matter how much money they want me to think I might make (when I know the cannibalization now without a doubt), it's just unstable. Even if you behave, play within the rules, do everything you're supposed to, ONE change with no notice can make it all fall down. It's madness.


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

Doesn't the system still operate on one customer one payout like in KU1? IE: once someone borrows you book once, you don't get paid if they borrow it again.


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

Tonya said:


> OR....the zon figured out some authors are cheating the system and having readers read their book over and over....THUS, the lower pages read can result in higher pay for pages read.


Page reads only count the first time through.


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## PJ_Cherubino (Oct 23, 2015)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> How sure are we of anything? Everything I have is from other people, so it's anecdotal. I know people who used the loophole to bulk up their file size in Jutoh and saw massive page count losses this week. That is anecdotal. Most of the people I know using Vellum did not see big losses. That's also anecdotal.


Understood. You're saying you don't really know.


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> Either way, what is infuriating is there is ZERO explanation for WHY one book was adjusted and the other wasn't. They didn't email me to say "The line spacing and blah blah blah in Book 2 resulted in an adjusted KENPC of XXX"


This. Literally the only thing about it that bothers me is the absolute lack of transparency. They formula should be VERY SIMPLE and it should be KNOWN.

Then if someone's scamming, bring the hammer down on them. No more of this bringing the hammer down on everyone because of a few bad apples.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> I only have 2 titles. Both have enhanced typesetting. Only one was adjusted, both have IDENTICAL formatting in Word. One was 20,000 and there were no changes, 98 pages. The one that is 36,030 pages was 198 KENPC and is now 168. So the unchanged one is close to 200 words per page. The changed one was 181 words per page, now 214 if you're going by that.
> 
> But even if I look at the pages in word, book 1 is 72 8x11 pages, book 2 is 127, even doing ratios that way, 72 word document pages = 98, 127 should equal 172 pages. Maybe it's adjusted lower because it was "higher" for the 2 months it's been out so there's an adjustment factor.
> 
> Either way, what is infuriating is there is ZERO explanation for WHY one book was adjusted and the other wasn't. They didn't email me to say "The line spacing and blah blah blah in Book 2 resulted in an adjusted KENPC of XXX" Again, I don't really care because both books expire this month, are not renewing, and I haven't decided yet if the pen name will live on. LOL. It's just another reminder that no matter how much money they want me to think I might make (when I know the cannibalization now without a doubt), it's just unstable. Even if you behave, play within the rules, do everything you're supposed to, ONE change with no notice can make it all fall down. It's madness.


Would it really be possible for them to explain, for every one of the million or whatever it is Kindle books, why that particular book's KENPC changed up or down? I can't imagine how they'd do that. They ran them all through a new calculator, from what I understand. I assume that they didn't have a human or a human-programmed computer analyze each book for what the difference was & why, and then email the author with the explanation for each of his/her books. They just recalculated to make things more equitable (at least that's what they're saying). From the anecdotal evidence I've heard, they did make things more equitable. I'm sure it really sucks to have lost 20-25%, but assuming things ARE more equitable now, people who lost that much had GAINED 20-25% more page reads that other authors lost out on over the past 6 or 7 months.

I could be really upset about my 20% loss or whatever. Because that would be a lot of money. But I figured they'd adjust the page count thing (because it clearly wasn't equitable from everything I knew), and they did. I totally get that people don't like the uncertainty of knowing the payout and so forth. That seems like a great reason not to participate in the program, to me. And maybe it's good to have another reminder that it IS a program with a fair amount of uncertainty (and some black hats trying to run the table).


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

lilywhite said:


> Page reads only count the first time through.


Not if they put the same book into multiple boxed sets. That's what I've heard was happening. (I never know this stuff!)


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

Rosalind James said:


> Not if they put the same book into multiple boxed sets. That's what I've heard was happening. (I never know this stuff!)


Oh, Lord!

Well, I'd say "Why didn't I think of that?" ... but I know why. LOL


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## PJ_Cherubino (Oct 23, 2015)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> I only have 2 titles. Both have enhanced typesetting. Only one was adjusted, both have IDENTICAL formatting in Word. One was 20,000 and there were no changes, 98 pages. The one that is 36,030 pages was 198 KENPC and is now 168. So the unchanged one is close to 200 words per page. The changed one was 181 words per page, now 214 if you're going by that.
> 
> But even if I look at the pages in word, book 1 is 72 8x11 pages, book 2 is 127, even doing ratios that way, 72 word document pages = 98, 127 should equal 172 pages. Maybe it's adjusted lower because it was "higher" for the 2 months it's been out so there's an adjustment factor.
> 
> Either way, what is infuriating is there is ZERO explanation for WHY one book was adjusted and the other wasn't. They didn't email me to say "The line spacing and blah blah blah in Book 2 resulted in an adjusted KENPC of XXX" Again, I don't really care because both books expire this month, are not renewing, and I haven't decided yet if the pen name will live on. LOL. It's just another reminder that no matter how much money they want me to think I might make (when I know the cannibalization now without a doubt), it's just unstable. Even if you behave, play within the rules, do everything you're supposed to, ONE change with no notice can make it all fall down. It's madness.


This is more to the point I was trying to tease out in a previous post.

We have only a vague idea that formatting, in some way, has an impact on KENPC. We have a lot of corroborated reports that some programs somehow yield more or less KENPC.

But you have books produced the same way that show radical differences. Others have reported using consistent methods with similar content and getting much different results between products.

We have just enough information to base the next set of loose assumptions on. I'm not sure whether or not Amazon wants it that way. They definitely seem to have a tight lid on their algorithms. I've been poking around on the webernet and don't find many programmers talking about it the way that the folks at Google talk about some of their algorithms. I probably haven't found the right place to look.

It's a great mystery. Someone should write a book about it . . .

Anyway, more words is good words I 'spose.

Keep writing, all.

Good luck.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

lilywhite said:


> Oh, Lord!
> 
> Well, I'd say "Why didn't I think of that?" ... but I know why. LOL


Because you're an honest person, maybe?


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Rosalind James said:


> Well, I shared mine. They're all 200 words/Kindle page or close.


I have eight titles currently in KU. With the adjustments mine are now averaging 189 words per page. With a range of 180-197.

Before they were in the 130-140 word per page range. I'd never made any effort to maximize pages per title but I was .5 indent and double-spaced, uploaded from Word. After that thread about .3 vs. .5 indents I updated a lot of my titles and did see a page drop from that pre this change.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

lilywhite said:


> Page reads only count the first time through.


I think she meant that some authors were padding each book with all their titles, just putting the new one at the front to trigger additional money. So, in theory, if that one author releases eight books with different covers they would be adding page counts for all eight books with each title.


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## writemore (Feb 3, 2016)

Rosalind James said:


> Well, I shared mine. They're all 200 words/Kindle page or close.


I'm a hair above 200 words/kindle page. But that doesn't make me feel a whole lot better. Because there still seems to be a range here with the few people who have responded.

Anyway it is their program and they can run it however they like. I can stay and try to adjust to the changes or try to go wide when the time comes. That doesn't mean I have to like it.


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## PJ_Cherubino (Oct 23, 2015)

lilywhite said:


> This. Literally the only thing about it that bothers me is the absolute lack of transparency. They formula should be VERY SIMPLE and it should be KNOWN.
> 
> Then if someone's scamming, bring the hammer down on them. No more of this bringing the hammer down on everyone because of a few bad apples.


I feel the same way. Transparency is the best way to go most of the time.

I suspect that the algorithm can't be simple. People who code, generally don't like complexity. I think that if they could make it simple, they would. They probably wouldn't tell us about it either way.

I think you mentioned before that explaining the algorithm would set clear boundaries and reduce BS. That sounds plausible.

As it stands now, a feverish rate of trial and error in self-publishing exposes more holes in the algorithms than Zon coders can keep up with.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Amazon isn't transparent about anything. They don't report their sales. They don't share their numbers. They most especially don't explain their algorithms. If you publish with them via Amazon Publishing, you see another side of that. Amazon. Does. Not. Share. Information, other than on a "need to know" basis--even amongst themselves, from what I've seen.

That's one of those "it is what it is" things. They aren't transparent, and I doubt they ever will be.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

For KU novels formatted with InDesign, using the same template (my page counts increased by about 10 - 15%, from what I can remember):

82108 words/483 KENP = 170 words per page (86 chapters)
55220 words/304 KENP = 181.6 (37 chapters + 3 excerpt chapters)
52951 words/304 KENP = 174.2 words per page (53 chapter book)
52408 words/286 KENP = 183.2 (33 chapters) 
47618 words/271 KENP = 174 words per page (35 chapters + 2 excerpt chapters)
34769 words/175 KENP = 198.7 words per page (22 chapter book) (used to be 155 KENP = 224.3 words per page)
22344 words/118 KENP = 189.4 words per page (14 chapter book)

Nick


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

Rosalind James said:


> Well, I shared mine. They're all 200 words/Kindle page or close.


