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Is "Amazon Prime" a trap door for Kindle authors?

by Jon Patrick
3 replies
As I was looking around at what the Kindle has to offer (research, not window shopping), I noticed that the Amazon Prime badge is nearly ubiquitous among Kindle titles. So, I clicked on the link and checked it out. I was disappointed by what I discovered.

Amazon Prime allows Amazon customers to pay one lump sum for unlimited downloads of participating Amazon Prime titles. Amazon gets the lump sum - then they give the authors of those titles pennies per download.

My alarm bells immediately started ringing when I realized what this means. It is in Amazon's best interests to push as many customers as possible into Amazon Prime memberships, so that Amazon gets these lump payments and the authors get mere pennies. And with so many authors participating in the program, I could see it becoming very difficult to successfully publish on the Kindle in the future without submitting to these terms.

I could even see Amazon making participation mandatory at some point, possibly with exceptions made for large, established publishers. It would be fairly easy for them to do once participation in Amazon Prime has reached critical mass (which appears to be happening as I write this).

Is it worth it to publish for the Kindle if this is the direction things are going?
#amazon prime #authors #door #kindle #trap
  • Profile picture of the author JonnyAndrews
    Being that you're not in the program your interp of the
    situation is fully understandable.

    Last month authors in the program earned $1.70 per
    "borrow". This means they earned $1.70 on sales which
    would have never taken place before.

    AZ is the only platform that's worth looking at right now
    because they're the ones with the eyeballs. If people
    bought more from iBooks I'd say go there.

    What about Nook? What about nook?

    On a great month I'd be lucky to see $150 from that
    fully pitiful platform.

    I can pull $1K/month easily with a title on Kindle only using
    the marketing in Prime. Before that I'd have to spend
    $2K on marketing to get the same number of sales.

    Lots of people don't like Prime. Lots of people also have
    no idea how to market their way out of a paper bag.

    If anyone can cross reference those datapoints I'd be
    SUPER curious to see the results

    At the end of the day Prime is a KILLER program for
    self published authors because it gets you almost more
    exposure than any form of paid ad I've ever run.

    100% worth it.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jon Patrick
    Thanks for the insights. Clearly, $1.70 is not what I was thinking at all. That doesn't sound too bad. But wasn't that part of their big $500K pool, and, if so, do you know what a "borrow" normally pays?
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    • Profile picture of the author JonnyAndrews
      Originally Posted by Jon Patrick View Post

      Thanks for the insights. Clearly, $1.70 is not what I was thinking at all. That doesn't sound too bad. But wasn't that part of their big $500K pool, and, if so, do you know what a "borrow" normally pays?
      It's month by month and, as always with Amazon,
      fully based on what's going on with all the other
      titles in the program.

      The whole thing was just burped onto the market
      like 2-3 months ago. Not much data to be had
      as of yet.

      All I can tell you is with their current config, I'm
      a believer and will be sticking around for another
      90 day go of it.
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