Sci-Fi, fantasy and speculative Indie Authors Review discussion

I'm getting more royalties from the 'pages read' section than from direct sales these days. I wonder if avid readers are more likely to sign up for Kindle Unlimited?

Not too sure but that's where most of my sales have come from in the last few months. It's nice to see that people are reading your work but you still want the full commitment of a solid purchase. I think for Kindle readers it's like having a book store at their fingertips, making it easy to thumb through as they please. :)

Yes, I'm seeing the same thing - but I can't work out how much is coming from downloads of the books and how much from 'pages read'. Is there info on the 'Reports' page that tells us?

They don't break it out in dollar terms, as far as I know. The KENP graph shows the number of pages, and the $ / page is out there somewhere, so it should be calculable. It's the same across all markets, unlike the sales.

Thanks Richard. That's the way it looked to me. Like you I seem to be making more from Kindle Unlimited than normal downloads. Seems a good scheme for the author. I'l try and find the $/page. Cheers.

If I remember correctly, it's about .5 cents per page. It's slim pickings but better than zero sales.

I've been getting more in the KENP pages read lately too. Strange. A good sort of strange though.

Just done a quick calculation based on Pike's 0.5 cents per page and for Feb, I made three times as much on Kindle Unlimited as I made on downloads. I was baffled as to why I was making so much money each month! (I kept quiet, just in case Amazon was making a mistake ... as if they would!). What confused me was that the 'Royalties Earned' table does not to include Kindle Unlimited earnings. Should have read the description - it tells you so. (Read the small print dummy!)

The rate for March 2016 was $0.004778 per page. It's different every month. January was $0.004115 (causing widespread panic). The first three months of Select 2.0 (July-Sept 2105) it was well over $0.005 per KENP, but yeah, usually, it hangs out just below that number.

We make far more on KU than on sales: about 3X as much in recent months.

Unclear why someone reading the book on KU is any less a "commitment" than buying it. A read book is a read book, and we get paid either way. As is happens, KU pays us a premium, which we'll happily take.

There's a scam where people put a link earlier in a long book to a place near the end. This causes the whole book to be counted as read, due to sloppy programming on Amazon's part. The exploiters of these weaknesses are the despicable ones, but you would think Amazon could spend a bit more time thinking through the robustness of their software.

If you're on KU, then you should definitely be aware of this scam mentioned above by Richard. Here's a link to a great post by Ann Christy which outlines what's going on. Bottom line - scammers are taking money out of the pockets of real authors. So if you're on social media, do share Ann's post - very important that pressure is put on Amazon to resolve the situation.

http://www.annchristy.com/anatomy-of-...

Thanks for posting this Mark - I saw Ann's earlier post but not this follow up. This is absolutely horrifying.

Tracking with closeups

When Amazon believes they are losing more money by not fixing the problem they will change the situation. It appears that they only need to keep one piece of data at the moment, highest page number read. Pretty cheap record keeping. File and forget. The new process will require them to actively monitor the book being read and keep a running total of pages actually looked at. I wonder how much computing power that takes. If they had enough computing power they could probably keep track of the data to actually track what people are actually reading.

Mine have been about equal. Though neither sales nor pages read have been significant enough to give any long term data (for me at least), I'm not sure I see a real trend in KU over purchase right now.

The introduction of page-reads has meant that sales is no longer an accurate indicator of success. I mean, if someone sells 1000 books a month they're probably doing fine, but you can no longer assume that they guy only getting 100 sales a month is doing poorly (or less well), because he could, theoretically, have an insane number of page reads.

I just notice the page count on my first book has gone up. Used to be about 350, now it's 450. Did the Kindle gods change the algorithm? PS it's on special this weekend, 0.99, plug, plug.