Authors deserve a living wage!

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Alanis, and I have been earning my living as a self-published author since early 2011. I personally support seven children with this income, one of which has a serious medical issue that requires treatments every two months that cost thousands of dollars, and an upcoming surgery at the end of this year. Being self-employed, I do not have access to medical insurance for my child. It simply is not affordable. Especially now that Amazon has drastically reduced income for the average self-published author.

I tell you this because I am not the only one in a similar situation. There are hundreds, if not thousands of authors who earn all, or at least a hefty portion of, their income through self-publishing. Some of these people are my friends, and they all have their own personal struggles.

I have seen my share of ups and downs in the business, but like many other authors, I've adapted and kept fighting. I have to. My family depends on it.

When Amazon introduced the KDP Select program, it required exclusivity. This wasn't such a big deal, because it wasn't essential that a book be in the program to get visibility. All it did for authors was allow their books to be borrowed by people who have an Amazon Prime membership, and allow those authors to promote their books for free now and then to gain extra readers.

In 2014, the program changed. Suddenly, with the introduction of Amazon's new Kindle Unlimited program (think Netflix for books, where users pay about $10 per month to access an unlimited number of titles in the program), authors could get paid for borrows from all those members. Income skyrocketed.

Each borrow ended up making nearly $2 in the beginning, but that number gradually slid lower and lower until each borrow was worth only around $1.30. Still, this was a huge income boost for authors. Plus, each borrow counted as a sale, helping boost visibility by putting those books getting borrowed a lot on the bestseller charts, boosting visibility even further.

Along the way, people started to realize they could release shorter works and get the same rate per borrow. People started writing short deliberately, because it takes a lot less effort and time to write 10,000 words than it does to write 40,000+ words, and by releasing 4x 10,000 word stories, you'd get four times the number of titles to potentially draw in readers. But some people were writing short stories long before the program came into existence.

Of course, this led some people to be unhappy. Those who write more for art's sake, or for passion's sake, or who write very long books that take months to write, got upset that short story writers were making a lot more than they were. Not necessarily overall, because some of those people made a lot of money. But on a per-publication basis.

Amazon used this as an excuse to drastically slash payments to short story writers by paying per page read instead of per borrow. Some writers have seen their income drop so low they can no longer pay their bills, despite writing more than ever.

You see, exclusivity wasn't such a big problem in the beginning. If you didn't care about getting the occasional (and pretty rare for most people) borrow from Amazon Prime members, or the little boost of visibility putting your book free for a few days would give, you simply didn't put your books into KDP Select. Then you were free to put your books on other websites and make money there.

The program was, initially, truly voluntary. It's still technically voluntary, but if you do not put your books into the program, your chances of making money with your books are reduced to nearly nothing.

But when they created Kindle Unlimited, exposing millions of readers to the possibility of reading more without paying for individual books, everything changed. Suddenly it WAS worth going exclusive, because the extra income AND the massive boost to visibility made it worth it.

Now that they are paying authors effectively a half a cent per page read, the exclusivity requirement no longer makes sense financially. The program HURT actual sales, because everyone wanted to BORROW books instead of BUY books. This means that if you're not in KDP Select, your sales will suffer terribly. And because Amazon has effectively stifled competition, the other stores (such as Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Apple, Kobo, etc.) can not make up for the lost income. You're essentially FORCED to be exclusive to Amazon now, but they won't pay enough to writers to make it profitable.

I'm asking you to sign this petition because Amazon has self-published authors backed into a corner. We have to be in the program to have any chance of being seen by readers, because sales alone can never push an author into the bestseller lists unless they already have a massive following that will buy anything they put out. But because they're paying drastically less to the average writer, they need to be able to put their books onto other stores to make up for that lost income.

Let's send a message to Amazon that authors deserve to earn a living wage just like everyone else. Most writers cannot get by getting paid a half a penny per page read. (And that number has already dropped from approximately $0.0057 in July to approximately $0.0051 per page in August. It's only likely to drop more from there, just as the rate per borrow steadily declined.)

Amazon: Stop your predatory business practices. Remove the exclusivity requirement from KDP Select so that authors can put their books on other stores and have a chance to make up for the income that's been taken away by your new payout structure. If you won't pay a fair, living wage to self-published authors, at least give us the option to place our books on your competitors' websites where we can earn some additional income without having to severely reduce our income on Amazon by removing ourselves from Select.

Thank you.