Kindle Unlimited (KU), a subscription service through Amazon that allowed readers unlimited access to books for just $10 a month, was unveiled by Amazon in July 2014. The reception by readers was mostly positive, finally a Netflix for Books! The reaction from authors and publishers was mixed. Kindle Unlimited was doing to independent authors what Spotify did to musicians. By offering their work for free to subscribers, they were potentially lowering the revenue that an author or publisher could make from each book. In this article we explore how KU has evolved over the past 5 years and its current impact on authors.
Since the inception of KDP Select, there has always been a KDP Select Global Fund, which is a pot of money that goes to authors whose books are downloaded for free through Amazon’s eBook programs. Authors who enrolled their eBooks in KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) Select prior to the launch of KU could have their books downloaded for free by Kindle owners who were allotted one free eBook per month through the Kindle Owners Lending Library. In the days prior to KU, the Global Fund totaled around $1 million, and was divided proportionally amongst the authors who had their books downloaded.
In July 2014 with the introduction of KU, the Global Fund increased to $2.4 M, and over the next year as more readers signed up for KU and more authors enrolled in KDP Select, that Global Fund increased to $11.5 M by July 2015, and today sits right around $25 M.
A whopping $267.9 M was paid out to authors through the KDP Select Global Fund in 2018. If the pot stays at its current size ($25.6 million per month) for the rest of 2019, Amazon will pay out $299.4 M to authors this year. It is possible that the Global Fund will continue to grow in the remaining months of 2019, which would make the total Global Fund payout for 2019 north of $299.4 M.
For the first year of KU, the payouts were simple: Each author was paid every time someone downloaded and read at least 10% of their book.
When KU was a year old, in June 2015, Amazon announced that they would begin paying participating authors by pages read, instead of by the number of books downloaded. At the same time, they introduced KENPC (Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count), which accounted for type size and line spacing to prevent anyone from cheating the system and artificially making their books longer. Amazon calculated the payout per page by beginning with their monthly KDP Select Global Fund and dividing it by the total number of (KENP) pages read. That first month it was decreed that each page was worth $0.005779.
As more readers and more authors entered into the KU system, the Global Fund size did not compensate for the increasing number of pages read every month, so the payout per page read dropped steadily in 2015.
In January of 2016, Amazon announced yet another change in how they were going to pay authors with the introduction of KENPC v2.0 (Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count). This was supposed to standardize for additional spacing and text features. Some authors saw their page counts, and thus their total potential payout per book, drop, while others saw them rise. Amazon claimed that the average change across all KDP titles would be under 5%, but individual authors saw up to 10% changes in page length.
An additional change implemented in V2.0 was the capping of payouts at page 3,000 for longer titles. This affected mostly dictionaries and large reference books but did have some implications for larger boxed sets as well. Since these changes, the payout per page has increased back up toward $0.005 per page.
Take a look at how these changes have affected payouts from the past year:
Under KU, using July 2019’s payout numbers, these are the maximum payouts per book based on total pages read:
| KENP Pages Read | Payout Per Page* | Max Payout |
| 150 | $0.004394 | $0.75 |
| 300 | $0.004394 | $1.50 |
| 450 | $0.004394 | $2.25 |
| 700 | $0.004394 | $3.50 |
| 1,000 | $0.004394 | $5.00 |
| 3,000 | $0.004394 | $15.00 |
| 6,000 | $0.004394 | $15.00 |
*based on payout numbers from July 2019
Looking at these numbers, it is easy to see why many authors were upset by the change to pay per page. Before KU, if you wrote a 150 page eBook, and priced it at $2.99 you would make $2.09 (after Amazon’s 30% royalty) off of a sale of that book and you would realize that revenue as soon as a reader downloaded the book. Under KU, that same book nets you $0.75, and that is only once a reader completes the entire book, which may happen within 24 hours or 6 months of the reader borrowing the book. Additionally, as an author, you do not know what the payout per page will be until the following month, so it’s hard to determine what the max. value of your book in KU is in any given month.
Authors do have a choice of whether or not their book is included in KU. An author can simply opt-out of KU altogether by not enrolling their book in KDP Select. This decision proves agonizing for many authors, and there are authors who make good arguments for both sides.
Hugh Howey, a successful indie author, offers some perspective in his blog post Why KU Short Fiction Still Makes Sense. He argues that the KENP system is leveling the playing field among indie authors. The amount of work that goes into writing 60,000 words is the same, regardless of whether or not you publish those 60,000 words as one novel or six, 10,000 word short stories. Under the KENP system, both scenarios are compensated equally, instead of being skewed in favor of short stories, which were often priced the same as full-length novels before. Howey is supportive of Amazon, and sung their praises in a recent interview with Digital Book World:
“Kindle Unlimited is just one example of the enormous sums of money an author misses out on by going with a major publisher. We’re talking $150,000,000 a year going directly to authors, and if you sign with a major publisher, you are taking yourself out of that pool.” – Hugh Howey
However, some authors argue that inclusion in KDP Select (and by extension, KU) authors are losing out on other revenue streams and becoming increasingly more reliant on Amazon.
