Let's Talk Numbers: It's official! If you write novels, the new KU is AWESOME!

Apparently it's number numbers niz-umbers week here at Pretentious Title!! Yesterday we took a look at the top of the world by going over NY bestseller John Scalzi's numbers, and today (thanks to the Amazon announcement) we're back with a report on my own numbers for Amazon's "Netflix for books" reading service, Kindle Unlimited!

As you might remember, two months ago Amazon announced that, to try and stop the rampant abuse going on in the KU system, it was changing the way it paid authors whose books were borrowed as part of the Kindle Unlimited program. I actually did an entire post on the changes, Amazon's reasoning, and what it could all mean for us authors back when it was first announced in June.

But while it was clear Amazon would now be paying per page read instead of a flat rate per borrow for KU titles, due to Kindle Unlimited's "you don't know what you're getting paid until we pay you" system, no one actually knew what the payment per page would be until Amazon announced it on August 15, which is today!!

So how's the money in the new KU?


Pretty damn good.


The KU payment for July has been announced at $0.0058 per page. Now, this sounds small until you realize that Amazon doesn't count print pages, but Kindle pages, which are much smaller. My first novel in the program, Nice Dragons Finish Last, has a print page count of 287 pages, but a Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC) of 703, which is almost a 2.5x difference. This means, according to the official payment for July, that for every KU reader who reads NDFL start to finish, I earn 703 x $0.0058, or $4.07.

That's a LOT of money per read, especially when you consider that I only earn $3.42 off a sale of the same book. So under the new KU, subscribers who read my book for free actually earn me more than readers who buy the book outright. That's kinda crazy, but it's also amazing. Especially in large volume, as we see below.

Here's my total KU page count for Nice Dragons Finish Last for July.

Click to enlarge
Not too shabby! As you can see, I was averaging about 15-20k pages read per day for a monthly total of 604,268 pages read in July. Multiply that by the official $0.0058 per page payment, and you get $3504.75 for the month.

Thirty five hundred bucks!!! That's almost twice what I earned from sales in the same time period!! And keep in mind that OGDDA didn't come out until August 1, so these are earnings from only one title in one month.

To say this is a game changer would be an irresponsible understatement. Under the old KU payment structure, I was only earning $1.33 every time someone borrowed my book and read past the 10% mark. NDFL has always been popular in KU, so it wasn't unusual for me to make $100-200 bucks a month off borrows. That's not too shabby, but it wasn't great either, and certainly not worth the exclusivity Amazon demands if you're going to be part of KU. We were actually about to pull out and go wide with the Heartstriker series when this payment change was announced. Now? If these payments keep up, we ain't ever leaving!

But wait, it gets even better!!

So Travis and I were so excited with the initial KU page numbers, we decided to take a risk and put our new release, One Good Dragon Deserves Another , into KU as soon as it came out on August 1. Keep in mind: this was back in July. We did not know yet how much Amazon was going to be paying per page, but we were gambling that it would be at least half a cent per page, and since OGDDA was both a hotly anticipated sequel to a book that had already done well in KU and almost 30% longer than NDFL at 953 KENPC.

With all these numbers in our favor, we decided to take a gamble and go all in with KU. That was two weeks ago.

So how did the chips fall?

Click to enlargeThis is our August KU graph for both Heartstrikers books--NDFL, which has been out for a year, and OGDDA, which came out straight into KU on August 1st after 2 months on pre-order.

Since it's only the 15th, the graph only shows two weeks worth of reads, but already we've racked up 1,875,253 pages read across both books. Yes, that is 1.8 million, in two weeks. Now, of course, we d won't know what the August KU payment will be until September 15, but since these KU changes are all on the author side rather than the reader's (and given that KU payments historically don't tend to shift by more than 5% in either direction from month to month) I don't think it's too far a stretch to say August's payment will be very close to July's. So if we assume that and multiply our 1,875,253 pages read so far in August by July's $0.0058 payout, we made $10,876.46 in the last two weeks.