Here's mine, based on six books published.

NOW 
Average Words/Kindle Page: 183
Range: 178 to 190

BEFORE
Average Words/Kindle Page: 156
Range: 139 to 201

At least for me, the range was significantly higher under the old system. To me, this illustrates how the new system is more standardized. The old system, it appears, had a pretty big range, even when all the books were formatted and uploaded using the same programs.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

I've always formatted in Word, saved to filtered html, put it in a zip and uploaded. Its simple, and works, and KDP seem to prefer it that way, since they wont accept my .docx directly.

My word settings are set for a less than normal paragraph indent, and a smaller than normal line spacing, and paragraph spacing.

I have no idea how they removed 15-20% of my pages based on formatting considerations, since as far as I know, I was using less than normal anyway.

I could accept a few less for ignoring my back matter, and front matter, but as far as I know, they ignored my front matter already.

The thing that bothered me the most is, I've never used a program to make my kenpc bigger, I've never formatted to make it bigger, I've never done anything to make it bigger, AND, I deliberately used less than normal Word settings because I prefer a more tightly looking book.

So why are my books hit so hard? And others which look to be spread out a lot more than mine, are not? And books I know could be compacted by up to 80%, haven't been?

None of this makes any sense to me. I've been throwing up theories and having them shot down. End result, I'm as confused now as I was when the gut punch came in.

My only conclusion is those of us who got cut more than 5% were deliberately targeted. I have to wonder now if me making an all star in Dec, put me on the target this list. Yes I'm being paranoid, but its the only explanation which actually holds up.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

TimothyEllis said:


> I've always formatted in Word, saved to filtered html, put it in a zip and uploaded. Its simple, and works, and KDP seem to prefer it that way, since they wont accept my .docx directly.
> 
> My word settings are set for a less than normal paragraph indent, and a smaller than normal line spacing, and paragraph spacing.
> 
> ...


Why would you being an All-Star make you a target?


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

TimothyEllis said:


> I've always formatted in Word, saved to filtered html, put it in a zip and uploaded. Its simple, and works, and KDP seem to prefer it that way, since they wont accept my .docx directly.
> 
> My word settings are set for a less than normal paragraph indent, and a smaller than normal line spacing, and paragraph spacing.
> 
> ...


How many words do you have now per Kindle page? If it's around 200, you weren't deliberately targeted, other than that anybody who had a ratio substantially lower than that (I mean, more like 150-160 words/page) seems to have had a significant change.

People who were at 200 words/page all along seem to have stayed about the same. That's what I'm seeing. It seems like they tried to normalize this so people's words/page were relatively equal. That doesn't mean you did anything wrong. It means that there was an inequity (working in your favor for the past 7 months) that's been corrected, at least to a certain extent. Stinks for you, I get it--but then, it stinks for me that I was getting 20% less all this time! I'd add that up, but it's too depressing.

At least, I'm thinking that's what happened. From the actual evidence I've seen, that's my guess.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> And other people have done the exact same experiment and registered full reads. People were bragging about it left and right in some groups, saying they made as much as $100 on a single borrow through this scam. It's sad honest authors got swept up, it really is, but the onus of this is on the scammers because they forced Amazon to step in and take action.


At the beginning of KU2, one of the members of this board borrowed one of my least popular books, went to the end, and then closed it. The total page read showed up in my dashboard.

I've never tried to game the system. My books are formatted in Word, nothing special, and I haven't done anything to optimize my books for KU. As best I can figure, they have reduced my page counts by the back matter. In most of my books I have a chapter of the next book at the end. If they don't want to pay me for that, so be it. I can't figure out how they would determine that content using an automated program, though.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> Why would you being an All-Star make you a target?


It places you on a list of well performing authors. When you want to reduce your payouts, starting by reducing how much you pay these people seems to be an obvious place to start.



Rosalind James said:


> How many words do you have now per Kindle page?


On my first book, its gone from 180 to 207.

And seriously, I have no understanding of why it would have been 180 in the first place.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

TimothyEllis said:


> It places you on a list of well performing authors. When you want to reduce your payouts, starting by reducing how much you pay these people seems to be an obvious place to start.
> 
> On my first book, its gone from 180 to 207.
> 
> And seriously, I have no understanding of why it would have been 180 in the first place.


So, by that argument they would reduce all of the All-Stars, right?


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

Rosalind James said:


> People who were at 200 words/page all along seem to have stayed about the same. ..It seems like they tried to normalize this so people's words/page were relatively equal. ...It means that there was an inequity ...that's been corrected, at least to a certain extent.


I agree with this 100%. Even though I lost 20%, I don't feel targeted. For what it's worth, I've also been an All Star, but I doubt that had anything to do with it.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

TimothyEllis said:


> My only conclusion is those of us who got cut more than 5% were deliberately targeted. I have to wonder now if me making an all star in Dec, put me on the target this list. Yes I'm being paranoid, but its the only explanation which actually holds up.


I disprove this theory. A few of the titles I still have in Select haven't sold a copy in over a month and probably longer than that. They're just in because I'm too lazy to do anything with them. My best title is around a 100,000 ranking right now. Highest ranking was maybe 14K in the last month.


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## Gone 9/21/18 (Dec 11, 2008)

Rosalind James said:


> How many words do you have now per Kindle page? If it's around 200, you weren't deliberately targeted, other than that anybody who had a ratio substantially lower than that (I mean, more like 150-160 words/page) seems to have had a significant change.


This holds true for my novels. They range from 73,000 words to 138,000 words. Each one had a reduction of right about 22%, and now each one is at 201-02 words per KENPC.

I do wonder about the whole formatting thing. I just don't think anyone could have plainer formatting than I have. It's very clean html and then converted to mobi via MobiCreator. I have been looking for another way to format because I know Amazon no longer supports that method of formatting, and I bought Vellum but haven't used it yet. I also have Scrivener and have used it for quick and dirty formatting of mobis to send to beta readers, but had pretty much decided to use Vellum from here on out. I now plan to re-format one of the shorter older books with Vellum just to see if it makes a difference but don't know how soon I'll get around to it. I hope the Vellum doesn't make a negative difference because I'd like to use it.


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## Guest (Feb 4, 2016)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> So, by that argument they would reduce all of the All-Stars, right?


Don't go bringing logic into it! lol

I already asked how, if they are reducing author rank by the same amount as they cut KENPC, how do you explain that I lost 25% by my rank has gone up. Next theory is it's a conspiracy to hit all the All Stars so Amazon doesn't have to pay so much in bonuses.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Rosalind James said:


> If anybody wants to compare, I'm getting almost exactly 200 words per KENPC page across my various titles. So a 100,000-word book is 500 KENPC, and a 135,000-word book is 670 KENPC. 200 words per Kindle equalized page.


My books range from 60,450 to 92,000. Words per KENPage range from 195 to 207. My books lost about 13% across the board, so I was higher than that before. Ros, I'll buy you a drink or two to make up for the few extra bucks I made. 

If everyone is playing on an even ground, it makes it hard to complain.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Here's the thing:

Under KU 2.0 v.1.0, two authors with books of 100,000 words might have different KENPC due to formatting. Amazon claimed to have a way to normalize the books to make it fair, but it was obviously NOT since KENP was all over the place. 

For example, two of my books that I had in KU were almost the same length except for 10 pages.

Book 1 had 220 pages in print and KENPC of 486. At $0.0049, that means a full read would net me $2.38
Book 2 had 230 pages in print and KENPC of 365. At $0.0049, that means a full read would net me $1.79.

That's a difference of $0.59.

If my books were each read 100 times, I would earn $238.00 for Book 1 and $179.00 for Book 2 -- a difference of $59 dollars.

Doesn't seem fair but I assumed it was due to formatting issues. I sometimes uploaded Mobi files I formatted with Calibre. Sometimes, I uploaded a MS Word doc so that could account for the difference. It wasn't deliberate as those books were written two full years before they were in KU.

Consider if those two books belonged to two different authors. I could see how that could be a cause for concern. 

Amazon had to do something about the inconsistent KENP, not to mention the blatant scammers. 

Now, this doesn't mean that I'm all smiles and happy. I still fault them for being so secretive about everything. I think we should have been informed in a different way and should have been given more information so we understand how the payout works and how the KENPC is determined. 

But I'm not holding my breath that they will start treating indie authors like real partners any time soon.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

TimothyEllis said:


> It places you on a list of well performing authors. When you want to reduce your payouts, starting by reducing how much you pay these people seems to be an obvious place to start.
> 
> On my first book, its gone from 180 to 207.
> 
> And seriously, I have no understanding of why it would have been 180 in the first place.


180 to 207 isn't 20%. It is 15%. (27/180)
I'd be curious to see how your books average out once you divide all their page counts by the KENPC. Sure looks to me like people's books are coming out around 200.

Nobody's accusing you or suggesting that you deliberately set out to have a higher KENPC than some of us. Sure, there are some authors out there (we've probably all heard about them) who deliberately set out to increase their page counts by sometimes scammy means. Plenty of people, though, were just using different methods that produced different ratios. Amazon would appear to have tightened that up so people are treated more fairly.

