Amazon has reworked its model coming up with a new plan to pay authors for each page that a Kindle user reads. Under the new per-page model, books published under Kindle Unlimited (KU) and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) will no longer be considered based on the borrows, with royalties calculated based on reads from the first time a customer begins reading. Amazon boasts of more than 80,000 titles in its collection which it offers customers on different business models. Amazon says that the formula applies to Kindle Select books that are self-published and distributed through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program.
The Kindle Direct Publishing Program has the Global Fund that pays the authors each month, and is set to continue even with the new model. The fund will also select All-Star bonuses to award authors and titles based on Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library pages read. Through, its website, Amazon offered examples on how the fund will operate. If the fund was $10M and 100,000,000 total pages were read in the month:
- The author of a 100 page book that 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 that 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)
Amazon is also equally aware that some may try and game the system by using bigger fonts thereby increasing the page reads. They have come up with a standardized metric, the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC), which kicks off at the “Start Reading Location”. KENPC will also allow Amazon to identify pages in a way that works across genres and devices. Non-text elements within books including images, charts and graphs will count toward a book’s KENPC. Big boon for authors!
