How Does Kindle Unlimited Actually Work? The Pros & Cons

This weekend, someone asked how Kindle Unlimited actually worked, and that seemed like a good topic for a post.

Basically, the idea is that the customer pays $9.99 a month, and then can check out an “unlimited” number of books from Kindle Unlimited. (In practice it’s ten books at a time, but you can return them at any time and check out more.)

How does a KU writer get paid? The author gets paid on a per page read basis. Typically, it’s about $0.0045 per page as Amazon defines page, though this can go up or down a little from month to month, but it tends to average around $0.0045 a page. (Amazon refers to page count as KENPC, which is an acronym for Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count.) The rough rule of thumb to find your book’s “page count” is to divide the word count by 153, though it can vary a little based on chapter and paragraph size. CHILD OF THE GHOSTS has about 713 “pages”, so a complete read-through of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS would get me about $3.20. If a book is in Kindle Unlimited, you can either purchase it as an ebook directly, or check it out through KU and return it once you are done.

As you can imagine, this system rewards long series with long books that people actually read from beginning to end. (SILENT ORDER didn’t really work in Kindle Unlimited because the books were too short to recover the costs of advertising them.) For me, THE GHOSTS/GHOST EXILE combined comes to just about 10,500 pages, so if someone reads through the entire thing, that’s (approximately) $47 dollars or so.

Kindle Unlimited does have some drawbacks. The two big problems with Kindle Unlimited are 1.) books in KU can’t be available on other platforms like Google Play and Nook and Kobo, and 2.) the payment model tends to attract scammers who put up fake books and then pay click-farms overseas to read through books.

Problem One is, for me, a big one. I don’t like removing my books from the other vendors. And, from a business perspective, it’s a bad idea to put all your eggs in one basket. So I’ll rotate series in and out of Kindle Unlimited, but I’d never put all my books on Kindle Unlimited at the same time.

Amazon tends to get a lot of flak over Problem Two, but in all fairness it’s not entirely their fault. If you look at the world of nature, any successful ecosystem attracts parasites. Unfortunately, this is also true of any successful human systems. Traditional publishing was riddled with scams long before ebooks came along – like agents who charged a fee to read books, publishers who sold useless “marketing packages” to their writers, and so forth. And, of course, this does not mention the “legitimate” agents and publishers who stole from their writers as a matter of course – think of Hugo Gernsback and Chuck Palahniuk’s agent, to cite two of the more famous examples. For that matter, all fields of human endeavor have trouble with scams, and some of them are in areas drastically more serious that fiction publishing. In the US, Medicare fraud and Social Security fraud are consistent ongoing problems. If the US government can’t entirely stop fraud (and they have nuclear weapons and well-armed police!), Amazon can’t, either.

That said, Amazon does try to shut down KU scammers. The big weakness of Amazon’s enforcement approach is that it’s highly automated and occasionally flags innocent writers.  But that doesn’t happen all that often. If you follow the KU rules, and don’t try any sketchy tricks – using formatting tricks to make your book “longer” for more page reads, hiring click farms to read your book, or going with sketchy ad sites – you’ll more than likely be okay. It’s like how driving sober and with your seat belt drastically reduce your chances of dying in a car wreck. Anyone can die in a car accident – but if you’re sober, well-rested, and wearing your seat belt, it’s massively less likely.

Kindle Unlimited, despite its problems, is more egalitarian, and closer to “fair” than anything traditional publishing ever managed.

But I do wish they would drop the exclusivity requirement.

-JM