And Amanda and I didn't have reductions, and we've both been All-Stars. She's a major heavy hitter. If they'd hit anybody hard to reduce payouts and bonuses, it would have been her. And they didn't. Didn't hit me, either, though I'm sadly whimpering in the rear.


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## Dom (Mar 15, 2014)

TimothyEllis said:


> I have no idea how they removed 15-20% of my pages based on formatting considerations, since as far as I know, I was using less than normal anyway.


Timothy, Word is extremely bloated. Any professional formatters would tell you as much. For example, if Amazon now stripped all html from the files, I could easily see you losing 10-20%, depending on how clean the output of whatever program you're using is. Word, in general, is NOT clean.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

I really dont understand all this formatting cr*p.

Why dont Amazon just set a page length to 200 words, and apply it to everything?

Why should formatting even matter?

Remove the front matter, remove the back matter, total words, divide by 200 = number of pages. Add a page for maps, and graphics which are part of the story. Ignore everything else, including page feeds. Put 1 word on a page or 500 words on a page, doesn't matter, you get the same number of kenpc pages.

Same thing applies to everyone. Its unambiguous.

Why all this variation from book to book?



Rosalind James said:


> 180 to 207 isn't 20%. It is 15%.


I wasn't using those numbers, and I originally said 15-20%.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

Same file: 62k words, NO formatting:

In MS Word on PC: 0.4MB
In Open Office saved as DOC (Word 2007 format): 0.8MB
In Pages for Mac: 0.1MB
In DOC Word 2007 format when saved by Pages: 0.3MB

Take from that what you may.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

TimothyEllis said:


> I really dont understand all this formatting cr*p.
> 
> Why dont Amazon just set a page length to 200 words, and apply it to everything?
> 
> ...


I've been told by other people that having them just divide by # of words would be too easy to game.

I don't know how, but then, I was surprised by the font changes and the putting-your-new-book-at-the-back and all the other garbage that I belatedly found out had been happening, so I'm sure folks are right. I suspect Amazon is trying to stay ahead of the gamers, and that's why they're so cagey with their algorithm (besides that they're always cagey with their algorithms). If people know how it's done, they'll game it. As we've seen.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Word count is too simplistic. A, the, if, on, etc. versus ludicrous -- four words versus 1. If you're paying on page count, number of words doesn't make sense. No matter what their algorithm is, it seems to now be fairly consistent.

What Zon should have done is issue a statement that said, "We have discovered that our algorithm for calculating KENP had a flaw. We have fixed that and books of equivalent length will now have roughly equivalent KENP." Simple, straight forward, and probably true. But Zon doesn't do a very good job of communicating.


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

Jim Johnson said:


> This. Plus, I'd encourage folks to look at KU bounties paid out as BONUSES, not reliable income to plan expenses on. It's not a day job, not a salaried position, not even a predictable royalty based on numbers of sales. From day one it's been clear that the KU payout would be variable based on Amazon's monthly pool of money, number of pages read, changes to the program, etc. So much of KU is not in an author's control that it is folly to look at it as reliable income. So consider adjusting your budget and plans accordingly.
> 
> What you can control is the number of books you have in KU. So write more good books, enroll them, or don't. But I despair for the folks who are tying life expenses to the highly unstable and unpredictable KU payouts.


This is how I've always felt about it. Unless you're a huge name who has already made enough money to retire, KU is a bonus. The ones devastated by the abrupt changes it's seen since it's launch are the ones who rely on the income. The problem is that borrows are often times higher than sales, so it's hard NOT to rely on it with the payout being the bulk of a writers income. Therefore, if you're a writer all in KU they've kind of gotcha by the jewels.


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

katrina46 said:


> This is how I've always felt about it. Unless you're a huge name who has already made enough money to retire, KU is a bonus. The ones devastated by the abrupt changes it's seen since it's launch are the ones who rely on the income. The problem is that borrows are often times higher than sales, so it's hard NOT to rely on it with the payout being the bulk of a writers income. Therefore, if you're a writer all in KU they've kind of gotcha by the jewels.


Well, counting on sales on any platform or medium isn't a good idea. I've only been publishing a little over 3 years, but I can tell you that, as somebody who sometimes goes 5 months without publishing, my income can vary by 300% from month to month if I have a major new release. When I was wide, it varied a lot more.

I'd say it behooves any author to set up a spending and saving plan and to be conservative. Trad or indie, it tends to be a variable deal for most. Add to that that the industry is changing and the job is getting more competitive all the time, and it's a scary business to hang your hat on.

I'm only doing it because I like it so darned much, and because I can't stand the idea of getting a real job again.


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## Monique (Jul 31, 2010)

brkingsolver said:


> Word count is too simplistic. A, the, if, on, etc. versus ludicrous -- four words versus 1. If you're paying on page count, number of words doesn't make sense.


I don't understand this logic. The number of words has made sense (mostly) for decades/centuries. After all, it's not the size of the word that matters, but what you do with it.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Monique said:


> After all, it's not the size of the word that matters, but what you do with it.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

katrina46 said:


> Unless you're a huge name who has already made enough money to retire, KU is a bonus. The ones devastated by the abrupt changes it's seen since it's launch are the ones who rely on the income. The problem is that borrows are often times higher than sales, so it's hard NOT to rely on it with the payout being the bulk of a writers income. Therefore, if you're a writer all in KU they've kind of gotcha by the jewels.


I'm still kinda new to this.

My books began to sell as Ku2 came in last July. I never really knew KU 1, or what it was like before.

KU is 2/3 of my income, and has been since I started making an income. I dont have any other way of looking at it, because I dont have any other perspective to view it from.

The scarey part is I'm making enough that my crutch was removed. This is only the second time in 15 years I actually have a taxable income. And regardless, KU is 2/3 of that income, and cannot be removed as a 'bonus'.

Part of why this has affected me so badly, is the fact I finally have something, and dont like an entity taking part of it away when I didn't do anything to warrant it. I'm also so new to all this, that being gutpunched hasnt yet become normal, as it seems it has for those of you who have been around for years.

KU isn't a bonus, its the other half of the equation. Those who read the same book over and over, buy. Those who read once, read through KU, when they used to buy. KU has simply changed the way people obtain their reading matter, and the way they pay for it. There is no bonus.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

TimothyEllis said:


> I'm still kinda new to this.
> 
> My books began to sell as Ku2 came in last July. I never really knew KU 1, or what it was like before.
> 
> ...


It's extremely difficult. However, this is not the last time it's going to happen. It always happens. I think looking at it as Amazon "taking something away" is the wrong way to go. They always said this was only the first version of KENPC calculations, and they will further tweak it going forward. You're looking at it as Amazon taking 20 percent of your income when there's no way of knowing how the payouts will shake out. On one hand you could look at it as you got extra money for seven months. On the other you just have to wait and see what happens. We have no way of knowing how things are going to shift. That's the way this works, especially if you're exclusive. I'm exclusive, too. The problem with counting on something like borrows money as static is that it's never going to remain static for long stretches of time. Bank as much as you can, but it's not always going to stay the same way. It's not a grand conspiracy. You weren't targeted. Amazon instituted a new algorithm and the computers went through all the books, not people. Amazon is not targeting All-Stars because they're still going to pay out the same in bonuses. They're still going to pay out whatever they announce for the global fund, which I believe is $12 million for February. Quite frankly, this new calculation seems more stable. It still sucks for you. I get that. Until we see actual numbers, though, you can't make claims about income. We will see what happens on March 15th.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

TimothyEllis said:


> I'm still kinda new to this.
> 
> My books began to sell as Ku2 came in last July. I never really knew KU 1, or what it was like before.
> 
> ...


If this is how you feel, and if I were you, I would take that absolute quickest steps to reduce that reliability on KU, because what goes up WILL come down, usually through no fault of your own at the most inopportune moment.

Amazon does not owe anyone a living. It's really up to the writer to play two cards: 1. the card of security and alternate income. A different series, going wide, trying a publisher, writing for games, whatever, 2. the card of opportunity. Dip your toes in all little tidbits and programs that retailers offer to see if you can goose some sales.

Find a balance between those two. Work on your mailing list to reduce reliance on one program offered by one retailer. Don't let Amazon's algorithm magic be the only form of advertising that gets you new eyes on your work.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> Until we see actual numbers, though, you can't make claims about income. We will see what happens on March 15th.


Fair comment.

I'm taking it all in. I'm still learning. I'm still more or less in lean mean survival machine mode, so banking is the priority.


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## Wired (Jan 10, 2014)

TimothyEllis said:


> I've always formatted in Word, saved to filtered html, put it in a zip and uploaded. Its simple, and works, and KDP seem to prefer it that way, since they wont accept my .docx directly.


That's odd. I always upload my .docx directly, with no fuss and no kickback.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Wired said:


> That's odd. I always upload my .docx directly, with no fuss and no kickback.


