Release the Rate!

by | July 2, 2015 | General | 1 comment

By Lisabet Sarai

You’ve probably heard by now that Amazon has revised its payment system for authors in the Kindle Unlimited program. The new rules are vague, but the basic criterion for author payment is now the number of pages read, rather than the number of books borrowed or bought read and at least 10% consumed.

This change will dramatically reduce many erotica authors’ income. Amazon hasn’t actually released specific figures (more on this below) but based on the information that is available, award-winning author and ground-breaking publisher Selena Kitt has calculated that authors will be paid about half a penny per page.

Previous rates were based on percentage of the book read, not pages. So an author who published wildly popular short fiction had a chance to make as much as a less popular author who produced lengthy tomes. Under the new scheme, this is not longer true. The change tends to disproportionately hurt erotica authors because many of the sexy books out there tend toward the short side. (Keep the heat raised for too long and your readers might collapse!)

In response to this modification in terms, a group of erotica authors has launched a campaign called #releasetherate. You can read about it in detail at Selena’s blog. Basically, KU authors are encouraged to write to Jeff Bezos, asking two perfectly reasonable questions:


1. How many people are downloading our books?
2. How much are you paying us per page?

No business owner can be expected to survive without data on sales volume and market pricing. Yet Amazon is now withholding this information.

All we’re asking is a bit of transparency. (And maybe a bit of respect…)

This campaign can succeed only if both authors and readers step up to challenge Amazon’s secretive policies.

Selena’s post includes sample text for letters to Amazon, for authors and for readers, as well as suggested Facebook and Twitter posts to share info about the campaign.

If you want erotic stories to be distributed via the KU program…if you believe that the quality of a reading experience should not be measured in pages…take action!

Lisabet Sarai

Sex and writing. I think I've always been fascinated by both. Freud was right. I definitely remember feelings that I now recognize as sexual, long before I reached puberty. I was horny before I knew what that meant. My teens and twenties I spent in a hormone-induced haze, perpetually "in love" with someone (sometimes more than one someone). I still recall the moment of enlightenment, in high school, when I realized that I could say "yes" to sexual exploration, even though society told me to say no. Despite being a shy egghead with world-class myopia who thought she was fat, I had managed to accumulate a pretty wide range of sexual experience by the time I got married. And I'm happy to report that, thanks to my husband's open mind and naughty imagination, my sexual adventures didn't end at that point! Meanwhile, I was born writing. Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, though according to family apocrypha, I was talking at six months. Certainly, I started writing as soon as I learned how to form the letters. I penned my first poem when I was seven. While I was in elementary school I wrote more poetry, stories, at least two plays (one about the Beatles and one about the Goldwater-Johnson presidential contest, believe it or not), and a survival manual for Martians (really). I continued to write my way through high school, college, and grad school, mostly angst-ridden poems about love and desire, although I also remember working on a ghost story/romance novel (wish I could find that now). I've written song lyrics, meeting minutes, marketing copy, software manuals, research reports, a cookbook, a self-help book, and a five hundred page dissertation. For years, I wrote erotic stories and kinky fantasies for myself and for lovers' entertainment. I never considered trying to publish my work until I picked up a copy of Portia da Costa's Black Lace classic Gemini Heat while sojourning in Istanbul. My first reaction was "Wow!". It was possibly the most arousing thing I'd ever read, intelligent, articulate, diverse and wonderfully transgressive. My second reaction was, "I'll bet I could write a book like that." I wrote the first three chapters of Raw Silk and submitted a proposal to Black Lace, almost on a lark. I was astonished when they accepted it. The book was published in April 1999, and all at once, I was an official erotic author. A lot has changed since my Black Lace days. But I still get a thrill from writing erotica. It's a never-ending challenge, trying to capture the emotional complexities of a sexual encounter. I'm far less interested in what happens to my characters' bodies than in what goes on in their heads.

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