Last month, Amazon changed their KDP Select program. That's where you can borrow a book for free if you have Prime or Kindle Unlimited. They paid authors based on a fund that they roll out every month.
So, the way the program used to work is that if someone borrowed your book and read 10% of it, you got a "full share" of the fund. This made it easy for people to game the marketplace by putting out a ton of short (10-20 page) erotica, childrens books, etc. If people opened your book and turned to the 2nd page (and who doesn't ever make it to the 2nd page?), you got paid. For someone with a novel, like mine, I wouldn't get paid until at least 20-30 pages were read.
The way the program works since July is that you get paid on number of pages read (which is normalized based on characters per page) rather than a blanket full share after 10%.
I always said that this would be great for long-form writing (novels, etc) that could really hook a reader and keep them engaged. It was going to be absolutely terrible for short-form writers like erotica.
After looking at the number of pages read for July it looks like I'll be making about five times as much in book-borrow royalties than I've made in the past--and for the first time, my book borrow payments are going to be roughly equal to my book sale payments.
Now only if it were enough for me to quit my job--that would have put this post in the major victory thread
So, the way the program used to work is that if someone borrowed your book and read 10% of it, you got a "full share" of the fund. This made it easy for people to game the marketplace by putting out a ton of short (10-20 page) erotica, childrens books, etc. If people opened your book and turned to the 2nd page (and who doesn't ever make it to the 2nd page?), you got paid. For someone with a novel, like mine, I wouldn't get paid until at least 20-30 pages were read.
The way the program works since July is that you get paid on number of pages read (which is normalized based on characters per page) rather than a blanket full share after 10%.
I always said that this would be great for long-form writing (novels, etc) that could really hook a reader and keep them engaged. It was going to be absolutely terrible for short-form writers like erotica.
After looking at the number of pages read for July it looks like I'll be making about five times as much in book-borrow royalties than I've made in the past--and for the first time, my book borrow payments are going to be roughly equal to my book sale payments.
Now only if it were enough for me to quit my job--that would have put this post in the major victory thread