Very odd. Each time I tried, it was rejected.

The way I do it now was the way suggested in the book I downloaded originally on how to do a Kindle. And it works without any problems.


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Adding my own data points for information:

Book 1: 220K words - was 1215 KENPC, now 1081 (words per page 204)
Book 2: 151K words - was 815, now 725 (wpp 20
Book 3: 157K words - was 871, now 765 (wpp 205)
Book 4: 164K words - was 925, now 825 (wpp 199)
Book 5: 137K words - was 772, now 684 (wpp 200)

All 5 books have dropped 10-12% in KENPC. Nothing fancy in the formatting department - I compiled from Scrivener to Word, then uploaded the resulting docx file. I don't even know what enhanced typesetting is!

Personally, I see this as a GOOD thing. There were clear inequities in the calculations before, so that different formatting methods and software gave different outcomes, and I don't blame anyone for trying to optimise their payout by tinkering. This new calculation seems to have addressed those problems. That's got to be an improvement.

As to whether the drop in KENPC equates to a drop in income, we won't know for sure until the 15th of March, but it seems to me that most people's numbers have dropped or stayed about the same. If that is so across the board, then the overall number of pages read will also drop, which means the per page payout will increase.


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

TimothyEllis said:


> I'm still kinda new to this.
> 
> My books began to sell as Ku2 came in last July. I never really knew KU 1, or what it was like before.
> 
> ...


I get where you're coming from, but KU isn't reliable. Just ask short erotica writers. Some gave up last June. Some starting writing longer, some went wide. If KU is 2/3 of your income, you'll probably have to get ready to adapt and roll with the punches. Sorry, but that's just how it is. It's always been that way. Free doesn't work the way it use to, either. 99 cents won't always get you a bestseller overnight like it did. Things always change. Writing is feast or famine and I know very few writers who haven't had bad months. There's still plenty of money to be made, don't get me wrong, but how you make it this month might not be how you make it six months from now.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Somebody please explain why my Author ranks are dropping like a stone, as are my KU reads. 

Seriously, in 2 weeks I expect to not be getting any reads at all.

My sales went up today in quite a nice spike, my reads dropped like a stone, and my ranks went with the reads, as if sales no longer mattered to the rankings.

WTF?   

Reads have gone like this...
Feb 1 was 18% down on Jan 31, which was holding steady for the previous 7 days.
Feb 2 was up 3%.
Feb 3 was down 25%.

My sales figures are much to volatile to do the same comparison on, but they are higher than the same time of the week last week, and today was significantly better than the previous 2 days. 

At this rate, I wont need to think about getting out of KU, it will effectively happen on its own.

Has anyone considered that the rankings method has been changed? And now pages read does play a part?

I'm sorry for kicking a dead cow, but none of this makes any sense.


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## 75845 (Jan 1, 1970)

TimothyEllis said:


> Somebody please explain why my Author ranks are dropping like a stone, as are my KU reads.


You write science fiction. It may be as simple as a Book Bub advertised reduction of The Martian to £1.99. Trade publishers have learnt from indies how to do price promotion to gain ranking boosts. You reads might rebound once readers finish with Weir.


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## 75845 (Jan 1, 1970)

If people reusing the same text is a problem Amazon's simplest solution would be to extend the ban on more than 10% of a Select text appearing outside Amazon to include more than 10% appearing in a second file in Amazon.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Mercia McMahon said:


> You write science fiction. It may be as simple as a Book Bub advertised reduction of The Martian to £1.99. Trade publishers have learnt from indies how to do price promotion to gain ranking boosts. You reads might rebound once readers finish with Weir.


I get the scifi Bookbub emails, and haven't seen anything I recognize as top of the list.

Its a good theory though.


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## RinG (Mar 12, 2013)

It is possible that Amazon has done an algorithm change at the same time as the KENPC changes. They do them reasonably regularly. Things even out after a while.

My reads were down for a couple of days, but they seem to be picking up again a little now, but sales are down. There's a lot of general variation, that makes it hard to predict. Being an author is an unpredictable business, and it really helps to be able to roll with the punches and adjust on the fly.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Monique said:


> I don't understand this logic. The number of words has made sense (mostly) for decades/centuries. After all, it's not the size of the word that matters, but what you do with it.


What I'm saying is that Zon is paying for reads on a per-page basis, not a per-word basis. A MG book is probably going to have more words per page due to using shorter words than a discourse on economics. You can't use number of words to exactly calculate how many pages there are in a book.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

brkingsolver said:


> What I'm saying is that Zon is paying for reads on a per-page basis, not a per-word basis. A MG book is probably going to have more words per page due to using shorter words than a discourse on economics. You can't use number of words to exactly calculate how many pages there are in a book.


And maybe that is what is wrong with their whole system.

They should be detecting words read, and paying by the word.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

TimothyEllis said:


> And maybe that is what is wrong with their whole system.
> 
> They should be detecting words read, and paying by the word.


I strongly disagree. The opportunities for gaming the system under that scenario make my head spin.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

brkingsolver said:


> I strongly disagree. The opportunities for gaming the system under that scenario make my head spin.


I cant see any difference myself. Anything one could do to game a word read system is probably already being done for pages. The scale of the "game" would be the same for either.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

> How are we sure that the document coding itself has an impact on KENP algorithms?


Here's some articles from the authors of Vellum. They not only document how formatting affected KENPC counts, but they altered the software to reduce the penalty and in some cases documented how they could have increased KENPC more, but did not do so because it would create poorly typeset books and negatively affect the reader experience.

http://blog.180g.co/2015/07/kindle-unlimited-vellum-1-2-5/
http://blog.180g.co/2015/07/more-details-about-vellum-and-kenpc/
http://blog.180g.co/2015/10/even-more-details-about-kenpc/

I'm afraid I'm missing how word count could be manipulated more easily than the mysterious "page" algorithm. It's obvious word count is the way to go. It's fair and predictable.


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## 75845 (Jan 1, 1970)

TimothyEllis said:


> I cant see any difference myself. Anything one could do to game a word read system is probably already being done for pages. The scale of the "game" would be the same for either.


"I can not see any difference my self. Any thing one could do to game a word read sytem is probably all ready being done for pages. That scale of the game would be the same for either."

There gamed it for you. That is just altering your words, if Amazon paid per word we would have a flood of circumlocutions as why use one word when you can be paid for several components of a sentence separated by spaces and or punctuation.


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## Elizabeth Ann West (Jul 11, 2011)

Just a quick side note, authors shouldn't think of KU payouts as just bonuses. There is a very REAL cannibalization of sales, assuming you had sales BEFORE putting your books into KU. Depending on where you are in your career, the cannibalization can be as high as 50%. I think to look at ANY kind of payment as "bonus" or "nice to have" is akin to saying you are perfectly okay with working for free. Now, if your price is very low (99 cents to $2.99) the cannibalization is less of a financial hit. But take a glance at Amazon imprints, across the board the prices have increased. Another way to make up the decrease in borrow payouts is to increase your price $1 or $2 so that the increased visibility you are paying in many ways to have actually gives you a profit.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> I think to look at ANY kind of payment as "bonus" or "nice to have" is akin to saying you are perfectly okay with working for free.


Aren't we all technically working for free anyway? There's no guarantee of sales for any indie. We don't get advances. Every title we release is on spec.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Mercia McMahon said:


> "I can not see any difference my self. Any thing one could do to game a word read sytem is probably all ready being done for pages. That scale of the game would be the same for either."
> 
> There gamed it for you. That is just altering your words, if Amazon paid per word we would have a flood of circumlocutions as why use one word when you can be paid for several components of a sentence separated by spaces and or punctuation.


Part of my editing process is removing all of those which I miss. I use that sort of thing in my non-fiction, but not in my SO.

To leave the double words in, is just bad editing. I'm not going that route just to get an extra couple of pages.



Elizabeth Ann West said:


> Just a quick side note, authors shouldn't think of KU payouts as just bonuses. There is a very REAL cannibalization of sales, assuming you had sales BEFORE putting your books into KU. Depending on where you are in your career, the cannibalization can be as high as 50%. I think to look at ANY kind of payment as "bonus" or "nice to have" is akin to saying you are perfectly okay with working for free. Now, if your price is very low (99 cents to $2.99) the cannibalization is less of a financial hit. But take a glance at Amazon imprints, across the board the prices have increased. Another way to make up the decrease in borrow payouts is to increase your price $1 or $2 so that the increased visibility you are paying in many ways to have actually gives you a profit.


Yes.

KU changed the playing field, and took more than half the sales into the pay per page end.


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## Elizabeth Ann West (Jul 11, 2011)

Jim Johnson said:


> Aren't we all technically working for free anyway? There's no guarantee of sales for any indie. We don't get advances. Every title we release is on spec.


