Author skills
What Are Kindle Unlimited Page Reads?
Explaining how the Amazon KU royalty model works.
If you’ve spent any time thinking about writing a novel, you’ve probably heard of Kindle Unlimited.
It’s Amazon’s flat fee, read-as-much-as-you-like model. Readers pay a few bucks a month, and they get access to literally millions of books on their kindle or phone.
Of course, not every book is in KU. It’s not the place for top new releases from the big 5 publishers. You won’t find the bestsellers from very high-profile authors like Stephen King or Dan Brown in there, and it doesn’t have much in the way of textbooks or academic non-fiction.
The first thing to be aware of, then, is who KU is for.
The answer: genre readers, especially those who read a lot.
KU is amazing for people who want to read loads of novels every month, and it contains a lot of fantasy, romance, sci-fi and thrillers. For the price of about two full-priced novels per month, readers can be consuming two a day!
These factors make it a great place for genre authors, too. After all, this is where your prolific readers are to be found.
Currently you stand to get around half a cent per page read, and so it would be a dollar for a 200-page book.
That’s probably less than the percentage that you might earn from a sale, but there are other advantages, such as visibility. Plus the fact that it costs the readers nothing extra to pick up your book probably makes them more likely to give it a try.
There are a couple of things that you should be aware of, however:
- If you’re in KU, you can’t be published elsewhere, at least not as an ebook. It’s exclusive to Amazon, and you can’t share more than 10% of your book elsewhere, even on your own site. This means that you cannot be published wide via markets like Kobo or Apple Books, and it can leave you very dependent on one source of income.
- Your book can, however, be available as a paperback or audiobook in other stores. Those rights are separate.
- The way that KU allocates money is based on page reads, and it’s not always very transparent. I’ve seen authors losing half of their KU royalties for a month because Amazon decided that it was going to recalculate and remove some registered page reads. There was no appeal process.
- You initially enrol a book for a 90-day period, and can’t take a book out during that time. After that, the enrolment automatically renews unless you uncheck the relevant box on Amazon’s site. This means, in effect, that you have to give Amazon 3 months notice to take a title out of KU.
Overall, the advantages of KU are hard to resist if you are an author of fantasy LitRPG like me, or similar genre-based fiction. I’d strongly recommend that you at least consider KU.
I hope that was useful to you. Good luck with your writing!
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