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KINDLE UNLIMITED PAGES READ
How much will KDP Select authors earn for KU/KOLL pages read?
According to Amazon, nearly 1.9 billion (1,900,000,000) Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP) were read during June, 2015 through Amazon Prime and Kindle Unlimited.
If the same number of pages are read during July, KDP Select authors will earn 0.58 cents per Kindle Edition Normalized Page (KENP) read.
Update: Amazon paid $0.005779 per KENP page read for July, 2015, almost identical to the forecast.
A little more than half a penny per page.
Or $1.00 for every 173 pages read.
How does Amazon calculate pages read?
Amazon keeps track of how many pages the customer has viewed.
So if the customer simply jumps to the last page of the book, that only counts as one page. They have to open every page for all of them to count.
Amazon starts counting from the start reading location.
Each KDP Select book has a KENPC (Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count), which may be different from the actual page count of the print edition and may also be different from the estimated page count.
It can be much different.
How do you find out what your KENPC is?
- Visit your KDP Bookshelf.
- Click the Promote and Advertise button.
How do I know how many people borrowed my book?
You don’t. You only know how many pages have been read.
If you have multiple books, click on the Month-to-Date Units Report to see a breakdown by book.
It would be helpful to know how many people borrowed our books. That way, we can figure out how many pages are read on average. This could be valuable data. Perhaps if KDP receives enough requests for it, they will supply this data…
DON’T PANIC!
Everybody’s pages read should be low on the first day.
Why? Because it takes time to read the books.
You know how many people usually borrow your book in one day.
You can’t expect everyone to read your entire book on the first day that they buy it.
So it’s silly to add up the pages read for day one, compare it with the number of borrows you normally get, and decide whether to opt out of the program.
Here’s my advice:
- See if the number of pages read increases tomorrow, the day after that, and so on.
- If the pages read per day (you’ll have to keep track—see the example below) is improving, this is a good sign.
- Eventually, the number of pages read per day should stabilize. It might happen in a week, a few weeks, or months.
- When the pages read per day stabilizes, compare that to how it was in the past. Use 0.58 cents per page to figure out what you’re making per day now, and compare that to the average number of borrows times $1.35 from previous months.
Don’t forget to check your KENPC. Your book might have more pages than you realize. I have books where the KENPC is 2-3 times the actual print page count. Things might be better than you realize.
EXAMPLE
- July 1, 200 pages read.
- July 2, 600 pages read. That’s 400 pages read on the 2nd.
- July 3, 1200 pages read. That’s 600 pages read on the 3rd.
- July 4, 2000 pages read. That’s 800 pages read on the 4th.
- July 5, 3000 pages read. That’s 1000 pages read on the 5th.
- July 6, 4000 pages read. That’s 1000 pages read on the 6th.
- July 7, 5000 pages read. That’s 1000 pages read on the 7th. It has stabilized. This book is getting 1000 pages read per day now.
1000 pages per day yields an estimated $5.80 per day (multiply 1000 pages read by 0.58).
If this book averaged 4 borrows per day in the past, it was making about $5.40 in previous months. We want to compare the new estimated $5.80 per day to the old estimated $5.40 per day, but don’t do this until your number of pages read per day stabilizes, or you’ll be disappointed.
If you had based this off the 200 pages read on the first day in my example, it would have looked like this book was losing money in the new system, but that’s not how it looked after it stabilized.
On average, about half of the books will see improvement to some degree, while about half of the books will see a loss to some degree. It will be good for some, bad for some.
But you have to wait until your data stabilizes before you can tell how it’s working out for you. Good luck.
Write happy, be happy. 🙂
Chris McMullen
Copyright © 2015
Chris McMullen, Author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers
- Volume 1 on formatting and publishing
- Volume 2 on marketability and marketing
- 4-in-1 Boxed set includes both volumes and more
- Kindle Formatting Magic (coming soon)
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