There have been several developments in the indie publishing world as of late:
 
First, Draft 2 Digital is making a major effort to establish themselves as a major distributor competing with Amazon’s behemoth.  A few weeks ago, there was the announcement of a new audiobook service that, unlike Audible, does not have a sliding royalty scale based on exclusivity.  As someone who sells at cons, you best believe that caught my attention as I could theoretically get CDs pressed to sell at the booth and still have my books distributed on Audible, Itunes, etc..  No, I haven’t looked into it yet as I’ve been a mite busy, but I’ll probably get around to it soon.
The second step that Draft2Digital took was to link up with Overdrive.  If you don’t know what Overdrive is, a short synopsis is here.  The Passive Voice gives his opinion here, and a couple of folks chime in their opinions via comments.  I’ve already clicked my 2 books through Draft2Digital onto Overdrive–I’ll let you know if there’s a big difference in my sales.
These changes are big news for those who are considering “going wide” and eschewing KDP’s exclusive agreement.  Why would someone do this, given that KULL will pay you for page lends?  Well, perhaps because there’s been a rush of articles on how KULL’s pot (which is fixed) is being scammed, clickfarmed, and otherwise cheated in a way that hurts honest authors.  This blog, in particular, got widespread attention among indie authors and content sites.  Although I think there are completely legitimate ways that an author can bottle lightning and suddenly have a whole bunch of page views, I can see the author’s larger point that this looks suspicious as hell.
In any case, Amazon has announced that they are revamping the way borrowed pages are counted.  If you’re in the KDP program, you should probably check your book’s pages and monitor to see if the new platform changes your page counts.  Hopefully, this makes scamming the system far less lucrative, and also allows honest authors to have higher payments.

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