No. We are not all working for free.  anything you write can be put on a blog with Adsense or advertising. On spec is not the same as free. On speculation means you have a reasonable expectation of making some money on the endeavor. That is not same as "we should be just grateful anytime Amazon pays us something like its a bonus on a borrow." I know it's hard to have confidence or belief that you SHOULD be paid for your work, but that belief is the first step to securing a livelihood.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> No. We are not all working for free.  anything you write can be put on a blog with Adsense or advertising. On spec is not the same as free. On speculation means you have a reasonable expectation of making some money on the endeavor. That is not same as "we should be just grateful anytime Amazon pays us something like its a bonus on a borrow." I know it's hard to have confidence or belief that you SHOULD be paid for your work, but that belief is the first step to securing a livelihood.


Law of attraction.


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

Rosalind James said:


> I'm only doing it because I like it so darned much, and because I can't stand the idea of getting a real job again.


This. LOL. Lord save me from ever having to go back to a crummy office job, Amen.


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

TimothyEllis said:


> To leave the double words in, is just bad editing. I'm not going that route just to get an extra couple of pages.


But plenty would. And when the hammer eventually came down on them, it would come down on all of us, because that's how Amazon rolls.


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## Rick Gualtieri (Oct 31, 2011)

lilywhite said:


> But plenty would. And when the hammer eventually came down on them, it would come down on all of us, because that's how Amazon rolls.


Hopefully, though, they'd get the added bonus of those new Amazon format/typo warnings.


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

Rick Gualtieri said:


> Hopefully, though, they'd get the added bonus of those new Amazon format/typo warnings.


Don't get me started! LOL!


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> I know it's hard to have confidence or belief that you SHOULD be paid for your work, but that belief is the first step to securing a livelihood.


It's not really a question of confidence, though. It's choices and living with those choices and being aware of what those choices cost. A writer choosing to enroll in KU might believe they should be paid for their work, but the reality of the program is that it's an unpredictable and unreliable stream of income (unless you've cross some critical mass balance point like Amanda or Bella Forrest, I guess). So as long as the writer is aware of that, they can hopefully plan accordingly.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

TimothyEllis said:


> Somebody please explain why my Author ranks are dropping like a stone, as are my KU reads.
> 
> Seriously, in 2 weeks I expect to not be getting any reads at all.
> 
> ...


You are not operating in a vacuum. Your author rank is based on what everyone else's author rank is doing. Reads have nothing to do with it. Borrows do. Author rank seems to lag a good eight hours or so behind purchases being reported on my dashboard (as far as I can tell) and page reads are reported willy nilly when people sync their devices. I understand you're panicking, but I have seen nothing to indicate pages read changes rank and I think we would've heard something. Have a drink and chill or something. The panicking is making things worse for you.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> Just a quick side note, authors shouldn't think of KU payouts as just bonuses. There is a very REAL cannibalization of sales, assuming you had sales BEFORE putting your books into KU. Depending on where you are in your career, the cannibalization can be as high as 50%. I think to look at ANY kind of payment as "bonus" or "nice to have" is akin to saying you are perfectly okay with working for free. Now, if your price is very low (99 cents to $2.99) the cannibalization is less of a financial hit. But take a glance at Amazon imprints, across the board the prices have increased. Another way to make up the decrease in borrow payouts is to increase your price $1 or $2 so that the increased visibility you are paying in many ways to have actually gives you a profit.


Just for the record, I think everyone has different experiences with KU. I know several authors who did experiments by moving two series into KU from wide and neither saw cannibalization. In fact they reported almost static sales with borrows on top of it. So, yeah, some people see it. Others don't. Not everyone sees it, though, so you can't use blanket statements. My sales are actually up in KU on top of the borrows, too. The rise in rank associated with KU allows more people to see your work and record more sales in some instances. It's not "one size fits all."


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

lilywhite said:


> But plenty would. And when the hammer eventually came down on them, it would come down on all of us, because that's how Amazon rolls.


Plenty do now. Its one of my chief gripes reading other peoples novels.

It was the hardest thing I had to learn to do - write without the double words. But I had to learn and edit them out, because that's how people speak in the context of my novels. In my first few books, that editing alone reduced the word count by thousands. But it was necessary.

Writing in double words is much easier than not. imo.



Jim Johnson said:


> It's not really a question of confidence, though. It's choices and living with those choices and being aware of what those choices cost. A writer choosing to enroll in KU might believe they should be paid for their work, but the reality of the program is that it's an unpredictable and unreliable stream of income (unless you've cross some critical mass balance point like Amanda or Bella Forrest, I guess). So as long as the writer is aware of that, they can hopefully plan accordingly.


I started in KU2 because it was new, and I had no idea if it was any good or not. Book 3 took off in sales, and slowly KU followed. When I didn't put book 4 into KU on release, I got a 1 star review that's still there, solely complaining about it not being in KU. By that time, KU was paying out, and I decided to go that route. But it was the review that spurred me in fully. It was also perfectly obvious around that time that I'd been shooting myself in the foot by not having 4 in KU.

But the way KU is performing for me at the moment, makes me seriously wonder if that dog has stopped hunting.



Amanda M. Lee said:


> You are not operating in a vacuum. Your author rank is based on what everyone else's author rank is doing. Reads have nothing to do with it. Borrows do. Author rank seems to lag a good eight hours or so behind purchases being reported on my dashboard (as far as I can tell) and page reads are reported willy nilly when people sync their devices. I understand you're panicking, but I have seen nothing to indicate pages read changes rank and I think we would've heard something. Have a drink and chill or something. The panicking is making things worse for you.


I'm not panicking. If I ever panic, I guarantee you will know it. 

The one thing I've always been accused of is over-thinking things. I've never liked not understanding what was going on, and I learn from understanding, not from being told. And having this linked to income, isn't doing me any good. I'm not used to having income, so it feels like I have more to lose than I do. And as I said earlier, I lost my crutch not long ago. So feeling very insecure.


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## Rick Gualtieri (Oct 31, 2011)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> Just for the record, I think everyone has different experiences with KU. I know several authors who did experiments by moving two series into KU from wide and neither saw cannibalization. In fact they reported almost static sales with borrows on top of it. So, yeah, some people see it. Others don't. Not everyone sees it, though, so you can't use blanket statements. My sales are actually up in KU on top of the borrows, too. The rise in rank associated with KU allows more people to see your work and record more sales in some instances. It's not "one size fits all."


Agreed very much with this and likewise. Heck, amusingly enough, one of my Facebook ads specifically worded for KU readers ended up generating a lot more sales for me than reads.

Also, as someone who's been in ecommerce for 2 decades the concept of cannibalization is always a tricky one and something that tends to terrify people (probably because it has that name instead of something nice and fluffy) and lead to a lot of assumptions. Personally, I look at KU no differently than I look at paperbacks and audio. I don't fret that it's cannibalizing my sales elsewhere. Instead, it's simply another option for me to offer customers to bring them into my funnel.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

> There gamed it for you. That is just altering your words, if Amazon paid per word we would have a flood of circumlocutions as why use one word when you can be paid for several components of a sentence separated by spaces and or punctuation.


That's more work than these people are interested in putting in.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> Just for the record, I think everyone has different experiences with KU. I know several authors who did experiments by moving two series into KU from wide and neither saw cannibalization. In fact they reported almost static sales with borrows on top of it. So, yeah, some people see it. Others don't. Not everyone sees it, though, so you can't use blanket statements. My sales are actually up in KU on top of the borrows, too. The rise in rank associated with KU allows more people to see your work and record more sales in some instances. It's not "one size fits all."


When I switched back and forth with experimentation (one book/series at a time), I saw cannibalization of about half my sales with KU. However, I also saw a huge increase in borrows, and I came out well ahead. For me, the difference between KU and wide is tens of thousands of dollars per month, so my choice is pretty easy until the next major thing happens.

For me, KU isn't really speculation. I have 3+ years of data that says that Select has worked well for me in comparison with being wide. I also write for Amazon Publishing, so the cross-promo provided by that plays into my decision (one big reason I decided to write for them in the first place). But people's experiences are very different, even within the same genre and subgenre. I recommend people try for themselves. Put a new series or an old series wide and see. But be prepared to up your marketing game. By a lot. I spent $1,000/month, and that wasn't nearly enough. I've had people tell me that they were spending $6-9K/month on Facebook ads in order to get "over the hump" on the other vendors. That opened my eyes. I had permafrees and merchandising support from iBooks and Kobo, and I still wasn't making a dent in the money I was giving up on Amazon, except for the first month when I did great. (Because of big ads on a free book.)

I would say, realistically, to expect that it'll take you a year or more to gain traction wide, and that you'd better be spending a fair amount of your earnings on marketing during that time.

I realize change is scary. But thinking about how Amazon "should" calculate things? I'm not going to do that. There's absolutely no point. Sometimes things roll my way. Sometimes (as with KU1 and all the benefit going to short stuff) they don't. I have to adapt and roll with it and up my own game. That's where I'm focusing.

Good luck to all.


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## Gone 9/21/18 (Dec 11, 2008)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> There is a very REAL cannibalization of sales, assuming you had sales BEFORE putting your books into KU.


