In 2010, Amazon had 600,000 e-books in its Kindle store. Today it has more than 3 million. Photo: Bloomberg
Now self-published writers, who owe much of their audience to the retailer's publishing platform, are unhappy.
It may bring in readers, but the writers say they earn less. And in interviews and online forums, they have voiced their complaints.
"Six months ago people were quitting their day job, convinced they could make a career out of writing," said Bob Mayer, an e-book consultant and publisher who has written 50 books. "Now people are having to go back to that job or are scraping to get by. That's how quickly things have changed."
For romance and mystery novelists who embraced digital technology, loved chatting up their fans and wrote really, really fast, the last few years have been a golden age. Fiction underwent a boom unseen since the postwar era.
Now, though, the world has more stories than it needs or wants to pay for. In 2010, Amazon had 600,000 e-books in its Kindle store. Today it has more than 3 million. The number of books on Smashwords, which distributes self-published writers, grew 20% last year. The number of free books rose by one-third.
Revenue from e-books levelled off in 2013 at $ 3 billion after increasing nearly 50% in 2012, according to BookStats. But Kindle Unlimited is making the glut worse, some writers say.
Some established artists, however, see fewer rewards. Taylor Swift pulled her music off Spotify this fall, saying it was devaluing her art and costing her money. "Valuable things should be paid for," she explained.
Holly Ward, who writes romances under the name H.M. Ward, has much the same complaint about Kindle Unlimited. After two months in the program, she said, her income dropped 75%. "I couldn't wait and watch things plummet further," she said on a Kindle discussion board. She immediately left the programme. Kindle Unlimited is not mandatory, but writers fear that if they do not participate, their books will not be promoted.
Ward, 37, started self-publishing in 2011 with Demon Kissed, a paranormal tale for teenagers, and quickly became one of Amazon's breakout successes, selling more than 6 million books, according to her website.
"Your rabid romance reader who was buying $ 100 worth of books a week and funnelling $ 5,200 into Amazon per year is now generating less than $ 120 a year," she said. "The revenue is just lost. That doesn't work well for Amazon or the writers."
Amazon, though, may be willing to forgo some income in the short term to create a service that draws readers in and encourages them to buy other items. The books, in that sense, are loss leaders, though the writers take the loss, not Amazon.
Amazon usually gives self-published writers 70% of what a book earns, which means a novel selling for $ 4.99 yields $ 3.50. This is much more than traditional publishers pay, a fact that Amazon frequently points out. But Kindle Unlimited is less generous, paying a fluctuating amount. In July, the fee for a digital "borrow" was $ 1.80. It fell to $ 1.33 in October before rebounding slightly to $ 1.39 in November.
Since the payment is the same whether the book is long or short, writers are taking the hint. Serial novels and short stories are increasing. Mayer took his $ 3.99 book about seven failures of technology or leadership and broke it into seven individual Kindle Unlimited volumes covering the Challenger explosion, the Titanic sinking, the massacre at Little Big Horn and so on.
"If you're not an author with a slavish fan following, you're in a lot of trouble," Mayer said. "Everyone already has a ton of things on their Kindle they haven't opened."
"In the old days, you had to type the story on actual paper," said Michael Henderson, a former lawyer now living in Venice, Italy. "Make your changes and retype it, or hire someone to do it. It was a herculean effort to get a 400-page manuscript ready. Now any monkey with a computer can do it in hours. Shazam, everyone is a writer."
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Capital in the Twenty-First Century author Thomas Piketty poses with the hit book. (Source: Getty)
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