a short thought on Kindle Unlimited

Recently, Amazon changed its terms of payment for the Kindle Unlimited subscription program. Previously, an author got paid if someone read to 10% of the borrowed book, and usually that payment was about $1.30 to $1.40 per borrow. Now Amazon has changed the pricing scheme so that the author gets paid per page actually read of the book, and estimates for the payment per page vary from $0.0025 to $0.0057 per page. Since that money comes out of fund that will be divided out by the number of pages read, we won’t know the exact number until mid-August.

$0.0025 to $0.0057 doesn’t seem like a lot, but Amazon seems to define “page” very generously. My book SOUL OF TYRANTS is about 260 pages in trade paperback, but that comes to about 900 Kindle Unlimited pages, and SOUL OF SWORDS weighs in at a whopping 1,140 Kindle Unlimited pages. Under the old payment system, I would get about $1.30 to $1.40 per borrow of SOUL OF TYRANTS, and $2 for each copy actually sold. Under the new payment system (depending on where the rate per page lands), for a borrow of SOUL OF TYRANTS I would get between $2.25 to $5.04, assuming the book is read in its entirety. I should point out that amount is actually more than what I would get from a straight sale of the book, assuming the per-page rate doesn’t drop below $0.0025. The difference is even more pronounced for SOUL OF SWORDS – at $3.99, I get $2.70 per sale, but with a borrow and a full read, I would get between $2.86 and $6.40.

So I don’t have an opinion on the new version of Kindle Unlimited until I see how it actually performs in the field, and I suspect Amazon will adjust the formula it uses to calculate page counts. That said, I do think a lot of press coverage of the change has been histrionic (at best), hyping up the “Amazon only pays half a penny a page!” angle without displaying any understanding of what is actually happening. One quote from a particular Guardian article caught my eye:

“Since the overall amount paid out to writers is intended to remain the same, there will be winners – mainly those who write longer books that are read in full.”

That’s a relief – I’ve been trying to write longer books that are read in full for almost twenty years now!

-JM