The news that Amazon is opening a physical bookstore this week in Seattle (see our companion article) almost eclipsed the fact that the company is also making a potentially potent change in Kindle Direct Publishing Select payouts.
KDP Select is the self-publishing distribution option in which authors choose exclusivity with Amazon for ninety-day intervals in exchange for access to the Kindle Unlimited (KU) and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) programs. In those programs, per-page-read payouts are made from the KDP Select Global Fund—which is set by Amazon monthly. Until now, payouts for borrows in different countries were made at the same rates universally from the fund. Beginning in November, because commercial conditions differ by the market, that will change.
In its announcement, Amazon used this example: “We recently launched KU in India with a local subscription price of ₹199 ($3.00) per month. As a result, starting with the November fund, we will work to take these marketplace differences into account, and payouts per country will differ based on local country factors.”
In other words, there’s not as much money coming in from a subscriber in India as from one in the United States, and Amazon says that market factors “such as exchange rates, customer reading behavior,” and subscription prices are now to be reflected in how its per-page payouts are calculated for authors.
The ever-acerbic Michael Cader at Publishers Lunch (paywall) makes the point that the fund’s value each month is set, after the fact, by the company. Amazon says that in November, the Fund will be at least $12 million, and that through November, it will have paid more than $120 million to Select authors over the last twelve months. But Cader’s trademark snark notwithstanding (he terms it a “fantasy that authors are earning some kind of share”), he’s right that the Fund is arbitrarily set by Amazon each month.
Let’s look at both these points in context for authors.
- As with the change to a per-page payout in July, the best advice is to wait, watch, evaluate. Look carefully at royalty statements for November. Those will indicate country of transaction for KDP Select activity. Only then, and in ensuing months, will any impact this change might have on a writer’s KDP Select income become apparent.
- Cader’s reminder about the potential flux of the fund’s value from month to month is worth remembering. On these independent-publishing platforms, the author is never in charge. These are marketplaces, each owned by “the house,” which sets the rules and can change them.
You may recall the 2013 incident in which Kobo took its UK store offline overnight and without warning in response to retailer WHSmith’s concerns about inappropriate content. Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn’s “Infinite Shades of Grey” address to the FutureBook Conference in London that year is a worthwhile (and funny) look at how volatile the online sales business can be for both authors and these platforms.
Bottom line: While Cader’s assertion that an author’s share of the monthly fund is a fantasy is overstated, his underlying point is right: authors are responsible for watching and appraising the adjustments made by these marketplaces.
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.
