Oct 14 2016

A Chronicle of the Amazon Page Flip Controversy: Or, how to piss off a ton of your vendors all at once

More good info on the page read scandal.

Ruth Nestvold - Indie Adventures

For the past several weeks (and in some case months), authors publishing through KDP Select have been noticing a massive decrease in the pages read (KENP = Kindle Edition Normalized Pages). I blogged about his before here and here, mostly about how it has hit me personally. In this post I would like to attempt a summary of what’s been going on and what the authors affected think might be causing it.

Most of what I know comes from a discussion thread on Kboards, a forum for indie authors. The thread was started on Oct. 2, and authors quickly began chiming in with information on decreasing numbers of pages read on Amazon. A few authors said they had seen no decrease, but the vast majority have observed decreases of between 30% – 90%.

Naturally, once we noticed that we weren’t the only ones taking a huge hit to…

View original post 1,405 more words

Oct 9 2016

Bye, Bye, KDP Select; Or, How I Got Screwed by Amazon (and You May Have Been Too)

One author’s decision…

Ruth Nestvold - Indie Adventures

I blogged a couple of days ago about how some kind of software glitch seems to be swallowing authors’ pages read, and posted the email I sent to Amazon about it.

Well, two days later, still no answer. Two days with a total of 24 pages read, when my daily average is closer to 1000. For all of October, I have have had less than half the pages read that I usually have in a single day. My pages read have flatlined, my rankings have tanked, and my sales have come to a halt. It looks like I’m going to have to start all over again — all over again.

I have since learned that the problem of the missing pages is probably connected to Amazon Kindle’s new feature, Page Flip, a navigational tool meant to be used to search books for specific passages. Unfortunately for authors, Amazon does not…

View original post 360 more words