Again, this is not including sales. That nearly $11k bucks is coming from KU reads ALONE, which is actually about 3k more than we've earned in sales this month so far. And considering that being in KU costs us nothing except agreeing to Amazon exclusivity (which would be a lot to ask if the other ebook retailers weren't so abysmally terrible at actually selling my books), it's pretty much money for free.

Also, in addition to all this mad money, KU borrows are counted into sales rank. Since Amazon is so secretive about how their sales rank is calculated, it's impossible to say if the rank is being increased by pages read, or if Amazon is still counting a borrow as a sale like it did under the old system. Either way, the impact is still definitely there.

Thanks to their KU performance, both NDFL and OGDDA have been consistently sitting at sales rank numbers much higher than their actual per day sales would suggest. Since Amazon's algos promote books based on sales rank, that's a ton of extra visibility and potential reader eyeballs I'm basically getting for free simply by participating in the KU program.

KU: the gift that keeps on giving!!

Wow, Rachel. KU fangirl much?Hell yes. Did you read what I wrote above? If you write novel length works people read all the way to the end (and if people aren't reading to the end of your book, you've got bigger problems) then KU is pretty much a licence to print money.

Is being in KU cannibalizing my sales? Probably, but I don't care! A $0.0058 a page, I make more off a borrow than I do on a sale.

Are KU's exclusivity demands giving reducing diversity in the marketplace? Yes, and I do think that's bad, but I also don't think it's Amazon's fault. Amazon isn't getting all these exclusive titles because they're engaging in something unsavory like a rights grab. They're getting exclusive access to titles because they're paying authors a shit ton of money.

Authors have been critically underpaid for their work pretty much since "author" became a job. Now, a company is going out of its way to pay us for our content, and as someone who's a fan of getting paid for her work, I have zero problem with that company becoming the dominant market force.

Will everyone earn this kind of money off KU? No. I'm a reasonably popular midlist author who writes very long books, which means this new KU system was pretty much tailor made for me. BUT, I am also not the biggest fish in the KU pond by a long shot. Just as there are lots of authors making pennies off KU, I've seen established indie authors with multiple titles in the program reporting earnings of over $100,000 in July for KU alone. Again, this is money authors are earning on top of existing sales. Many of us are doubling (or more than doubling) our monthly income just by being in KU.

Now you're just bragging.I am not! I never post numbers to brag. There's no point. However impressive these numbers might look to you, I guarantee there's someone else reading this blog who's pitying me for my low sales. That's the eternal truth of publishing: there's always someone selling better (or worse) than you are.

So why did I post these numbers? Well, firstly just because I was excited about them!! Mostly, though, I wanted to present solid, numerical proof that the new KU isn't the giant middle finger to authors that many self-published writers have been proclaiming it to be. You'd think Amazon changing its KU payment system was the end of the world listening to these people kvetch. But while I do have great sympathy for those authors who lost money when KU changed the way it plays, I think these changes are exactly what needed to happen for the future of indie publishing as a whole.

By paying a flat rate per borrow, the old KU payment system tacitly encouraged short stories and serial fiction. More titles, no matter how short or even how good, were the way to make money. Now, though, everything is different. By changing the payment rules to reward authors for writing things readers actually read instead of rewarding people for who can write the most click-baity title, Amazon is actively encouraging the production of long, engaging, quality books that readers will read all the way to the end. I think this is a hugely positive change for readers and authors alike, and I hope that the new KU will be around for a long, long time.

I hope you've enjoyed this post on the new KU! If you want to read more of what I think about the program (Spoiler: I've been a fan for a while), try these older KU posts:

Let's Talk Numbers: Wild Speculation on the New KUKindle Unlimited Is Changing Their Payment Structure and Why I Think That's AwesomeUnlimited Profit: The math behind how Kindle Unlimited is going to make Amazon a ton of money, and maybe you, too!We also have an actually accurate report of the money we made off the old pay per borrow system if you're interested in seeing the earnings difference between the new and old systems for yourself. 
Thank you all so much for reading this special Saturday report! If you're having success in the new KU (or if you aren't and you want to vent about it), please leave a comment below! Let's talk numbers!!!
Until next time, I remain your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man author,Rachel