Our last update on Kindle Unlimited—Amazon’s ebook subscription program—was in July, on the two-year anniversary of the service. KU pays self-published authors based on pages read, and Amazon sets a monthly per-page payment rate retroactively. To avoid gaming of the system, Amazon has had to continually tweak what constitutes a page read—and it’s critical for Amazon to protect the system from scammers, since there’s a finite pool of money to be paid out to authors each month. If page reads are accumulated unfairly, then each indie author receives less money.
In September, authors in KU started to notice irregularities in Amazon’s reporting data, and they suspected their page reads were not being fully counted. One indie author, David VanDyke, who has sold over 300,000 books and makes a living from his sales, wrote a lengthy post at TeleRead on the problem. Long story short, Amazon eventually admitted there was a software glitch and adjusted the page reads in authors’ accounts. But did they adjust it sufficiently? It’s hard to know, and only Amazon has the information to understand the full extent of the problem. Notably, September page reads are down 7.44 percent from August.
So will authors be motivated to leave KU as a result? Unlikely, at this point. Some authors’ income increased substantially when they enrolled their titles in KU, which requires exclusivity with Amazon. It would probably take ongoing glitches or decreased income over a long period—which isn’t out of the question—to make authors opt out. (See our item on Author Earnings’ latest report.)
If you have books enrolled in KDP Select and you believe your reported page reads have been unusually low recently, you can send an email to ecr-support@amazon.com or kdp-support@amazon.com. Provide them with data and clearly explain why your numbers don’t look right.
Bottom line: When traditionally published authors aren’t confident about the sales reporting they receive from their publisher, their contract grants them specific rights to request and conduct an audit of the publishers’ books (which is typically done by a literary agent). This “glitch” at Amazon—a company that already has a reputation for secrecy and protection of its data—highlights the vulnerability of indie authors, who have little or no ability to conduct an audit with a retailer or distributor, or to know for sure if reporting problems have been successfully resolved. The best protection they have is sharing data with each other (which is precisely what is happening now) and continuing to collaborate on reporting discrepancies—to spur appropriate investigation and response.
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.
