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KINDLE UNLIMITED PAGES READ FOR SEPTEMBER, 2015
Good news, I think:
Kindle Unlimited paid $0.00507 per KENP read for September, 2015.
That’s just over half a penny per page.
Why is this good news?
Because in August, 2015, Kindle Unlimited paid $0.00514 per normalized page read.
We now have two consecutive months with only a very slight change in the Amazon payment for pages read.
Recall that the payment for July was somewhat higher: $0.00580.
When July’s $0.00580 dropped to August’s $0.00514, I was concerned with this 11% drop.
I was worried about stability.
But with September’s $0.00507 roughly matching August’s $0.00514, I see prospects for stability.
It’s still early. We only have three months of data for the new Kindle Unlimited payout.
But we do have a year of data for the previous Kindle Unlimited payout, along with a few years of payouts for Amazon Prime borrows.
And that data shows that the payout tends to approach a fairly stable number (until significant changes to the program were introduced).
So there is reason to expect the payment to stabilize. Will it stabilize at or near half a penny per normalized page? Good question, but for two months in a row, that’s about what it is.
There is a little more good news, too:
The KDP Select Global Fund has risen to $12M for September, 2015.
This figure has steadily grown, and has been fairly stable.
The KDP Select Global Fund for August was $11.8M, and it was approximately $11M in May, June, and July.
This represents a very large, indie-friendly customer base. Amazon is paying over $100M per year just for KDP Select books borrowed through Kindle Unlimited and Amazon Prime.
This customer base is not just very large, its stable; if anything, it appears to be growing a little.
Write happy, be happy. 🙂
Chris McMullen
Copyright © 2015
Chris McMullen, Author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers
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Question about Kindle Unlimited. Do you think it’s having an effect on actual sales?
Sometimes, yes. Each borrow helps with sales rank, which in some situations helps with exposure. Overall, I believe it helps with sales.
I’m still trying to figure out how much of an effect the pages have on the rank. I assume it isn’t as much.
I believe just the borrow matters, not when pages are read.
In that case, I do wish they had a column for borrows. Just to get an idea of how many there are.
That would be nice.
As a relative newcomer to the indie scene I am still finding my feet. I publishes a four book series, Mark Kane Mysteries, in mid-August 2015 and decided to go with KDP Select. For me the decision seems to have been the right one. My September page reads were 110,000 and hey have now levelled out to an average of 2,500 per day. My September sales were about 600 units. However, whilst I have a detailed breakdown of which books were sold and in which Marketplace, I have no way of telling which books were borrowed or from where. This is a pity since the sales figures have been very helpful, revealing a surprising pattern – one of my books sold as many as the other three put together! This has been useful to know because I am now able to concentrate on what it is that readers like more about the successful book and then try to modify the content in the other books in due course. It has been very interesting for me because the bet-selling of my books was the one I considered the weakest, if only because my books are crime mysteries, and the one that sells the best is the one with virtually no action. However, the real purpose of writing is to point out something overlooked by Chris. You can have some of your books in Select and others not which can give you the best of both worlds. When my current 90 day period ends I plan to omit the best-selling book from Select and place it on other sites, especially Smashwords and B&N. I hope to be able to use the front & back matter in the book to drive sales of the other books which I propose to keep in Select. Another advantage of having a multiple book series on Select is that it gives you the ability to run a free promo every week during the Select 90 day period. With four books I can run a a free book every 4.5 days on average. I will publish a fifth book in the series at the end of this month, so I can leave books 2-5 in Select. By Christmas I hope to publish a sixth book in the series. That would give me 2 days per week to run free promos, so throughout the whole period at least one book in the series will be available free every week. Another consideration for me with Select is the Reviews. I have found these extremely hard to garner, even though I am building subscribers through my website (johnhemmings.net). I feel that for the time being it is better for me to get what reviews I can all in the same place, so the exclusivity requirement doesn’t really worry me. Incidentally a gripe at this point: Why doesn’t Amazon post reviews from .UK on Amazon.com (although it does the reverse? I was unaware that page reads (or borrows) count towards sales rank and am a little sceptical about that because there have been days when I’ve had over 7,000 page reads but have seen no reflection in the sales rank. My last comments on Select borrowers are these: 1. I’m pretty sure that most (if not all) borrowers would have purchased my book. 2. I think borrowers may ultimately prove to be a good source of reviews. 