Amazon may Pay Self-published Authors no more than $0.006 Per page learn

final month, Amazon took a page out of Spotify’s playbook, electing to begin paying its self-revealed authors via the page slightly than per obtain. the brand new version used to be put into motion Wednesday—and it looks as if the e-commerce massive could now pay writers not more than $0.006 for each page learn, in step with The Guardian.

In an electronic mail sent to authors on Wednesday, Amazon mentioned that buyers of the 2 systems plagued by this alteration—Kindle homeowners’ Lending Library and Kindle limitless—had read almost 1.9 billion pages in June, The Guardian stories. the corporate wrote in the e mail that it planned to shell out at the least $11 million each and every month for June, July, and August. Do the math, and that could come out to as little as $0.006 for every page became.

In different words, for an writer to make $1.30 on an e book rental, he or she would have to write at least 220 pages, and the reader must flip thru each web page. As a literary editor informed The Guardian, this might hit nonfiction writers and youngsters’s e book authors specifically laborious, on account that their books tend to fall on the shorter aspect.

So what can authors do to continue to exist the new policy? increasing font size is a no-go, due to the fact Amazon is now standardizing that across the board, together with line spacing and height, in the course of the Kindle adaptation Normalized web page count (KENPC). the most suitable choice for writers at Amazon’s mercy: Fill your pages will illustrations, photos, and infographics—and hope that your novel is the following long gone woman.

replace: An Amazon spokesperson told fast company that because the new payment plan simplest applies to subscription platforms, it does no longer affect the sale of purchased books:

beginning July 1, the payout of the KDP select global Fund will likely be in response to the choice of pages Kindle unlimited and Kindle homeowners’ Lending Library customers learn. the total fund size can be at least $11M (the best month-to-month payout to date). This is the same measurement fund as it might had been underneath the earlier method, though we expect that the allocation of those $11M in accordance with pages read rather than borrows will extra closely align authors’ and readers’ pursuits . . . I’d additionally notice that KDP writer participation on this software is not obligatory, and only applies to books borrowed thru our subscriptions. It does now not impact gross sales.

[by way of The Guardian]