KDP Select

Dear Readers,

Finally, let’s come to KDP Select. Many of you have been asking me about this and I got a little busy so I couldn’t post it until now.

Books that have been enrolled into KDP Select when you are setting up your Amazon KDP book, can be read for free by anyone who has a Kindle Unlimited (KU) subscription. I’m sure you’re aware of it but in case you’re not, KU is a subscription plan for readers where they can borrow 10 books at a time, read, return, all for a very nominal fee every month. More on it here.

So, if you as the author enroll your books into KDP Select, you’re probably wondering what’s to gain here if people are going to borrow your books and not buy them. The gain is in the money, baby. Amazon pays the authors for KDP Select from a global fund that is announced every month. Authors however are paid only when readers borrow their books and read it because Amazon calculates the number of pages read and not just the number of borrows per month.

In the 1.5 year experience that I’ve had working on Amazon KDP for my books, I can definitely see that a majority of my income is from Kindle Unlimited royalties. If you feel that you’d rather people buy your book and not just borrow it, I’d still ask you to consider this for a while and see.

However, I’ve also noticed that KDP Select is more useful for fiction, rather than non-fiction. It could be because most non-fiction books are perceived to be more useful than fiction and hence, people want to own them, rather than just read and return them.

You don’t need to do anything extra to enroll your book into KDP Select. When you’re setting up your book for publication on Amazon KDP, just remember to select the box that appears right on top of the third tab.

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Once you’ve selected this box, you’re book can be read for free by KU subscribers. You also cannot upload your book on other eBook platforms like Smashwords, Kobo, Google Play etc. There’s a list of do’s and don’ts which is quite easy to follow.

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These are some of my books which are up on Kindle Unlimited. You can borrow them or buy them on Amazon and read them on your Kindle device or Kindle app on your phone.

If you want to do a little more reading about KDP Select, do check out this blog - https://blog.reedsy.com/kdp-select/

If you’re not sure about what sort of Global Fund we’re talking about, it’s all out in the open, here - https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/kdp-global-fund-payouts/

From $2.5 million in July 2014 when Kindle Unlimited began, we’ve come to $32.2 million. Not joking. You’ll get just a minuscule portion of this pie because the money you get is calculated by the number of pages of your book that has been read. But the more number of books out there means more people borrowing your book and reading it subsequently.

Also, since we are talking about money, how does one get paid? Since you enter your bank details and tax information when you set up your account, Amazon transfers the money that you’ve earned for a month once 60 days are completed. So, any money that you make in July will get credited to your account in the beginning of October. Amazon pays out only money that you have made from the US and Indian market at the moment. The other markets information is given to you but only when you reach a certain threshold do you get paid.

With this, we come to an end of this series. But I’ve got other KDP related articles coming up, interviews with bestselling authors who have aced KDP in India, etc. Until then, happy reading and happy writing!

Read Part 1 of this series here.

Part 2 on Kindle Create can be read here.