I'm aware of the change. I know the days of the "6-figure" erotica author are done for but from the research I've done I believe there is still some decent money to be made. Yeah that flat rate system was a magical time but so were the days when your Google page rank could be easily gamed with backlink blasting. Its just how things are. Loopholes get closed up and legitimacy gets enforced. The positive flipside is that then all the easy-money bandwagoners move on and the people with real passion for what they're doing have more room to prosper.
Regardless, the short story format still has a HUGE advantage in the new system. Now the bottom line in the kindle game is your total published page count. Lets say you spend a month writing a 300 page novel that flops. You just blew an entire month for nothing! But with short stories you can really diversify the keywords/subgenres you target. So say instead of that novel you write six 50 page short stories across different categories and only half of them tank. At least you still have 150 profitable pages up on the store instead of 300 worthless ones.
I don't disagree with what your saying in terms of the short story still having potential. I am simply saying you have to turn it into a long story to make money.
I had a number of short story series and once you get your head around the new system you can easily make $4+ per reader rather than the old flat rate of $1.35.
My income has more than trebled by seeing which books sell and then expanding them.
My point is if you leave as short stories you will not make any real money, a 50 page book = $0.25 per read on KDP, you now need to expand them to make real money.
But lets take your 50 pages scenario. At $0.005 per page read that is $0.25 per book read. On your model you spend all your time getting that high up the chart and then when you do, you launch another book? Why bother? Expand to 100 pages and double your income with no more marketing. Or put all 300 pages in and don't have any "new" book tank. Now your making $1.50 per book read and keep scaling.
I now have fiction books with over 2000 pages that make me $10 per read each!
So your better off launching short story book 1, seeing how it does and if it does well, rather than launching book 2 separately, expand book 1 by adding book 2 to it and so on.
Chances are if you cannot get book 1 in a series to work you wont get books 2 onwards to either. So your best using your time in starting another new series rather than writing book 2 and changing the keywords.
If you have a few decent books that you expand it is pretty easy to get to $10,000 + per month on Kindle now.
