As we approach summertime and the anniversary of Kindle Unlimited, it’s once again time to revisit the fortunes and strategies of indie authors participating in Amazon’s ebook subscription service, Kindle Unlimited (KU), which requires exclusivity to Amazon (on the ebook edition only). For those who need a quick refresher on where we’ve been:
- July 2014: KU launches at $9.99 per month for “all-you-can-eat” access to ebooks and audiobooks. (In fall 2016, popular magazines were added.)
- Summer 2015: KU begins paying self-published authors based on pages read. The pool of money for making these payments–the KDP Global Fund—is retroactively determined each month. (Traditionally published titles receive some agreed-upon standard payment once a certain percentage of the book is read. Notably, no Big Five publisher offers its titles through KU.)
- Summer 2015–present: Amazon continually tweaks what constitutes a page read and makes other modifications to the system, particularly to curb manipulation. Some unscrupulous people accumulate falsely high page reads in KU by deceptive means; Amazon has to remain vigilant to prevent underhanded tactics that hurt all indie authors, since there’s a fixed amount of money to go around each month to pay for pages read.
For an excellent historical overview of the Global Fund payout (and the value of a page read), we recommend Written Word Media’s charts. The first month’s fund was $2.5 million; it reached $17.8 million in April 2017. The average payout per page has remained fairly consistent—just under half a cent.
What can we say about KU publishing strategy after three years? Well, to encapsulate it in a Facebook relationship status: “It’s complicated.” Most well-established indie authors do not go exclusive with Amazon and instead distribute widely. Less-well-known authors have more to gain by putting all their eggs in the Amazon basket. KU page reads contribute to a title’s Amazon ranking, and thus can make a title more visible. When we asked author Sean Platt of the Self-Publishing Podcast about the matter, he confirmed, “KU is where all the power is. [It] is pixie dust. Sprinkle some of that on a subpar title, and it can shoot up the ranks by simply existing.”
KU may have created a marketing challenge for perma-free titles. A perma-free title is one that is distributed widely for free at all retailers, forcing Amazon to price-match to free even though it doesn’t technically allow KDP authors to price below 99 cents. Based on a range of private conversations we’ve had with indie authors, perma-free doesn’t work as well as it once did for attracting new readers, especially when compared to KU-enrolled titles. When we asked Platt (who was an early champion of first-in-series perma-free, prior to KU’s launch) about this, he told us, “There are two big problems with perma-free: Amazon hides those titles, so discoverability is totally balls, and they give no ‘weight’ to them in downloads, so your ranking has a really hard time staying buoyant.” Author Lindsay Buroker told us something similar, and added, “In the early days, you’d get folks downloading [perma-free] whether you did any promo or not, but that’s not really the case anymore.”
Whether related to KU or not, it’s clear that Amazon changed their algorithms and doesn’t favor free downloads like they used to. One author, who prefers to remain anonymous, told us, “This isn’t a horrible thing for authors in some ways. I think scammers were using free to jack up their paid rankings. … It’s pretty common knowledge that blackhatters were setting a KU book to free—often it was just random computer-generated text—and then using underhanded methods to drive up downloads. … They often wound up at the top of the free charts, where they’d get KU readers clicking [the] borrow button without checking the Look Inside. Then they’d come off free and their rank would be super high and they’d pick up sales as they slid down the rankings. So Amazon probably changed the system so that free downloads don’t count as much towards rank.”
While there’s commonality in the author reports we’ve received about the challenges of perma-free, there was also confirmation that it can still work as part of a larger strategy, especially when authors aren’t relying on Amazon’s algorithms for visibility and when they have a variety of ways to bring attention to their work and attract new readers outside of the Amazon retail environment.
Bottom line: Given how the rules keep changing, we ourselves feel exhausted when browsing author discussion boards about the strategies and tactics involved in using Kindle Unlimited, and we expect Amazon will have to remain on top of bad actors who continue to manipulate the system. Just last week, we observed complaints in the author community about “epic-length” ebooks in KU—standard-length novels padded with tons of extras (and, in one case, a full-length trilogy) so that the books end up in the thousands of pages. However much artificial intelligence Amazon has applied to prevent manipulation of the per-page read system, it’s safe to say they probably need to do more.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
