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Welcome to the Roundtable Roundup, our fortnightly podcast where we invite a guest or two to join us live to discuss the latest news and views from the self-publishing and indie industry.
Author Zoe York returned! She joined Robert Chazz Chute, Xavier Granville and Erica Conroy to discuss the below topics:
Amazon is cracking down on advertising sites
Ones hat use affiliate links in their emails, which violates Amazon’s terms of service. Instead of giving out warnings though they’ve gone straight to terminating accounts and blacklisting. A number of ad sites have reported this and some have decided to close. Fussy Librarian and EreaderIQ are continuing on without their affiliate links.
See the full story: http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/06/15/amazon-brings-the-hammer-down-on-discount-ebook-sites/
KDP Accounts being shut down without warning!
A number of authors who have ebooks in Kindle Unlimited have reported that their books have been pulled from Amazon and their KDP accounts closed. The reason given is:
we have detected that borrows for your books are originating from systematically generated accounts
Implying that the authors had manipulated their borrows by using click-farms or the like. No warnings were given.
See the full story:
- https://the-active-voice.com/2016/06/16/think-you-couldnt-possibly-lose-your-amazon-publishing-account-think-again
- https://darrienia.com/2016/06/18/authors-beware-a-new-danger-for-ku-authors
- http://www.thepassivevoice.com/2016/06/72431 <– in the comments some feel the authors brought it on themselves o.O
- http://www.thepassivevoice.com/2016/06/dangers-for-prawny-authors <– how it might happen
Author Earnings May Report
Author Earnings expanded the data they use to more than just the 200,000 listed category best-sellers that they usually used to include the also-boughts and the other titles from the authors of those ebooks. They ended up with nearly a third of all ebooks in the US store. That’s practically any ebook that sells at least one copy a day.
Big Fives’ overall ebook unit sales plummet this year has finally levelled off and could possibly be attributed to the lowering of prices. The average price dropping from $10.31 to $8.67 from January to May.
1,340 authors are earning more than $100k a year from Amazon sales and half of them are indie or Amazon imprint published.
The expanded results also revealed previously invisible earners–ones that hadn’t turned up on the best-sellers lists–30 self-published authors out of a total of 43 were earning six figures!
And as usual romance dominates followed by Sci-fi / Fantasy, then thriller / suspense, mystery and literary is teeny tiny.
See the full report: http://authorearnings.com/report/may-2016-report
Ugh, let’s not even go there… click at your own peril: http://goodereader.com/blog/digital-publishing/indie-authors-are-to-blame-for-the-e-book-slowdown
If you have a second, an iTunes review would be VERY appreciated!
Alternatively please feel free to leave a comment 🙂
See you in two weeks!