Kindle Unlimited has sparked its fair share of complaints and controversies.
From a promotion and payment perspective, the biggest downside to KU from the beginning has been that authors no longer get paid for books that readers borrow and never read them. We all have that stack of books that we keep telling ourselves we want to read, but never seem to get to. In the early days of indie eBook authorship, if your cover and blurb were good enough to prompt a sale, then you got paid. Now the game has changed and is rewarding increasingly higher quality, engaging content. As competition increases, covers and blurbs become more important to make ebooks stand out from the crowd, with the crux of success coming from the content of a book and the quality of its storytelling.
The most notable and most recent controversy concerned the placement of the table of contents in books enrolled in KU. Some authors were placing a link at the beginning of their eBooks which directed the reader to a table of contents that lived at the back of the book. Since the number of pages read by a reader (which is what the payout is based on) is measured by noting the furthest page in a book that a reader views, some believed that authors were cheating the system by preemptively pushing readers to the end of their books. It turns out that this was not as impactful as many believed.
The same marketing tactics that work for selling books also work for driving KU borrows:
KU has two fundamental perks for indie authors who are actively marketing their titles:
The primary difference when marketing a title enrolled in KU is how quickly you can measure the results of your efforts. For a title not enrolled in KU measurements is simple: authors watch their sales graph spike and then watched halo sales come through in the following days. Authors tally up the total earnings from the promotion and compare it to the time and money spent actively marketing the title.
RETURN = Total Sales – Amazon Royalty – Marketing Cost
For a title that is enrolled in KU, there is an additional component to measure: KENP read. The challenge here is twofold:
RETURN = (Total Sales – Amazon Royalty) + (KENP pages read * KENP payout rate) – Marketing Cost
Many authors make a best guess by using the prior month’s payout per page to get to an approximate value of the KENP read in the weeks following a promotion. Sophisticated authors will look back at promotions over a 3 or 6 month window to aggregate the full effect, and the corresponding full cost of their promotional activity, to account for the lag.
Kindle Unlimited has changed the way that many people read books. By giving independent authors an arena in which they can sell their books without the competition of mainstream publishers, KU has empowered them to find audiences in new ways. But all the while, Amazon reminds authors that they hold the keys to the coffers, and can always change the rules. It’s impossible to predict what new perks and programs Amazon will release in the coming years, but being at the top of the eBook and book markets appears to be a top priority.
Authors still have control over many things: whether to enroll in KDP Select at all, the packaging of each book and the quality of the content inside. Successful authors focus on these elements and experiment with programs like KDP Select to determine the best path to success for each of their titles.
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"eschewed in favor of short stories"
I think you mean 'skewed.' To 'eschew' means 'to deliberately avoid or abstain from'
Thank you for pointing that out! You're correct and it has been fixed.
The one point you did not mention is that subscription services ALWAYS mean less money for authors - look at Harlequinn's model. It ran a subscription service and their authors earned less than most other authors. No way is any subscription model going to be good for authors earnings. KU sucks and is not something most authors will touch. What's worse Amazon are using their might to ensure KU has an unfair advantage - look at the top 100 in any genre and it's all KU. KU is not an authors friend. It's Amazon's friend to draw customers to their site.
Hello, Bronwen Evans. Sharing this: Yes, Harlequin sold books via subscription. Still does. And sells in volume world wide. As for making less $$$. While Avon was paying advances of $500 for 100,000 word historicals, Harlequin was paying advances of between 7500$ and $22,000. One of my colleagues nailed a $30,000 contract with Harlequin. Those contracts are few and far between, if at all now. A new contract today might see a $2500 advance. And the online division, Carina, offers no advance at all. The market has changed with the innovation of Kindles and the ability to self-publish. LoveSwept faded. Harlequin owned Silhouette, too. Print editions have less shelf space today across all genres because so many bookstores have closed their doors. I network with more than 50 indie authors every single day. Some publish wide, some are exclusive to Amazon. I don't know a single author in my group whose books outsell Amazon. At the most, other sales venues account for 20% of their sales. For a newish indie author it takes at least a year to top sales of 1000 books on B&N, with Kobo close behind. If the author is not a savvy promoter they won't even see those numbers. More often than not, successful authors selling across all venues built a readership on Amazon first. Yes, there are exceptions. I cannot address your comment that most authors won't touch KU. I don't know most authors. But I do know a 100. It is true Amazon is customer centric. Has been since inception. That is Amazon's foundation. Works for me. But it is always Author Choice.
