For Crying Out Loud!
For those of you fa
miliar with Amazon’s new payout scheme for Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP), authors get paid for the number of pages read versus books sold. It theory it sounded like a good idea for authors who would write very thin books and then get paid the same rate for an author who wrote a much larger work. In the past, an author could expect around 1.14-1.35 for each borrowed through KDP Select.
Yes, in theory, it sounded like a good idea, but, to excuse the pun, it’s not really paying off in the long run.
When Amazon started this last year, I would get .0056 per page read. Then it was .0049 per page. Last month, .0046 per page.
The bottom line is that an indie author cannot make it out in the cruel, cold world of indie publishing without a friend like Amazon. Even though my books could be bought at other online sources, most people feel very comfortable and secure with buying only from Amazon. In addition, reviews left on Amazon do drive sales.
I look at any sale, whether a book is purchased or borrowed, as a way of getting more exposure. However, one has to wonder if Amazon’s KENP is really worth it.
