Kindle Unlimited Pages Read

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These days I’ve come across many articles and questions
concerning Amazon’t new policy that will be implemented starting
July 1st. At first it seemed confusing even to me, so I went
through some stuff and decided to clarify things for you today.


For those of you who have not heard about this yet - the news
says that Amazon twill pay Kindle authors only for pages read…


Before digging into this let me make one thing clear from the
very start. This will only affect self-published authors whose
books are available on Amazon’s lending services I mean those who
self-publish their books exclusively through Amazon’s “KDP
Select” program. It means that the news applies only at cases
when Amazon prime members get your book for free from the Amazon
Landing Library and if you are not enrolled at KDP Select program
nothing changes for you.


But what if you are enrolled at the program. Before the change
each month Amazon fixed a price per each landed/downloaded book
and paid everyone that amount. So basically each landed book was
viewed as a sale and the price was set by Amazon.


What will happen from now on? Well now what will matter is how
many pages have the people who have landed your book have
actually read. If someone downloaded your book and never opened
it - you won’t get paid at all. So you will be paid for each page
read.


“We’re making this switch in response to great feedback we
received from authors who asked us to better align payout with
the length of books and how much customers read,” the company
said. Basically“ Under the new payment method, you’ll be paid for
each page individual customers read of your book, the first time
they read it.”


Some might think about fooling the new system by making the fonts
bigger, double spacing the thing, etc, right? Well Amazon thought
of it too and developed a “Kindle Edition Normalised Page Count”
(KENPC) which standardises font, line height and line spacing. So
that part has been taken care of.


Since some have asked what I think about this here we go….


First of all it is good that the writers have the choice - it is
only for the KDP Select authors, so if you don’t like the new
system you can still sell your books on Amazon and be out of the
KDP Select.


Second I am thinking about my personal reading experience. I am
not from those people who feel obliged to finish the book when
they start reading it. In average I finish only 1-2 books out of
the 10 that I pick up. I give a book chance of 20-30 pages - it
either hooks me or it doesn’t and when it does’t I don’t feel
like investing my time and attention into it. If the writer is
not able to keep my attention and want me read more then he’s
probably not a very good writer, right?


So in that respect I think that it is fair. There are so many
VERY short non-fiction books, which have only one main message
and lots of air inside. There are non-fiction books, which were
written in 2 hours. Why should their authors be paid the same as
a thriller writer of 140k word book, who spent months writing the
book? Maybe if that new system applied to all book sales and not
only the landing library we would have less of those small non
fiction crappy books which were outsources just to make passive
income for the publisher? Maybe in that case only really good
writers would make money and not those who don’t even write the
books but outsource them and use keywords and stuff to get the
downloads? Maybe, I...