/lit/ - Literature

>>19521065
Kindle unlimited is frequently a loss leader. Amazon pays out $0.005 per page view no matter how many pages a particular customer reads.

Authors publishing on kindle books for sale get 35% of the sale price. They have the option to bump that to 70% of the sale price if they sell the book between $2.99 and $9.99, enable all the kindle features, and sign a contract not to list the book on any other site for a lower price than what they list it on amazon for.

Let's say an author is selling a 500 page book.
If they sell it for $10 on amazon they get $3.50, if they sell it for $9.99 they could get $7.99.

Maybe the hype is gone and now they want to sell it for $1.00 to capture more market share, they now only get $0.35 per sale. If they bump it up to $2.99 they could capture $2.00 of that but perhaps it's only a hundred page book and customers are hesitant to pay that much so the author is in a tough spot.

Each person reading the 500 page book on Kindle unlimited gets them $2.50, they legit get more money for letting people read the book for "free" than they would selling it for $2.99 each. And they will likely find significantly more readers.

If you read more than 2,000 pages per month amazon looses money on kindle unlimited. My peak months have been around 45,000. That's more than $200 out of Bezos's pocket into the pockets of authors.

KU algorithmic rankings reward authors that publish at least once every two months. And they pay out based on number of page views with little to no regard to actual quality. This leads to shorter books in long series that are just good enough to keep the pages turning. I am somewhat split on weather it's over all a good thing or not.