I'm finding this very true. Didn't see much cannibalization under KU1, but I only tried 2 books there. I now have all but one of my standalones in KU. Sales are way down. The one not in KU has the highest sales. However, when I do the math of how much that one brings in with it's higher sales vs. how much the others bring in with sales + KU, the KU books win, and my monthly income is higher than I would have expected on sales alone. The other plus for KU is I'm getting a lot more mailing list subscriptions than I did, and I believe these are new readers.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> There is a very REAL cannibalization of sales, assuming you had sales BEFORE putting your books into KU.


This is a generalization based on your personal experience. I was wide for 3 years. My total sales have doubled since enrolling in KU and remain steady at that rate. In addition, I'm adding 120% of that revenue in page reads. Everyone is different.


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

I also get borrows on top of sales. Putting my older books into KU increased actual sales and then the borrows came on top of those. I noticed zero cannibalization.


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## 75814 (Mar 12, 2014)

brkingsolver said:


> This is a generalization based on your personal experience. I was wide for 3 years. My total sales have doubled since enrolling in KU and remain steady at that rate. In addition, I'm adding 120% of that revenue in page reads. Everyone is different.


I've also seen an increase in sales and overall revenue since going all in with KU.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Revenue is building since I went all in with KU2. It is very gratifying to see books that have not been selling being read. This is especially true for my older books.

I love looking at the month to date sales and seeing anywhere from 20 to 25 different books both selling and being read. That's about half the books that I have in KU you right now.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> Just a quick side note, authors shouldn't think of KU payouts as just bonuses. There is a very REAL cannibalization of sales, assuming you had sales BEFORE putting your books into KU. Depending on where you are in your career, the cannibalization can be as high as 50%. I think to look at ANY kind of payment as "bonus" or "nice to have" is akin to saying you are perfectly okay with working for free. Now, if your price is very low (99 cents to $2.99) the cannibalization is less of a financial hit. But take a glance at Amazon imprints, across the board the prices have increased. Another way to make up the decrease in borrow payouts is to increase your price $1 or $2 so that the increased visibility you are paying in many ways to have actually gives you a profit.


Note to folks: Do not do this willy-nilly. Price for your genre. Romance, for example, in most circumstances, is a very hard sell over $4.99. Amazon imprints haven't increased across the board. For SOME new releases, they're testing higher prices. I have two books right now at $3.99 (which seems low to me), and one book at $5.99 (which seems high to me). I think the sweet spot in romance right now is $3.99 (for lesser-known authors, shorter books, sweet romance, etc.--this is where Montlake is pricing that stuff) to $4.99. $5.99 crosses the $5 barrier and is a hard sell.

It also depends how long you write. If you write 20,000-word books, KU isn't that good a bet. If you write 100-135,000-word books, a KU borrow is worth--well, 5-7 times more than that. I sell my books at $4.99 (the max my own market will bear), and my latest book gets almost as much for a borrow as a sale.


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## new_writer (Feb 2, 2016)

Rosalind James said:


> Note to folks: Do not do this willy-nilly. *Price for your genre.* Romance, for example, in most circumstances, is a very hard sell over $4.99. Amazon imprints haven't increased across the board. For SOME new releases, they're testing higher prices. I have two books right now at $3.99 (which seems low to me), and one book at $5.99 (which seems high to me). I think the sweet spot in romance right now is $3.99 (for lesser-known authors, shorter books, sweet romance, etc.--this is where Montlake is pricing that stuff) to $4.99. $5.99 crosses the $5 barrier and is a hard sell.
> 
> It also depends how long you write. If you write 20,000-word books, KU isn't that good a bet. If you write 100-135,000-word books, a KU borrow is worth--well, 5-7 times more than that. I sell my books at $4.99 (the max my own market will bear), and my latest book gets almost as much for a borrow as a sale.


Exactly.

The author you quoted writes in, from what I can tell, almost exclusively in Jane Austen fan fiction. That's a VERY SPECIFIC niche if I've ever heard one and what works there isn't going to work in bigger genres. Though I'm not sure if the author truly understands that.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

I figured my own borrows at .0043 for January (which is a total estimate of course, but January has typically been the highest borrows but lowest payout of the year). Using that measure, most of my titles would earn $2.15-3.00 for a borrow. I earn about $3.40 for a purchase on those books. $2.15 isn't ideal, but it ain't chopped liver, especially since I had a somewhat astonishing number of borrows for January and also earned a lot on sales and my other ventures, all of which were pushed by those borrows and the visibility they gave me.

I've known other authors who write really well and market much better than I do, but, for whatever reason, haven't found much success with Select and KU. It's all so very YMMV. Really--try different ways and see what works best for you. It's so tempting to ask other people, "what happened when you went wide?" or, "What happened when you put your books into Select?" But their answers won't inform you that much.


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## Elizabeth Ann West (Jul 11, 2011)

Right. Because Amazon imprints increasing prices across the board, EVEN in romance with their Montlake titles, is a silly observation. You know, the people with all the data we DON'T have.

But explain to me this, if you're in KU for the increased visibility that comes from ghost borrows, why aren't you leveraging that advantage with a higher price point? Because Amazon is. 

And I am not just someone who writes in one niche. My prices are still high even for my sub-genre. I haven't put a book out in over six months due to personal issues, still put 4 figures every single month into my family's checking account. I am a low mid-lister, not someone punching a lottery ticket amount royalty check every month. 

There is a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy in the indie world. I know that. Right now there are two versions, either you believe KU will work for you or you believe it won't.  My self-fulfilling prophecy is that wide will work for me because I see advantages to that system over the alternatives. Authors have to choose for themselves what their self-fulfilling prophecy will be by beginning with what it is they want for themselves. 

I've been around since 2010 watching many an author in many a genre. There are far more who do everything right and still don't get the lottery ticket level. A few get it and lose it. Even fewer than that get it and keep it. 

And I don't think KU authors lack confidence, I think getting into the mindset of "this" is bonus money, whatever "this" is, is dangerous for a working writer. It's how you wake up one day and realize you weren't taken advantage of, you let people take advantage of you. And that day isn't very fun. I used KU for the first 6 months it was out, I don't feel taken advantage of by the program. I am not speaking about personal experience from that, I left KU when it was clear to me it wasn't working the I anticipated at all. I've been selling my writing since 2007, almost exclusive digitally even before KDP existed. I STILL get a little $10 payment every spring on an article I wrote in 10 minutes back in 2008.  I think I have more than earned the experience to say "Be careful of telling yourself this is just bonus," because when you do that, you start rationalizing a whole lot more because as a freelancer/sole proprietor/indie, it's far, far easier to worry more about losing the low-paying gig because it's at least something, instead of pursuing other opportunities. It's just the nature of the work.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Wrote a long post but deleted it. Amazon Publishing isn't raising prices across the board. They're experimenting with some books from good-selling authors. It isn't always going well, but kudos to them for experimenting.


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## tomwritesabit (Jan 16, 2016)

I posted this on another forum, but it applies here as well:

I look at the KU reads as a separate market, just like another country. By making it available there, I am reaching an audience, that in all likelihood, wouldn't have bought my books on the regular sales channels, as they are a different kind of reader. Sure, I make a little bit less than a book selling for 3.99 on the page reads of an entire novel, but it's like selling any product. Prices vary depending on the venue for many things. A head of lettuce at Wal-Mart probably cost less than one at Kroeger, unless it's on sale. It's the bottom line that counts. Of course, your mileage may vary, but as long as the margins are working out, it's viable.


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## 75814 (Mar 12, 2014)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> But explain to me this, if you're in KU for the increased visibility that comes from ghost borrows, why aren't you leveraging that advantage with a higher price point? Because Amazon is.


Because I price according to my genre. In the genres I write in, most books are priced between $2.99-$4.99. My novellas are priced at $2.99, my season compilations at $4.99, individual serial episodes launch at $0.99 and then go up to $1.99, and I have two stand-alone novels--one priced at $3.99, the other at $4.99.

Higher prices work for you and hey, more power to you. But just because it works in your genre doesn't mean it will work in every genre.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Pricing is not about what Amazon is doing. It's about what everyone else in the genre is doing. Of the top 20 books in cozies right now, ten of them are .99 (including my new release witch short). The rest are essentially $2.99 and $3.99 (including my new full book in a series). The most expensive title is $7.99 by a trade publisher (and is fading fast). And the one Thomas & Mercer book? It's $2, which doesn't sound like Amazon is leveraging it "across the board" for higher prices.
If you want to price higher, that's great for you. Go ahead. I prefer moving a ton of books for a buck less a book and cultivating more fans. Not every genre supports higher prices. In my genre, Jana DeLeon can launch a $5.99 new release and make it stick. I am not Jana DeLeon, though. I can launch a new series st $3.99 and make it stick, but I go with the market and what I can make in it because I prefer making money. Not every genre can support high price points.


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## Saul Tanpepper (Feb 16, 2012)

P.J. wins the internet.


