When someone says “kindle” in reference to books and publishing, there are a number of things that can mean.
Kindle—the e-reader device made by Amazon.
“Kindle book” or “Kindle edition”—an e-book, usually sold on Amazon, that can be read on a Kindle device.
KDP, or Kindle Direct Publishing—Amazon’s self-publishing platform, with which authors may publish e-book, paperback, and hardcover versions of books.
Kindle Vella—Amazon’s serialize self-publishing platform, which is part of KDP.
Kindle Unlimited (KU)—Amazon’s subscription service for readers, which makes e-books and audiobooks available for unlimited reads/listens.
Throw this book on the campfire to get it started.
The idea behind Kindle Unlimited for readers is fairly simple. For a monthly fee, subscribers have full access to a long but limited list of e-books, audiobooks, and digital magazines through Amazon. Subscribers may read or listen to titles on that list—Amazon boasts more than 4 million e-books and thousands of audiobooks—as much as they like. If they cancel their subscription, they no longer have access to the content.
In some ways, Kindle Unlimited is like Amazon’s library service whereas traditional Amazon is a bookstore. Under the traditional Amazon model, you buy a book, e-book, audiobook, or magazine and then you own that digital item, theoretically, forever. With Kindle Unlimited, users only have access to the library of content for as long as they subscribe; they do not own any of the content.
Anyway, that’s the value prospect for readers. Of the 48-million-plus e-books for sale on Amazon, unlimited access to around 4 million of them (plus audiobooks and magazines). The subscription fee is $11.99 per month after a 30-day free trial or two months at the discounted rate of $4.99. Publishers may choose to make Kindle e-books free or can price them from $0.99 up. Depending upon what someone likes to read and how much they read, $11.99 per month might be a great deal or it might be a waste of money.
In the Kindle Unlimited terms and conditions, Amazon acknowledges that books are added to and removed from the Kindle Unlimited library and they make no guarantees about the availability of specific titles in the KU library or the total quantity of available titles.
It’s fairly easy for a reader to figure out how much they spend on e-books and decide whether KU is a good deal for them. It’s much harder for a self-published author to determine whether making their titles available in KU is a good deal for them. Common questions from authors about Kindle Unlimited include:
How do authors earn money for KU participation?
Can people still buy my book if it’s available in the KU library?
What are the benefits of participating in KU over just selling the e-book?
Will I make more money with KU and KDP than with KDP alone?
Good questions, all. I’ll try to take them from the top and answer as many as I can.
KDP has a program—yes, another program, separate from KU, called KDP Select. KDP Select promises authors three benefits above what they would have as a KDP author without the KDP Select participation. These are:
Higher royalties, including a share of the “KDP Select Global Fund” (more on this later).
Promotion of their book by Amazon.
Greater discoverability, especially in international markets (ie, easier for readers to find the book).
In exchange, authors agree to two stipulations:
The digital version of the book (e-book) will be available only on Amazon.
The title will be enrolled in KU.
KDP Select is a 90-day program. During the 90 days that the title is enrolled in KDP Select, the author has access to the promotional opportunities such as Kindle Countdown Deals (limited time discounts) and free promotional windows (book pricing drops to free for 5 days to attract new readers). After the 90-day program ends, the title remains available in the Kindle Unlimited library unless the author decides, at that time, to pull their title out of Kindle Unlimited. Based on my reading of the terms and conditions, the title stays available in KU for the 90-day period during which the title participated in KDP Select. After that time the title may be withdrawn from KU, but not before. That is, the author cannot enroll their title in KDP Select and then immediately withdraw the book from KU in order to get the promotional benefits without KU participation.
Importantly, titles are enrolled in the program independently of one another. An author may enroll one of their books, or several, or all of them. Enrolling does not mean an author’s entire catalog must participate.
I’m not a lawyer, I just spent the weekend reading fine print.
So, the KDP Select Global Fund. This is an amount of money paid out to authors of titles that are available in KU. If your title is available in KU, you will receive a portion of the fund. The amount of the fund changes each month. In December 2023, the fund was $49.5 million, plus another $2.4 million from the “All-Stars Bonus,” so a total of around $51.9 million in royalties paid out to authors of KU titles in December 2023.
This money is split among KU authors according to pages read. Amazon explains it thus:
If there are 100,000,000 total pages read in a single month, a 100-page book was read completely 100 times (this book got 10,000 page reads) during that month, the author would earn a royalty of 0.01% of that month’s KDP Select Global Fund. This book’s page reads contributed 0.01% of the total reads for the month, so the author gets 0.01% of the money.
