Kindle Unlimited 1.0 vs Kindle Unlimited 2.0

Today Amazon released the payment rate for July under the new terms of the Kindle Unlimited program, $0.0058 per page. Previously, the writer got paid when the reader borrowed a book and reached the 10% mark, and the writer was typically paid about $1.30 per borrow. Under the new terms, which began in July, the writer was paid per page actually read. As you can imagine, this disadvantages writers of short stories, while advantaging writers of longer works. (One suspects Amazon wanted to get longer books into Kindle Unlimited.)

So how does this work in practice? My DEMONSOULED series is currently in Kindle Unlimited, which meant I could compare the results in June, the last month of the old terms, to the first month of the new terms in July.

In June, the DEMONSOULED books were borrowed 183 times, which meant I got paid about $237.90.

In July, under the new page-read system, 139, 255 pages of DEMONSOULED were read. (If my math is right, that would have been about 136 borrows under the old system, assuming that all the books were read in the entirety.) That means I got paid about $807.

Needless to say, I consider July’s Kindle Unlimited experiment to be a success. 🙂

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the future. Right now, SOUL OF SWORDS costs $3.99, which gets me about $2.79 a sale. SOUL OF SWORDS counts as 1,144 Kindle Unlimited pages, so if someone borrows it through KU and reads the entire book, I get $6.63! That doesn’t seem sustainable in the long term, so I expect Amazon will change either the payment per page, or more likely, how it calculates page count for a book.

-JM