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## doolittle03 (Feb 13, 2015)

Bingo. I swear PJ Post, you nail it every time. But I have to say, thank you EAW and Rosalind for your candid insights. You both had such helpful generous posts in this one thread. Seriously, everyone lurking should be taking notes. 

Here's my take: I'm 56, I have a bit of disposable income, I've been reading for 50 years so it's really hard to please me as a reader. I read fringe writers who don't quite fit in (or sell) but have strong literary voices or points of view. They can price high because people like me will pay. I don't spend money on clothes or crap anymore. We spend money on good food and good books. I like my TV crappy but my literature has to be smart. And not surprisingly, I'm rarely impressed by the Big 5 offerings. I've decided I need to fish in indie waters and I'll pay a higher sticker price to get what I want. 

All to say, that's why PJ Post nailed it. Books are art and book readers are unpredictable.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

Here's a 'chaos theory' example I stumbled upon while chatting with authors on another forum. Check out this successful series and their covers.

Not quite what I would have expected. That cover isn't like a lot of others in the subgenre.


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## Al Scott (Dec 22, 2015)

Jim Johnson said:


> I formatted my books in Scrivener and it looks like they got the modest KENP hit. I'm not worried about the rejiggering--I just want to figure out how to get more KU readers.


I think that is the secret...no. of pages matter very little if no readers pick our books up


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

What does "writing double words" mean? #latetotheparty


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Saul Tanpepper said:


> P.J. wins the internet.


Absolutely


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

GrandFenwick said:


> What does "writing double words" mean? #latetotheparty


You take every thing that is a combined word and split it up. No contractions, no any thing like that. Car pool is two words. Brother in law is not hyphenated. In stead of using conventional spellings, you drive your readers crazy.


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

That's what it sounded like it meant, but it's such a crazy thing to do I thought it had to be something else!

Thanks. Wow.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

GrandFenwick said:


> That's what it sounded like it meant, but it's such a crazy thing to do I thought it had to be something else!
> 
> Thanks. Wow.


BTW, welcome. I read your dad's books in middle school. I'm please that you've republished them.


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

Aw thanks for saying. It turns out that trad published authors (even successful ones) have problems getting book deals, marketing support -- let alone attention from their agents -- just like any other struggling author.  So we took a cue from the indie world and now we not only get a bigger cut we don't have to pay the additional 10%


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## PJ_Cherubino (Oct 23, 2015)

P.J. Post said:


> At the risk of looking silly discussing sales with someone as successful as you...
> 
> Sort of. It's also about fungibility and price elasticity vis a vis any given author or work. As you noted, Jana DeLeon can demand a higher launch price. I don't think the "art" market (books are art) is nearly as definable as business folks would like to think.
> 
> ...


Sharp and insightful. I hope P. J. Post is writing on this professionally or bloggily somewhere.


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## IreneP (Jun 19, 2012)

P.J. Post said:


> ... because every single book is a monopoly market comprised of exactly one product, but still influenced by all of the adjacent pop culture and entertainment markets.


Oh. God. This.

Fer reelz.


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

As a update thing on a earlier post where I am talking about those scam books that put all those links in the front to make readers get to the back of the book in an instant? Well, the romance market has just been flooded with pages and pages of these scam books. I am still only looking at one day, feb 4th and I am paging through pages after pages of that. 100's it seems. Packs of 127 "books", single gooks with file sizes so large and page counts up on the 800's and above. All using some sort of tempt spiel, or several to get folks to click those links that go to the end of the thing. Maximizing I guess up to the 3000 KENPC. 

Its like a total scam assault on the romance category. No clue if its also in other genres. 

So they are still doing it, even more so now.


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

Atunah said:


> So they are still doing it, even more so now.


This is so frustrating. Not because there's any temptation to do the same--nothing could be less appealing to me--but because with every page FLOODED with scams, how does one even get any visibility?


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

lilywhite said:


> This is so frustrating. Not because there's any temptation to do the same--nothing could be less appealing to me--but because with every page FLOODED with scams, how does one even get any visibility?


Good question. I went through what seems hundreds of pages, skipping some, and all I see are these title stuffing scams. 
Sorted by publication. I used to like doing that, seeing what was released, what is about to be released, etc. Useless. Been useless for a while, but I don't think I have ever seen so much of this. This is really bad.

Visibility? Readers and certain blogs that cater to readers and some email services. I stick to other readers at this point and do not browse anymore. The new goodreads recommendation that has been implemented on my Voyage with the latest update is working pretty good. Its actually going by star ratings of mine so the recs make sense. I don't really care what others bought for example, I care what I liked and what others liked and how that meets. Like Netflix. Now Amazon seems to implement the star ratings to give recs on the kindles via goodreads. Of course they also ask you to get started and rate some more stuff so be prepared to get more star ratings with no reviews.

Its really depressing to see this much useless carp in a genre I love so much. .


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Atunah said:


> Its like a total scam assault on the romance category. No clue if its also in other genres.


I noticed this when I was researching Regency romances - so many of these multi-book sets, and some of them get terrible reviews.

We can clearly see they're designed to take advantage of KU2, and presumably an Amazon rep could see it, too. Is there any way of reporting the most blatant cases? If there are lots more flooding onto the market, I wonder if they're reusing content, which would fall foul of the KU rules, wouldn't it?


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

FWIW, people have already figured out how do significantly increase KENPC by changing formatting. FFS, just make it based on word count already. Authors should not get a bonus for producing ugly books.


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## Nicki Leigh (Aug 25, 2011)

I've seen both the book stuffing and the new formatting on Amazon as well as discussed with how-tos on other forums.

I really feel like Amazon might have to take a step back and, as others have suggested, just go off word count.


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

Word count is not going to help with the scamming though. They'll still scam folks to click the links to go to the end of the stuffed "book". Same result. Assuming they are getting paid for the jumps. Seems like it as its so much more now this month than I have ever seen of these scams. 

How would you count a readers word count. I mean how would they know how many word on a page I read.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

You declare a page is X words and go from there. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Atunah said:


> Word count is not going to help with the scamming though. They'll still scam folks to click the links to go to the end of the stuffed "book". Same result. Assuming they are getting paid for the jumps. Seems like it as its so much more now this month than I have ever seen of these scams.
> 
> How would you count a readers word count. I mean how would they know how many word on a page I read.


Why cant Amazon decree that links in the first 95% of the book are not allowed, and have the upload facility check for them and reject the book?


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## elizabethsade (Feb 3, 2015)

TimothyEllis said:


> Why cant Amazon decree that links in the first 95% of the book are not allowed, and have the upload facility check for them and reject the book?


Because a lot of nonfiction books I've seen have links build into the text (e.g., this is discussed in chapter three, and chapter three is a link to the start of chapter three).


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

TimothyEllis said:


> Why cant Amazon decree that links in the first 95% of the book are not allowed, and have the upload facility check for them and reject the book?


That is a good suggestion to send to feedback. But I see many books where links to signups are right up front so they'd have to disallow those also.

They better get a handle on this stuff as its really upsetting to us readers. And of course if it makes authors upset and they pull out, that too upsets us reader that pay for a subscription.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

No matter what system Amazon puts in place, the scammers will find a way around it.


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## Nicki Leigh (Aug 25, 2011)

It seems like the more Amazon tries to get a handle on this, the worse it gets. Not really sure how they can fix it though without going pre-KU.


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## Guest (Feb 8, 2016)

TimothyEllis said:


> Why cant Amazon decree that links in the first 95% of the book are not allowed, and have the upload facility check for them and reject the book?


So ban all of us whose ebooks have endnotes?

I'd really be curious to know exactly what proof has been shown that putting a link in the front of the book to the back gets you a full read through count? (or heck, if I open a borrowed Kindle book and i click the "About the author" link in the TOC first to go to the back, that counts as a full read?) Not just "so and so claimed it", but actual measurable proof? Amazon is not generally know for being stupid and I seriously doubt they would overlook people doing that to up their pages read.


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

Anma Natsu said:


> I'd really be curious to know exactly what proof


I have a short (10K) fantasy that was in KU at one time and got maybe one or two borrows a month. It was easy to have people test it out in the early KU2 days by borrowing it and using the TOC to skip to the end. I got full credit for that, several times over several weeks, as I and the other members of my private FB group tried to figure out how it was all working. Some of them also had infrequently-borrowed books that we could experiment on, with the same results. So I can tell you, not from hearsay but from firsthand experience and experimentation, that this is absolutely a thing.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Sometimes I skip to the end of a book to find out whodunit. Then I go back to where I left off and read the rest including the end again. It sounds like that gives a full pages read count when I skip to the end and then possibly a double count when I read from where I left off all the way to the end a second time.


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## RinG (Mar 12, 2013)

The table of contents is made of links, so disallowing links would make most table of contents broken.


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> Sometimes I skip to the end of a book to find out whodunit. Then I go back to where I left off and read the rest including the end again. It sounds like that gives a full pages read count when I skip to the end and then possibly a double count when I read from where I left off all the way to the end a second time.


