Amazon has just announced sweeping changes to their Kindle Direct Publishing Select program. Under this new model, the amount an author earns will be determined by their share of total pages read rather than their share of total qualified borrows.
Here are a few examples illustrating how the fund will be paid out. For simplicity, assume the fund is $10M and that 100,000,000 total pages were read in the month:
- The author of a 100 page book which was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $1,000 ($10 million multiplied by 10,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).
- The author of a 200 page book which was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $2,000 ($10 million multiplied by 20,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).
- The author of a 200 page book which was borrowed 100 times but only read half way through on average would earn $1,000 ($10 million multiplied by 10,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).
The authors that will benefit the most from the KDP Select restructuring are those who publish episodic or serialized fiction. There has been an influx of this type of material on Amazon in the last few years, since the books are easily read, digestible and there is freedom for the author to pivot based on consumer feedback.
In other Amazon news the company has announced they are increasing the global funds for KDP Select. There is an extra $7.8 million to the May KDP Select global fund on top of the previously announced $3 million base fund, bringing the total fund to $10.8 million. July and August should also see the total revenue pool around $10 million as well.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.