3. Books sell by word of mouth – the more mouths the better! On a different topic there is one particular thing which I have found more than a little surprising. In spite of great care I found (or had pointed out to me) quite a few errors in the text of each book. Every time this happened I immediately corrected the file and re-uploaded it. This does not only relate to typos. I also changed some of the text where I found (in retrospect) the writing was a little clumsy, or I felt something needed to be better or more fully expressed. But I have read a large number of reviews of other books complaining about grammar/spelling mistakes and, to my amazement, even though some of the reviews date back a year or two, no attempt has been made by the author to correct them !! One of the things I like about digital books is that they are so easy to re-edit and improve. Usually it takes little more than five minutes to edit and re-post on the site. To date I have done it more than 20 times – each time (I hope) improving the books, the introduction or the front/back matter. I have also found that some of the authors who fail to correct complain about sales. Most readers find obvious grammatical/ spelling and other errors irksome. Other errors include howlers. I hope that my comments will be helpful food for thought for some others.
I’m sorry, the previous comment contained one of my famous typos. Under 1. it should read ‘I’m pretty sure that most (if not all) borrowers would NOT have purchased my books.’
Whilst I’m on the subject of borrowers I would just mention that on my worst day this month (October) when I sold only one book ($2), and reached for the gun, I was relieved to notice that I had 3,700 page reads (worth $19) before I pulled the trigger!!
Thanks for sharing the figures with us. By these numbers, it does look like it is stabilizing.
The $12M KDP Select Global Fund is definitely something to be happy about. I hope the figure keeps growing every month, that will always be a positive signal for authors.
Indeed. 🙂
I am a little confused by your claim of 5 cents per page read. I just look at my most recent statement from Amazon, and I only received about 3 cents per page. I didn’t have a ton of reads…somewhere around 300 pages, but it was not 5 cents per page. Any ideas why not?
Also, you are definitely correct on borrows helping your rankings. I moved up quite a bit this past week, and I’ve had no recent sales, just a lot of KENP reads – about double where I was last month.
It’s half a cent per page…
Hi,
Me again. It is of course 0,5 cents (half a cent) a page, not 5 cents.
I have done some math which may be of interest, although I expect most of you have done your own.
First let me say that I suspect that Amazon increased the fund only as a means of keeping the per page payment above half a cent. In order to determine how worthwhile it is to join (or stay with) Select let’s look at the figures. My books sell for $2.99 so my royalty is $2.06 per book. For UK sales I get the equivalent of $1.75, the difference being caused by the UK VAT (a sales tax).
My KENP pages work out at an average of 350 pages per book, as follows.
1. Pages 195, KENP 373; 2. 164/306. 3. 176/331. 4. 205/380. At an average of 350 KENP, assuming someone reads the whole book, I will get $1.75. This is the same as I’d get from a UK sale, a bit less than for a U.S. sale. However, if my books were priced at 0.99c my sales royalty would be 35c. In that case the borrow would net me five times as much as a sale.
For this reason Select ought to be very attractive for those selling at 99c. Of course, my figures are based on an average KENP of 350. If the books shorter then the return would be less per book.
At the moment about one quarter of my royalties derive from borrows and so it’s still attractive to me – it would only bother me if I decided I wanted to sell my books through another site. As I mentioned before, I plan to keep one book out of Select and post it on both Amazon and other sites as a ‘permafree’ book, For myself I can’t see any downside to select right now.
LOL. What a dummy. You are so right! Sorry about that. 😉
Reblogged this on The GUNDERSTONE review.
Thank you. 🙂
Thank you – keep us updated on those numbers; I’ll keep pushing your post along.
Reblogged this on Kim's Author Support Blog.
Thank you for the reblog. 🙂