The move raised some old questions—and confusion—about how writers get paid in Amazon’s subscription service
Earlier this month, Philip Jones reported in The Bookseller (subscription required) that HarperCollins UK has added hundreds of backlist titles to Kindle Unlimited. While it’s the first we’ve seen any Big Five publisher go on the record about their participation, it’s not the first time a Big Five has entered titles into KU.
In June 2018, here at Hot Sheet, we made the mistake of stating that Big Five publishers don’t participate in the KU program, and we were quickly corrected by Amazon. We did some digging on Amazon.com and were able to find a significant number of HarperCollins US titles enrolled in KU in the romance sector (mostly Harlequin titles in Spanish), as well as small selections of adult fiction and nonfiction, Christian titles from Thomas Nelson, and children’s lit. When we run a search today, we surface more than 100 HarperCollins US titles that are KU eligible at Amazon.com—and you can find a tiny smattering from some other Big Five publishers as well.
While the terms of such deals are never disclosed, one assumes that Big Five authors typically get paid for KU borrows the same as they would be for an ebook sale. Agents negotiate authors’ contracts to cover such scenarios, if possible, to avoid granting such rights in the first place or to get payment equivalent to a sale. Of course, every contract is different—and there are indeed ongoing contractual disputes between authors and publishers over correct payment for books in subscription services. Regardless, self-published authors get treated differently in KU. They get paid by the number of pages read, and that payment is determined only after the fact and drawn from a communal pot. Such payment currently amounts to less than a half cent per page. Fraudulent activity and manipulation of this page payout system is well known and an ongoing problem. (Here’s our report from last year.)
As we’ve pointed out before, it’s concerning how authors have ended up in two separate-but-unequal classes in Kindle Unlimited. (Worse still, getting your work in KU as a self-published author requires exclusivity with Amazon on your ebook.) However, if Amazon were to pay all authors the same, it seems unlikely the subscription model would be sustainable unless it were modified. KU competitor Scribd has had to be flexible and make changes to be sustainable; here’s our 2018 coverage, where Scribd’s CEO comments on how the company has been a guinea pig for the rest of the industry.
Recently, when we’ve heard Big Five publishers discuss digital subscription services, it’s been in a positive manner. At the 2018 BookExpo, Chantal Restivo-Alessi, chief digital officer of HarperCollins, and Nathan Henrion, vice president of sales for Baker Publishing Group, were unequivocally supportive of publishers adding certain titles to services—or at least to Scribd. Restivo-Alessi said the “sales opportunity is endless,” and it allows HarperCollins to be in as many places as possible with their content. While not directly stating she was referring to Amazon, she added, “It is important to really realize how little actual visibility ebooks currently have in the retail environment. It is more and more focused on very limited slots and highly manipulated slots. Alternative channels are really important to allow the midlist and breadth of our work to be as accessible to as many consumers as possible.”
Henrion agreed and emphasized that because Baker is a midlist publisher with modest resources, subscription services like Scribd allow them to get their books in front of readers with the least amount of risk to the reader.
Scribd has said that 75 percent of reading activity on the site is from backlist titles. So it’s not surprising to see Big Five publishers experimenting with KU on the backlist. At the 2018 BookExpo, Restivo-Alessi was blunt in stating that subscriptions haven’t cannibalized HarperCollins sales: “Just being opposed to subscriptions per se is really shortsighted in that you’re really missing out on an additional [sales] channel.”
But is it in fact shortsighted to feed Amazon’s KU service? Margot Atwell of Kickstarter, writing in her newsletter last week, said, “An experiment where the end result is giving more power to the most powerful player in the publishing space, decreasing competition, and undermining the value of the book is a bad experiment. It’s especially galling to me to see this happen at a time that the US Big Five publishers are harshly curtailing library access to ebooks and increasing the prices charged to libraries for this access.”
Bottom line: The big-picture question we find difficult to answer: How much will consumer demand increase or shift to digital subscription services like Kindle Unlimited, Scribd, and Storytel? The more market share these services gain, the more publishers will be compelled to strike deals or participate. In the near term, we don’t expect to see the Big Five experimenting with much more than limited backlist offerings in KU.
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.
