My post therefore is invalid.
I apologize for the confusion
It has been pointed out that the proceeding post has a math error and that person is correct. It is not .000972 cents per page it is .00972 cents per page. So my figure of .24 cents per 256 page book is actually $2.40.
My post therefore is invalid. I apologize for the confusion
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Starting next month Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Lending Library are changing the rules for royalty pay outs for writers availing themselves of the program.
Kindle Select held the promise of helping new writers build readership by offering enrolled books to customers who could read you book and as many other books as they wanted for a flat monthly charge. The writing being paid out of a pool of money as long as the reader who downloaded you book completed reading 10% of your book. The average royalty was $1.40 per unit or about 69 cents less than full royalty for Kindle listed at $2.99. Starting in July they are moving the goal posts once again. Under the new payment method, the amount an author earns will be determined by their share of total pages read instead of their share of total qualified borrows. Here are some examples of how it would work if the fund was $10M and 100,000,000 total pages were read in the month:
There is a math problem here. the current cash pool that is being drawn from is $10,300,000 of which the payout per book that qualifies (10% of the book's pages are read) comes to $1.40. 10,300,000 divided by 1.4 is 7,357,142 books. 7.4 million qualifying books. That is a lot of books and even more pages. Spot checking the number of pages of Post Apocalyptic books, the genre of my last book, the average is 256 pages. Lets assume that of the 7,357,142 books 75% of them, 5,517,856, meet the page average. The number of pages is now 1,412,571,136. Lets assume that 75% of those pages are read. 1,059,428,352 pages are read. Per page that averages out to .00094 cents per page or for a 256 page book, twenty-four cents. My book, is 213 pages, or twenty cents. Judging from the reviews that down tick the number of stars in a review for books in Sci-fi and Fantasy because of a low page number count, this new system screws these two genres. We either break up our books into smaller chunks, making them a novella serial and take some nasty review hits, or opt out and loose what was once a nice way of building up our reader base. The only one winning in this new system is Amazon. My guess is, over time, even Amazon is going to see a loss on this as authors bail on a system that robs them of hard earned royalties. |
AUTHOR
Gregg Macklin, writer of Science Fiction Archives
May 2023
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