Month: August 2015

As some people trying to make money as writers and publishing on Amazon probably know Amazon has changed the Kindle Select Program. It has changed where now writers are paid based on the number of pages people read in their books enrolled where their books may be borrowed in Kindle Unlimited or Prime.  For this page count Amazon has come up with some mysterious way to count the number of pages in a book.  They call this mysterious page count KENCP.

KENCP does not seem to be based on character count and picture count.  For different e-books of similar character count, the KENCP may vary widely.  Also the page count begins where they consider the Start Reading Location.  For my books that were enrolled, that was never set.  And they say when they set that start location the page count may change.  I figured if they couldn’t set the start location the odds are there is no way they would even try to correctly count the pages read.  That opinion may be overly harsh and perhaps for many writers it is not borne out.  I hope it is not borne out but when you see the errors I and other people saw, it is logical to doubt the entire system–especially when you are not one of Amazon’s darlings who gets special attention.

Most of my books had already fallen out of Kindle Select with only one new book left and one that I published under a pen name left.  My new books that were going to be part of a serial did not sell a single copy so I have moved them to draft mode until I can figure out what to do with them.  So I now only have one book, that is under a pen name, that is part of Kindle Unlimited.  They figure it at 121 KENCP and with no start count established.  It has only sold a few books along and I don’t think it was ever borrowed.  So it is believable that no Kindle Unlimited pages have been read in it.  I am not really worried about it one way or another as far as uncounted pages and money.

Since I have never “gone wide” as some say, meaning to sell my books at different locations (I did try one book at KOBO at one point and made a dollar there)  I really would like to put all my books in Kindle Select for Kindle Unlimited and Prime and also start back doing the free days, but at this point I don’t really trust the system.  Paranoid.  Yeah, probably, but the suspicions are not totally baseless from what various people are saying on one forum I frequent.  And from my own limited experience.

I figure I will consider putting my books back in Kindle Select after August 15 or 20th with the pay out for July.  With that event I will see what the general reaction is.  If the reaction is too bad I may reconsider and have second thoughts about putting my books back in Kindle Select.  Regardless, even if there is a positive consensus I may still change my mind and decide it is not worth the hassle with my existing books.  I may still consider it with new books.

Probably to stand a chance of getting a correct page count and start position I will have to re-upload with a change in formatting before I enroll in Kindle Select.  Yeah, I am not so paranoid as to think the problem is all on the side of Amazon. At some point I forgot about the code to start a new page before a new Chapter and also the code to set the start location.  So if that is part of the problem that is my fault.

But still, that Amazon didn’t use simple code to count characters and pictures and set the page count that way does raise some questions.  Why?  Why did they create a system they had to have known was going to be heavily flawed and cause headaches for themselves and for the writers?

In one of the forums someone has suggested page count bias may exist for genres.  They suggested that romance and erotic books are getting lower page counts.  Interesting thought though I don’t know if anyone has proven or disproven that notion.

So, anyway….

Disclaimer:  Any truth, proper grammar, or correct spelling is entirely coincidental

With facebook and twitter and some other social unsocial sites the elite media likes to refer to this phenom as the Social Internet or Social Networks.  Even before this phenom, the elite media hypnotized America to think not just that Google is a place for search but that Google is synonymous with search.   They did this by repeating the word Google a zillion times a day on the different cable stations and talking about how great it is.  Never mind that the search engines that came first were just as good or even better.  I know, opinion, but that is my opinion.

Google did a lot of bad things as they took over the internet but one of the things they did was that they empowered haters and spammers to rank websites through linking.  Why did they do that?  Did they do it because it created such great search results?  No.  They did it because they wanted their ads and paid search to be superior to their organic search.  After all, other great search engines that came before it were perfectly good at search, but they couldn’t make money.

Since a lot of webmasters thought they could game the system and were part of the system they helped the elite media create the myth that google’s organic search was superior.  Rather than joining with those of us who said google was stupid they joined with the elite media singing the chorus of how great google is.  In a way google was a social / unsocial system but spread across the known internet.  This was different from AOL that was trying to be both an ISP and a walled social unsocial garden.  AOL wasn’t so much doing that because of any agenda.  It was just part of the AOL evolution from being an ISP / and information service like the then GEnie and Compuserve and some others.  AOL was also a search engine but it operated its search almost like an after thought.

Now here comes Facebook that is  now trying to evolve from a Walled Garden Social Unsocial site to also being a connection to the broader internet.  It is following the google example by allowing its link farm to be valued by the unwashed masses of manipulators, haters and pretend lovers.   At the same time it does its own manipulations to try to encourage advertisers to pay them money.  There again they want to cripple the organic part of their system to the benefit of their paid ads.

I’ve never liked Facebook.  That is probably because it reminded me too much of how Google began.  When I hear the elite media repeating something a zillion times my reaction generally is “yeah, you aren’t going to hypnotize me, you f’ers.”

So anyway, now here is my downfall.  I actually did like twitter as a microblog.  I didn’t so much like the social unsocial part of it but I liked that I could put simple thoughts out there and with some linking.  I always saw the follow/followers/unfollowers/muters/blockers and other a-hole manipulators as problematic but still the microblog part of it is somewhat addictive.  And with the social unsocial part of it, I actually have connected with people I like.

But now for me it has become as worthless as google, facebook, etc.. The haters run twitter.  And now twitter has added a formula to censor tweets based on the behavior of not just haters but hatebots.  My main account is now being heavily censored so the time I spend on twitter is pointless, but even knowing what I know it is still addictive.

It is kind of ironic that the internet became a place for those of us who aren’t really very social in life and then the so called Social Networks took the internet over to our dismay and revulsion.  Now it is all about money and the so called popular people who many of us have spent a lot of our lives ignoring at best and disliking at worst.  It is the power of the elite media to now even rule the internet.  For many of us it is a sad state of affairs.  But you are unlikely to ever hear those in the elite media discuss that part of the internet story.