$500,000 isn't enough for my book. What about yours?
No sooner had a I uploaded Hot Silver, my review of the Indian Pacific, than I received an email from Amazon inviting me to be part of KDP Select. This, I thought, is going to put the cat among the self-publishing pigeons.
Let us discuss…
What is KDP Select?
KDP Select is a way for self-publishing authors to put their books in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. The library allows Amazon Prime members ($79/year) to "borrow" one book per month for no extra charge with "no due date". ("Borrow" is Amazon's word, about which more later.)
How much will authors be paid?
Self-publishers will be paid pro rata from a pot of money determined by Amazon.
The pot is $500,000 this month and will be "at least $6 million" next year (i.e. probably $500,000 per month for the foreseeable future). Each time your book is "borrowed" you get one dip into the pot. If there are a million "loans" in a month and your book is borrowed once you will get a one-millionth share of the pot. If your book is borrowed twice, you will get a two one-millionth shares and so on.
In this example each loan would earn the author 50 cents. If your book was borrowed 10 times, you would make $5.
If the size of the pot is the same the following month but two million books are borrowed that month, a loan will earn only 25 cents. Ten loans would earn you $2.50. You have provided the same product and earned half as much.
What are the conditions?
To participate in KDP Select, authors must commit to their book's inclusion for at least 90 days.
During that 90 days the book must be available exclusively on Amazon.
The book can still be bought on Amazon, e.g. by Amazon customers who aren't Prime members or by Prime members who want to own it not "borrow" it.
My take on it
I have deliberately not read much of what's been written about this because I wanted to make up my own mind. Still, I'm reliably informed there's reams of opinion out there so you can see all sides of the discussion with a Google search for "KDP Select". I'd certainly love to know what you think.
The pie is too small
My gut feeling is that there will quickly be so many books in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library that the amount authors receive per loan will be tiny, perhaps negligible.
I already think 35 cents is too little to earn on most books. (I think 35% is a fair royalty but I don't think 99 cents is a good price.)
What you are paid for a "loan" of your book will make 35 cents seem like a king's ransom.
$500,000 sounds like a lot of money until you divide it by millions of loans.
My books have a value
My book has a value. I get to suggest that value by setting a price for my book and readers get to agree or disagree by choosing to buy or not buy it.
Because KDP Select works on a fixed pot of money determined by Amazon then divided by the number of loans of all books in the month, I'll be getting a different amount every month for the same product. I have no control over what that amount will be because I have no control over:
The size of the pot
The number of books in KDP Select
The number of times those books are lent out
It doesn't seem right to me that the more popular the Library, the less I get paid.
In making your books available for Amazon to "lend" to paying customers, you are making the Amazon Prime service more attractive. The more attractive it is, the more people will pay $79/year to join it. The more people who join it, the more "borrowing" there will be. The more borrowing there is, the less you get paid.
You are contributing to a mechanism to lower the price of your book.
That only changes if Amazon increases the size of the pot commensurate with the growth in Amazon Prime memberships and the number of the books being lent out. I don't believe that will happen.
We are teaching readers that books should be free
There is pressure to keep dropping the price of books. That's fine if you're John Locke and sell a million books at 99 cents and your greatest cost is the risk of RSI from writing too much too quickly. It's hard if you write in a niche or the costs of preparing your books are high.
When you fold books into a subscription model — Amazon Prime will not limit members to one book/month for long, I'll warrant — all books start to look free to readers because they are not weighing the value of a particular title anymore, they just get what they want for a lump sum.
Should my short walking tours of Sydney really earn me the same as Sebastian Junger's WAR, which is 10 times the length and required Junger to spend months in a war zone risking his life daily?
Exclusivity is a high price to pay
While you stand to gain exposure — how much is moot — by being in KDP Select, you pay for that opportunity.
To be in KDP Select your book has to be unavailable anywhere else for the 90 days it is available for "borrowing". (And you renew for another 90 days by default unless you jump in to stop the renewal).
If your book has already earned ranking, ratings and reviews in another online bookstore, you will have to unpublish it and lose that juice in order to participate in KDP Select.
In addition by being part of KDP Select you are:
increasing the value of Amazon Prime by making your book exclusive to Amazon
restricting yourself in how and where you promote your book.
In return you deserve more respect and certainty than payment of an amount that Amazon can't even tell you because it depends on how much money they alone decide to release that month and how many people borrow books. (Remember, we know how much it is the month we sign up but we don't know about the next two months to which we are also committed because of the 90-day minimum.)
While the amount indeterminate, you can bet it will be tiny.
Are there many commercial arrangements you can think of where you let someone sell your product and they get to decide afterwards how much they will pay you?
This is not lending
I don't like the terminology of "lending", "borrowing" and "library" that Amazon has adopted for this service.
What is happening with the Kindle Owners' "Library" is not "borrowing".
With KDP Select there is no physical item that passes from author/publisher to reader and back again. The author/publisher isn't without the book while the reader is "borrowing" it so they don't get anything back when the reader has finished with it. There is no reason, therefore, from the author's point of view to let the reader have the book for less than the sale price.
There is nothing to lend again and ultimately make more money from lending than selling because the same item is being paid for repeatedly (cf. your local DVD rental place).
Sure, the reader doesn't get to keep the book. So what? With most ebooks there is no meaningful distinction between borrowing and owning. I am reading a couple of wonderful books at the moment but I'll never re-read them so I don't care whether I "own" them or I've "borrowed" them.
I'm not getting materially less value from "borrowing" these books than buying them so I shouldn't be able to pay a fraction of the cost for the main part of the transaction: getting to read the book.
"Borrowing" and "owning" are the same thing to me as a reader, if I don't care about re-reading, but they are very different to you as an author because you are giving readers the same thing — the pleasure of reading your book — but making a small fraction because they are "only" borrowing it not buying it.
We are teaching readers the wrong language for a new model of publishing.
We already have readers who think they should be able to lend a 99-cent ebook to all their friends. They haven't grasped the difference between a physical book and a digital book when it comes to lending.
We need to help readers understand the difference between books and ebooks, not confuse them further into thinking physical books and ebooks can be treated the same.
"Lending", "borrowing" and "library" are not the right paradigm here.
There is no public interest in this library
Libraries serve a public interest — making books available to people who can't afford to buy them. I am all in favour of libraries. Amazon Prime and its Kindle Owners' Library are for people who can afford a Kindle and a $79 annual membership. They are a privileged group so this isn't about knowledge and education for all.
What I DON'T think about KDP Select
Amazon is evil
Amazon is a business. It is their job to make offers to their suppliers and customers. As a supplier, it's your job to decide whether to accept.
I'm not impressed by KDP Select as it's presented now but it's just an offer, not something Amazon is forcing on us. (Which is interesting because historically they have forced things on those who choose the 70% royalty so it is telling that they haven't done it with this.)
We wouldn't be where we are as self-publishers without Amazon and I'm grateful to them. Their job is to keep innovating and finding new ways to get ebooks into the hands of readers and I love them for doing that. That I don't agree with them on this, doesn't make them "bad".
That you shouldn't be in KDP Select
I've put a couple of my titles in the Kindle Owners' Library because I'm all about experimenting. Whether it's right for you depends entirely on you, your book, your promotion plan and so on. I'm certainly not suggesting you don't do it. You have to make the right decision for your books.
Personally, I understand the argument about building an audience by giving your work away — it's what I do with every blog post. I just wonder if the audience you're building this way might be an audience of readers who expect all your books to be free.
I would love to know what you think. Please let me know in the comments and tweet, Facebook or Google Plus a link so we can see all sides of this discussion.
