Why You WON’T Be Reading This Book on Kindle

Amazon has a new program of interest to bloggers; you can have your feed available on the Kindle store, and Amazon will share revenues.

Sounds great—until you read the fine print. I read the entire contract, all seven pages of 10-point type, and I thought it was one of the most author-unfriendly documents I’ve seen in quite some time. I don’t think I really want Amazon to be able to just swoop in and repurpose my content into books or whatever, without not only consulting me but giving me the right to say no if I object to a particular use. And of course, all the liabilities rest with the blogger.

Yes, there’s a revenue share. If I understand this particularly confusing section correctly, it’s 15 cents per downloaded kilobyte. So if a typical text-only blog post of mine weighs in at 10K, I’d get $1.50 when someone downloads it—or is that what the total revenue would me, and my portion a share of that? The contract is quite ambiguous on this. If the former, the pay rate is not bad, in the great scheme of things—it compares with a typical book royalty—but not really enough to get me to give them the rights they want. How many would I realistically sell in the course of a year? A dozen? A hundred? Ten thousand? My guess is one of the lower numbers. And meanwhile Amazon gets the right to anthologize and package me, whether I like it or not.

I think I’ll wait for a more author-friendly contract, thank you very much.