I used to tell a joke that I didn't care if you read my work, just that you bought a lot of copies. In some ways, that still applies when it comes to the print stuff. I mean, if you bought about 100 copies of The Man From Taured in print, you'd pretty much make my year. But since most of my books are snatched up by the ebook crowd, that old joke is pretty stale.
A while ago Amazon changed the way things worked for those who signed up for Kindle Unlimited. That's a monthly service Kindle fans can sign up for and then download as many books as they want. It's great if you're a reader, but it wasn't so cool for us authors. You can't get royalties from books that are downloaded with a monthly fee like you can when people buy individual copies. Instead, Amazon used the fees to create a giant pool of money and, at first, depending on how many people downloaded your work you got a cut of that.
That was interesting, but it soon created a problem. That meant that a guy who cranked off a 5-page short story could get the same percentage as someone who took 10 years to write a 1,000 page novel. That hardly seemed fair and several of us authors started to complain. So, Amazon changed things.
Now, being an actual reader is more important than ever. You see, we now get a percentage based on the number of pages read, not just the number of copies downloaded. So, I go into my little Amazon Kindle Publishing dashboard and look at the number of pages read. I love with the little numbers and lines on the graph go up and up and up. Then I will go for days when its nothing. I can now tell you that even you most ardent Kindle readers will not read much during actual holidays, for example.
So, dear readers, you see that us indie publisher-types need you now more than ever. We need you to keep us writing, keep us doing this thing, keep feeding the beast. It has nothing to do with reviews or anything, but for the fact that you keep clicking that little page-turner button on your kindle or app.
Thanks for reading. Keep it up.
BWA