This decision proves agonizing for many authors, and there are authors who make good arguments for both sides. An author can simply opt-out of KU altogether by not enrolling their book in KDP Select. value of your book in KU is in any given month.Īuthors do have a choice of whether or not their book is included in KU. 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. 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. 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. Looking at these numbers, it is easy to see why many authors were upset by the change to pay per page. Under KU, using July 2019’s payout numbers, these are the maximum payouts per book based on total pages read: KENP Pages Read
Take a look at how these changes have affected payouts from the past year: Since these changes, the payout per page has increased back up toward $0.005 per page. This affected mostly dictionaries and large reference books but did have some implications for larger boxed sets as well. 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.Īn additional change implemented in V2.0 was the capping of payouts at page 3,000 for longer titles. Some authors saw their page counts, and thus their total potential payout per book, drop, while others saw them rise. This was supposed to standardize for additional spacing and text features. 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). That first month it was decreed that each page was worth $0.005779.Īs 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.įor 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.
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. 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.Ī whopping $267.9 M was paid out to authors through the KDP Select Global Fund in 2018. 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.
#How much money can you make on kindle direct publishing for free#
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. 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. In this article we explore how KU has evolved over the past 5 years and its current impact on authors. By offering their work for free to subscribers, they were potentially lowering the revenue that an author or publisher could make from each book. Kindle Unlimited was doing to independent authors what Spotify did to musicians.
The reception by readers was mostly positive, finally a Netflix for Books! The reaction from authors and publishers was mixed. 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.
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