While I do not question your satisfaction with Amazon--if it works for you, great!-- I do question some of your facts, especially the ones that looked back a few years as opposed to today's situation. Avon, in my 15 years in the business, never offered advances as low as $500 for books they brought out in print as well as ebooks (their ebook only line is very recent), and Harlequin (not Mira or HQN) never offered advances for one book of $30,000 for their series books (well, of course Nora got even more but she was an outlier). That latter figure might be received on a long, multi-book contract, with each book receiving a portion of it. The *earn out* on a book published with them could rise to the level of 20-30K, after some years. But its subscription model that produced those numbers was for many years, and still is, in print, so I am not sure that applies to the topic of this blog post, which is about ebook subscriptions. Also, a Harlequin subscription to those print books was not open-ended, as in pick any books you want from among millions. Harlequin picks, and sends them to you.
Perhaps some apples got into the mix of oranges in this discussion, or perhaps I misunderstood something.
THIS x1000
You know what would be nice is if the publishers gave other websites the chance to compete, but sadly they refuse to do so, Amazon makes a hell of a lot of money from authors both from publishers and non publishers, If the authors guild or whatever it is called had to even pay for a website with all there books available from all publishers and gave everyone a chance to upload and sell there books amazon would not have the monopoly they have, As for amazon not paying them enough, it is a fact that if an author used amazon only they would be paid 70% of every sale, meanwhile they are only getting a very small portion of each sale from the publishers.
The authors caused amazon to get a majority of authors to put there books on amazon and it is the publishers fault for this as they do not want to compete they want amazon to do all the work and to just reap the benefits even if authors receive less as publishers pay less to them.
One advantage to readers of KU is the freedom from paying for books which they will not finish due to any of several reasons. Among these are unexpected subject matter, improper spelling or grammar, and other features indicative of inferior works. Editing is often subpar or nonexistent. As a reader, buying a book based on a blurb or "recommendations" is at best a roll of the dice. Many times I have read only a short portion before abandoning a book completely. I do wish for authors to receive fair compensation for their work, but do not wish to finance their literary educations.
But that doesn't factor in those who read many more books under KU. I read a novel every couple of days. I would read nowhere near that without KU, so I hope I and others like me make KU more profitable for authors. I feel like I want to thank each and every one for letting me enjoy their works so much more.
Very Informative. Thank you. I have been so confused by all of Amazon's methods of paying. You have cleared the muddied waters somewhat.
You're very welcome Jane! Happy to hear that our article was informative and helpful :)
Very interesting article. Thank you. I still haven't figured out how or where to view on Amazon how much one has earned with this program. I check reports and unit sales but that doesn't give me the amount that will be paid for pages read. I had over 30,000 pages read on one book last month thanks to Freebooksy.
Thanks again... I do have a clearer understanding of how this works.
Now I'm confused again. Are you saying that there is a cap of 6,000 pages read? Does that mean that my 30,000 pages read is still worth only $15.?
Hi Susan - The payout is capped at 3,000 per book. So if you have a book with 4,000 pages and a KU reader completes the entire book, your total pages read will be 3,000. If 10 people complete the book, your pages read will be 30,000 and you will get paid out on that total amount. The max $15 is a limit on the payout per book borrowed, not a cap on the total amount you can get paid for KENP read for the full month.
Ricci that is a good question. In any case getting 1/2 a cent per page read is not fair and does not inspire one to be a writer because to make a $1,000 you would need 200,000 pages read.
I write books to sell not pages. They don;t sell you pages at a book store. Someone can download your book read the first ten pages and decide they don't like it. It didn't cost them anything so they feel no need to read it further.
If they don't like your book and got no value out of it, do you really deserve to be paid?
Authors should be creating engaging books that capture the readers' attention and give them lasting enjoyment. Authors should not be paid to create "click-bait" books that look good on the outside but offer little substance inside. Amazon's model seems to be aligning incentives the right way, and that's a step in the right direction for readers.
That is good news. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Hi, I just finish my book editing, and I am going over the contract with Amazon, and it dosent sound fair to the authors. I have not decided if what Amazon is right for me., especially the part of pay per pages. I DONT like that. Many people sometimes don't read the whole book, that means, you are out of luck and never will get paid.
They do give the choice to enroll or not in KDP Select. I am NOT. It took me 5 years writing my life story, as Pharaoh Hatshepsut. And Ithe reason I decide to write it is because I wanted the world to know what happened to me, 3,500 years ago.
Good luck to everyone.
Hatshepsut
Dear Madam, Greetings and I have authored 15 books in KDP and it's 90 days. I haven't got any payment. Please advise me. Thanking you, Yours Sincerely Arockiasamy
Hey there, I would recommend contacting Amazon KDP here, and explaining the issue to them. They should be able to help answer any questions and resolve the problem.