It only gives credit for page reads the first time. If you borrow the book and read it again there's not second payment.


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## Guest (Feb 8, 2016)

lilywhite said:


> I have a short (10K) fantasy that was in KU at one time and got maybe one or two borrows a month. It was easy to have people test it out in the early KU2 days by borrowing it and using the TOC to skip to the end. I got full credit for that, several times over several weeks, as I and the other members of my private FB group tried to figure out how it was all working. Some of them also had infrequently-borrowed books that we could experiment on, with the same results. So I can tell you, not from hearsay but from firsthand experience and experimentation, that this is absolutely a thing.


Ah...that's what I was curious about. Thanks. Really surprised Amazon didn't account for that.


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

Anma Natsu said:


> Ah...that's what I was curious about. Thanks. Really surprised Amazon didn't account for that.


Me, too. I'm sure it's not as simple as it seems to track these things, but it's such a HUGE opportunity for scamming.


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## AmrRahmy (Jan 11, 2016)

Hello everyone, sorry about the noob question. I can't see the KENP count in the dashboard, or in the promote and advertized page. can anyone tell me where the KENP count is?


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## Lydniz (May 2, 2013)

AmrRahmy said:


> Hello everyone, sorry about the noob question. I can't see the KENP count in the dashboard, or in the promote and advertized page. can anyone tell me where the KENP count is?


Go to your Bookshelf and click on Promote and Advertise. You'll find it squirrelled away in the small print at the bottom. Who knows why Amazon hide it in such a counterintuitive place? You'd almost think they didn't want us to see it.


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## AmrRahmy (Jan 11, 2016)

Lydniz said:


> Go to your Bookshelf and click on Promote and Advertise. You'll find it squirrelled away in the small print at the bottom. Who knows why Amazon hide it in such a counterintuitive place? You'd almost think they didn't want us to see it.


I am enrolled in select.
I had the price match box, checked and it was to 0.00, i just uncheck it. it's updating now.
but the strange thing, the book is live and got one sale, but step 2, the price and promotion tab(i think) is still in progress 3 days later, is that normal?
there was no kenp anywhere in the promote and advertise page, i triple checked.


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## Nathalie Aynie (Nov 24, 2013)

These are my KENPC results:










They seem to be considerably lower than 200 words per page.

I didn't do anything to change them up or down, I just put them through Vellum.

Thoughts?


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## spellscribe (Nov 5, 2015)

What happened to the thread that postulated the count is based on character count (with spaces) /1000? Was it disproved? 

Sent from my SM-G900I using Tapatalk


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

spellscribe said:


> What happened to the thread that postulated the count is based on character count (with spaces) /1000? Was it disproved?


It worked for my books under the original KENP, but I have no idea how they're doing it now. My books range from 195-207 WPP now. The range was much greater under the original calculation. Formatted with Word and uploaded as .doc. I lost about 13% across the board.


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## Jeff Hughes (May 4, 2012)

I find Amazon's apparent struggle to get KENPC right to be utterly mystifying.  How hard can it be to count words?  Or characters, if one is concerned that those words are being unduly tortured?  Crikey, authors have been paid by the word since forever.

And I just shake my head at the notion that some authors would bork up the formatting - and diminish the user experience in doing so - in order to eke out a few measly more KENPC.

The whole issue of scammers using links to capture page reads that weren't actually read is entirely different.  That's a bit more complex, but not really that hard to solve either.

I normally think of Amazon as being on top of its game in nearly every respect.  But it sure seems like these two issues got tossed to a team of summer interns...


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## Ros_Jackson (Jan 11, 2014)

Probably more than one change went into this new calculation. Perhaps Amazon got better at detecting front and back matter, at the same time as dealing with formatting changes.



Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> No matter what system Amazon puts in place, the scammers will find a way around it.


It's certainly going to be a running battle, until such time as KU isn't worth scamming.

Just going by word count isn't going to work for illustrated books, and penalising links in the text is going to be a problem for legitimate academic non-fiction.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

Maybe they should just ban scammers?


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## Gessert Books (Apr 20, 2015)

Atunah said:


> That is a good suggestion to send to feedback. But I see many books where links to signups are right up front so they'd have to disallow those also.


They actually already do: external links that gather customer information (like email addresses) are prohibited.


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## AmrRahmy (Jan 11, 2016)

AmrRahmy said:


> I am enrolled in select.
> I had the price match box, checked and it was to 0.00, i just uncheck it. it's updating now.
> but the strange thing, the book is live and got one sale, but step 2, the price and promotion tab(i think) is still in progress 3 days later, is that normal?
> there was no kenp anywhere in the promote and advertise page, i triple checked.


I see it now. That was my mistake, I glanced over the number and I read it 00 57 every time thinking it was 0.0057 royalty per page thing. The v2.00 is what got me. 

It's 45 for printed version
57 for KENP


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

AmrRahmy said:


> I see it now. That was my mistake, I glanced over the number and I read it 00 57 every time thinking it was 0.0057 royalty per page thing. The v2.00 is what got me.
> 
> It's 45 for printed version
> 57 for KENP


I glanced right over it, too. It's not very clear especially since the numbers are all jammed together.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

phillipgessert said:


> They actually already do: external links that gather customer information (like email addresses) are prohibited.


Manyauthors put links to their mailing list sign up page in the front and back of their books. Do you have the text in the TOS that specifically states this is not allowed?

If so, this will mean a lot of authors are breaking TOS.


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## Gessert Books (Apr 20, 2015)

Sela said:


> Manyauthors put links to their mailing list sign up page in the front and back of their books. Do you have the text in the TOS that specifically states this is not allowed?
> 
> If so, this will mean a lot of authors are breaking TOS.


pp 24-25 of this document: https://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf .


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

phillipgessert said:


> pp 24-25 of this document: https://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf .


Many thanks.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

phillipgessert said:


> pp 24-25 of this document: https://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf .


I have a link to my website where the signup form can be found. There is no direct link to a mailing list.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Publishing on Kindle: Guidelines for Publishers
Kindle Publishing Guidelines
Page 25

•
Links to web forms that request customer information (e.g., email address, physical address or 
similar);


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## Lydniz (May 2, 2013)

brkingsolver said:


> Publishing on Kindle: Guidelines for Publishers
> Kindle Publishing Guidelines
> Page 25
> 
> ...


Well, that's interesting. I don't know a single author who doesn't do that.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Lydniz said:


> Well, that's interesting. I don't know a single author who doesn't do that.


My link does not go directly to a web form. It goes to my website. The signup form is at the bottom of the home page. If that kind of link is a violation of Amazon's TOS, I can't imagine that they wouldn't be coming down on us like a ton of bricks.


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## Lady Vine (Nov 11, 2012)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> No matter what system Amazon puts in place, the scammers will find a way around it.


They didn't have any of these problems until they started renting books as opposed to just selling them... Just saying.


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## Incognita (Apr 3, 2011)

Lady Vine said:


> They didn't have any of these problems until they started renting books as opposed to just selling them... Just saying.


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## Antara Mann (Nov 24, 2014)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> My link does not go directly to a web form. It goes to my website. The signup form is at the bottom of the home page. If that kind of link is a violation of Amazon's TOS, I can't imagine that they wouldn't be coming down on us like a ton of bricks.


Me either. And even if they haev problems, it's not a biggie. An author here said that when she accidentally forgot her KU book somewhere else, Amazon sent her email, giving her 3 days to remove her books from the other platforms.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Author websites are OK, but not collecting info.


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## JalexM (May 14, 2015)

EF5 said:


> Wow, so no links to email lists or author websites allowed in your ebooks? I imagine this will cause a stir.


A link to a website for the possibility of signing up is fine. It's talking about direct links that ask for your information.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

JalexM said:


> A link to a website for the possibility of signing up is fine. It's talking about direct links that ask for your information.


Exactly.


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## KevinH (Jun 29, 2013)

brkingsolver said:


> Author websites are OK, but not collecting info.


I think there's an argument here that sign-up for something like an author newsletter - the intent of which is to enhance the reader experience (and a link to which would therefore be allowable) - doesn't necessarily violate the TOS. The primary purpose of such a sign-up isn't necessarily to gather customer info, but that's an ancillary requirement in order to make the newsletter available to them.

(Also, I think the last sentence in the passage at issue reads, "Amazon reserves the right to remove links in its sole discretion." That makes it sound as though they'll simply remove a link if they think it violates the TOS.)


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

KevinH said:


> (Also, I think the last sentence in the passage at issue reads, "Amazon reserves the right to remove links in its sole discretion." That makes it sound as though they'll simply remove a link if they think it violates the TOS.)


And since there are a finite number of good mail list sites, it should be easy for such links to be removed by the upload process, if they were going to do it.

But if they did, I would be convinced Amazon were shooting themselves in the foot, since mailing lists are sales generators.


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## JessieVerona (May 10, 2013)

> They didn't have any of these problems until they started renting books as opposed to just selling them... Just saying.





ChristinePope said:


>


Plus One!


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