Amazon Changes

There is a debate raging at the moment, among indie writers at least, about the extent to which changes made by Amazon have affected sales. I never lived under the old regime because I published my first book on Amazon after the changes were made, and I'm also not entirely sure what these changes are or what impact they have had.

A major point of debate is the issue of KDP Select and the function that allows a writer to offer their work for free for up to five days in (I think) a 90 day period. If you use this facility your work can be downloaded for free and it enters a list of bestselling books (in the free category), the idea being that if you hit the Top 100, people who browse that list will see your work and you will be exposed to a greater number of readers. Some writers claim giving away their work for free has no effect at all on their sales, while others say they get a real lift from it.

My experience is that my sales go up after a free day, but not a huge amount. I feel the facility might work better if you have many different titles on your page, then when a reader is brought to the page by the free title they can see your other titles. Those arguing against Select focus on the exclusive nature of the deal, which is to say if you sign up to Select (in order to put your books up for free) you cannot sell your work at any other location on the internet, such as Barnes & Noble or Smashwords, etc.

One thing many indie writers seem to be sure of is that their sales are down considerably since around the third quarter 2012, and there is much speculation about what is behind this, including some of the stuff I've written about in this post. I have nothing to compare it to, as I have said, but my sales this year are in the hundreds and as someone new to Amazon I'm perfectly happy with this for the time being. I'm going to be publishing the second part of my apocalypse trilogy in the next week or so, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that goes.

I understand the argument that having a facility where thousands of writers can offer their work for free, or even for 99c is driving down writers' wages, but considering that the odds of people getting published by a traditional house was in lottery-winner territory, the deal offered by Amazon offers most of these writers a much better chance of distributing their work than they had in the past. No one seems sure about why sales are down, but it could be that the market place is becoming saturated with indie writers all trying to sell their work - like with any market, the laws of supply and demand apply. Over the last couple of years, there have been a few very public success stories of indie writers selling a lot of books on Amazon Kindle and making a lot of money, and this will have massively increased the number of authors selling their work on Amazon. It could be that this in conjunction with the Amazon changes has meant there is a new paradigm now and the higher sales of the past are over.