If we were the author who had a 100-page book read completely 100 times in December 2023, and there were 100,000,000, total page reads in that same month, we would have earned $4,950 in royalty, or 0.01% of the $49.5 million KDP Select Global Fund for that month. Good for us. That’s a huge royalty.
Meanwhile, let’s consider what sales royalties might look like for a Kindle title that sold 100 copies in the month of December 2023 (separate from anything to do with KU). Kindle authors may choose a flat 35% royalty option or a 70% royalty option less delivery fees (average $0.06 per unit sold). Let’s assume the 70% royalty option with a delivery fee of $0.06/unit.
If our title was priced at a modest $1.99 and we sold 100 units, that title grossed $199. Of that $199, the 70 percent royalty is $139.30, less $0.06 per unit or $6, so the total royalty would have been $133.30. If our title was priced at $9.99, we earned a royalty of $693.30.
On its face, this sounds like much less than the royalty the author would have received from participating in KU, but we must consider that KU pays out according to pages read and not on a per-download basis. If 100 readers downloaded our book, read one page, and then gave up, our December 2023 KU royalty would have been $49.50, not $4,950—because the title had 100 page reads of the 100,000,000, or 0.0001%, versus the 10,000 page reads we calculated earlier (0.01%). Decimal moved over two places and life got sad.
When an author sells an e-book, the royalty is paid out whether the purchaser reads it or not. As evidenced by the many Instagram Reels and TikToks out there of bookfluencers showing us their towering TBR (to-be-read) piles, purchasing books and then not reading them right away (or ever) is a thing. Under the KU program, a subscriber who “checks out” an author’s e-book but doesn’t read it generates the same amount of royalty for the author as a subscriber who did not check out the book—none.
Participating in Kindle Unlimited versus selling the e-book is not an either/or prospect. In fact, authors make their e-book available for sale on Amazon first and then opt the title in to Kindle Unlimited. Anyone who shops for e-books on Kindle is familiar with seeing the cost breakdown—“0.00 on Kindle Unlimited or $9.99 to buy.”
However, participation in Kindle Unlimited means the author may not make their e-book available for sale anywhere but Amazon. While other formats like paperback and hardcover can still be sold to and through other retailers, KDP Select–participating e-books are exclusive to Amazon.
The questions any author would have to ask themself in order to determine whether participating is a good option for them are:
How much of my e-book revenue comes from sources outside Amazon, and is it worthwhile to lose that revenue?
Am I willing to gamble that people who download my e-book will actually read it?
Does the enhanced discovery and promotion of KU outweigh the money I would earn selling the book to purchasers who don’t read it?
There’s no good way to math it. I’ve seen a lot of anecdotal stories from authors for and against KU. For every “70 percent of my monthly royalty comes from KU reads” there’s a “my monthly royalty payment plummeted when I joined KU and I had to yank my title back out.”
As a reader, I’m not a Kindle Unlimited subscriber. First, I don’t purchase enough e-books every month to make the subscription fee worthwhile. My reading is a mix of newly bought e-books, newly bought physical copies, newly bought used books, books borrowed from friends, and the hundreds of books I’ve bought in the past but not yet read.
Kindle Unlimited is—again, anecdotally—thought to be a better moneymaker for some genres than others. Romance, for instance, is supposed to do especially well on the platform. I was not able to uncover any proof of this—for instance, any comparison of the top genres on Amazon as a whole versus the top genres for KU titles. I can’t say with any kind of authority that romance, or any genre for that matter, does better on KU than any other genre.
I think the truth that Kindle Unlimited is trying to obscure is that the authors who get the most marketing have the most name recognition and end up with the most money. The Notebook is available on KU and Nicholas Sparks is probably taking home a bigger chunk of the KDP Select Global Fund every single month for that one title than the average self-published author gets in a year.
I also think the Kindle Unlimited is attempting to capitalize on every self-publishing author’s fantasy that their book could truly stand among the greats, if only people knew about it. That people don’t want to take a chance spending money on an unknown so they stick with what they already know they like, but if readers just knew about the book and gave it a chance then it would surely become a bestseller. KU offers enhanced discoverability and an opportunity to make your book free to readers and still earn a royalty for it. Whether any given author can make it pay, is the lingering question.
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