Amazon Taketh Away and Amazon Giveth
Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2016 8:19 am
Well, it's been about a week since Amazon pulled the plug on their highest rated reviewers getting freebies in exchange for reviews. I have received several wink-wink e-mails from sellers suggesting that we skirt that rule by saying they'll send me stuff and, although I don't have to post a review, they would understand if I liked their product enough to do so, and, by the way, I don't even have to disclose that fact in a disclaimer. I'm not really interested in those sorts of reviews.
Fortunately, their crackdown doesn't extend to books, and that's really why I got started reviewing for them anyway, to improve my own writing skills and make myself more marketable. I've actually made a number of good contacts with writers who have been published on Amazon and they appreciate my input on their works (some of them number among my Twitter and Facebook followers), and in the long run that's more important to me than getting some free flea market merchandise.
But Amazon did give me and all other Prime members a new goodie this week. It's a benefit called Prime Reading, and it's sort of a barebones version of Kindle Unlimited. That service allows people to read all the books they want for $10 a month, but there are two catches. The first is, that they can only have 10 books out at a time, and if they quite their Kindle Unlimited Membership, the books they have on their devices vanish. The second is that there's a limited number of authors available (although there are well over 1,000,000 titles available). Each author or publisher decides whether to participate, and the big names like KIng, Grisham, etc. do not. So, the vast majority of what they have are self-published books of wildly varying quality.
The new benefit, Prime Reading, is sort of a cream of the crop of Kindle Unlimited. It's got about 1,000 books (and magazines, including some popular ones) available. There are a couple of "name" titles, like the Hobbit and one of the Harry Potter books, but, for the most part, they've chosen books from the best selling of their Kindle Unlimited authors. Instead of getting all of an author's books on Prime Reading, you can read one or two. Presumably, if you like the author, you'll buy more of his or her work. What I really think they're trying to do is to use Prime Reading to persuade people to sign up for Kindle Unlimited by showing that these self-published authors can be pretty good, even if they aren't household names. Like Kindle Unlimited, you can only have 10 books at a time, and if you cancel your Amazon Prime membership, you lose your books.
Prime members still qualify for two other reading benefits, Kindle First (which allows them to get for free one of six selected newly published books each month) and the Lending Library, which essentially allows them to borrow one Kindle Unlimited book each month.
Fortunately, their crackdown doesn't extend to books, and that's really why I got started reviewing for them anyway, to improve my own writing skills and make myself more marketable. I've actually made a number of good contacts with writers who have been published on Amazon and they appreciate my input on their works (some of them number among my Twitter and Facebook followers), and in the long run that's more important to me than getting some free flea market merchandise.
But Amazon did give me and all other Prime members a new goodie this week. It's a benefit called Prime Reading, and it's sort of a barebones version of Kindle Unlimited. That service allows people to read all the books they want for $10 a month, but there are two catches. The first is, that they can only have 10 books out at a time, and if they quite their Kindle Unlimited Membership, the books they have on their devices vanish. The second is that there's a limited number of authors available (although there are well over 1,000,000 titles available). Each author or publisher decides whether to participate, and the big names like KIng, Grisham, etc. do not. So, the vast majority of what they have are self-published books of wildly varying quality.
The new benefit, Prime Reading, is sort of a cream of the crop of Kindle Unlimited. It's got about 1,000 books (and magazines, including some popular ones) available. There are a couple of "name" titles, like the Hobbit and one of the Harry Potter books, but, for the most part, they've chosen books from the best selling of their Kindle Unlimited authors. Instead of getting all of an author's books on Prime Reading, you can read one or two. Presumably, if you like the author, you'll buy more of his or her work. What I really think they're trying to do is to use Prime Reading to persuade people to sign up for Kindle Unlimited by showing that these self-published authors can be pretty good, even if they aren't household names. Like Kindle Unlimited, you can only have 10 books at a time, and if you cancel your Amazon Prime membership, you lose your books.
Prime members still qualify for two other reading benefits, Kindle First (which allows them to get for free one of six selected newly published books each month) and the Lending Library, which essentially allows them to borrow one Kindle Unlimited book each month.