Do you have BookReport? That's one way to get an idea of how much you earn over the month with KU, and you can adjust the per-page payout under settings (I usually keep mine lower than projected just so I'm not disappointed :P).. I think the address is getbookreport.com if you need it. And it's free until you earn over 1K a month.
Very helpful, Chloe, since I'm currently enlisted in KU and I'm asking fellow authors about up-and downsides.
Question: under your title "Calculating Payout by Book" where you list the KENP, price per page and max payout, you
write that 3,000 KENP leads to a max payout of $15. Under that, you write twice the read of 6,000 KENP also grant you $15, which I believe is a mistake.
It will result in about $30, because twice the pages read means twice the profit.
Hi Mars,
Thanks, we are glad you found this helpful! The pay out for 6000 pages is correct. When Amazon released KENP 2.0 they capped the number of pages read that they were willing to pay out at 3000, so any book longer than that has the same maximum payout as a 3000 page book.
Ah, I just understood it by rereading your post. Sorry for my false accusation. It makes sense on Amazon's side--they want to avoid paying out fortunes for people reading through gigantic tomes or dictionaries etc.
Glad I found out about it.
PS-I just bookmarked your site. Keep up the good work.
Who has a 3,000 page book. Not even War and Peace is that long. I have converted all my books, 18 novels that average 270 pages (print) per book to KDP Select and Unlimited. As an example, I have a 7 book western series that I posted first in Aug. Dropped the price to .99 cents and watched. Not much improvement until Dec, then BAM, they took off. The first book in the series was written and published originally in 2012 with a print length of 324 counting front matter. Dec. alone showed 618 downloads and 126,087 page reads the oldest and first in the series was the highest seller/page reads. Adding the others came to: 2,605 downloads and 568,218 pages read for the 7 novels. It tripled what the same seven sold in Nov. and so far Jan. is tripling Dec...I love it. Just wish I had started earlier. I think the key is cutting the price to .99 cents (from 3.99). The increased downloads (more readers) extrapolated to more page reads...Do the math.
Ken, could you help me out here. I just began posting books on Amazon (KDP Select) in March, 2018 and began promoting them in April and May. The sales are not very high but I have a 14 book set that has been generating 220,000+ pages read. They are priced at 2.99. On your post you said that you reduced the price of yours to .99 and had many downloads. My report page doesn't show DOWNLOADS. If I reduce the price of mine to .99 and get 35% royalty, will I be able to see downloads somewhere? And how do the downloads work into the pages read? Please forgive my ignorance of this but your post sounds promising to me.
Ken Farmer exactly! People griping about a non-reality ... 3K+ pages in a book. That's 750,000 words for crying out loud.
Awesome article, Chloe!!!!!
What does Kindle Unlimited mean to me?
Discrimination! Unethical marketing practice.
Policies whereby a company offers privileges to one group of clients that are not available to another. It should not have been released if it was not being made available to all countries. I feel the same outrage that the lowest price one can set a book in the US for at 70% commission is $2.99 but it must be $1. higher t customers is Australia. I think that, allowing readers in some countries to buy for less—stinks, and is discriminatory.
KU means manipulative marketing, running a loss leader product aimed at trying to drive competitors out of the market and gain a monopoly. I thought that sort of marketing was illegal. It certainly lacks ethics. I try to run an ethical business and I do not support monopoly policies. I am not in KU and I don't plan to be in KU,
Totally agree - KU is not an authors friend except if you are a new author and need exposure. But as an author you also need to make a living. KU won't help you do that.
Informative read, thank you.
I'm curious about lack of a mention of the very large pie which is taken by scammers that get paid legitimate royalty.
Overall, the negatives seem to outnumber the positive benefits. Obviously the majors see it this way, otherwise they'd be into it, too. One thing is clear, both sales and borrowing respond to promotion but promotional costs rise while effectiveness diminishes in the tried methods. One needs new ways to promote constantly because what works today won't work tomorrow since everyone and their cousins jump onto whatever works.
Very good point
Great article! I do agree that KU rocks right now but the point is that we *are* at the mercy of Amazon's whims. For example, the authors who wrote short stories originally saw their income completely changed overnight with the first change.
I've had well over a million page read so far this month - KU accounts for 80% of my sales so I'm not going anywhere quite yet but what if they suddenly changed it? KU makes me $8k a month, and it's frightening because that could just disappear. I truly believe that distributing our books widely is the best solution for authors in the long run. Once we've built a nice following, in any case.
One of the problems I've run into with KDP is that I'm not able to offer first book in a series as permafree in order to attract readers to the rest of the series. That's why I'm taking some of my novels out of KDP. I also want to set up a book giveaway when people sign up for my newsletter, again difficult to do this if your book is enrolled in KDP.