By Lynn Messina
When Alex Hern reported on the Guardian’s tech blog in early July That Amazon’s new pay structure for the Kindle Unlimited books that authors might amount being paid as little as $ 00.6 cents per copy, it set off an barrage of grumbling. I’m a grumbler, and, as a female writer who got caught in the chick lit backlash of the mid-aughts, there’s nothing I love more than complaining about the publishing industry. Oh, the injustice! Oh, the double standard! Oh, the small-minded editors who can not see beyond an arbitrary pink cover!
Seriously, I could go on for hours.
As a champion grumbler, I’ve spent months wanting to get in on the action grumbling over the Kindle Unlimited program, Which from the very beginning the authors paid less per book than an actual meeting. In the subscription service’s first this months, it paid an average of Approximately $ 1.40 per book, a considerable drop from the $ 2 dollars an author would make it a $ 2.99 sale. Clearly, this was an issue rife with unfairness. Oh, the injustice!
To my regret, I just could not work up the indignation. As a refugee from traditional publishing, I’m too in awe of the royalty is $ 1.40 grumble about it. $ 1.40 is almost three times what I earned for my last traditionally published novel – a paperback original for teens released in 2010. The book sold for $ 8.99, and I earned a 6 percent royalty. That came out to 54 cents per copy.
My chick lit novels retailed for more and my royalty rate was slightly higher, but I still earned less than a dollar per book – hardly a princely sum.
This track record is why I could not get my grumble up over the Kindle Unlimited’s original metric, Which paid a flat fee whenever you read a book passed the 10 percent mark, and why I can not bring myself that gripe Over its new plan to pay authors for every page read. The $ 00.6 figure seems Discouraging, but $ 1.30 for a 220-page book sounds entirely reasonable to me.
The figure Becomes twice as reasonable when one factors in what Amazon’s Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC) algorithm considers a page. The hard copy of my book taps out at 278 pages. The novel was formatted using the industry standards established by Createspace, Amazon’s print-on-demand service. Kindle Unlimited, however, clocks it at 535 pages, Which is almost double the book’s actual page count. Going by this metric and Hern’s rough calculation, I’m really being paid $ .012 per page, or $ 3.12 per book. That’s 60 percent more than I’d get for a $ 2.99 sale!
This Means That where a reasonable human being would look and see a 220-page novel, the Kindlebot looks and sees a 440-page epic worth about $ 2.60. Oh, the ka-ching!
Obviously, everyone’s experience is different, and I do not doubt That some of the outrage over the new policy is entirely Justified. The case for the new metric penalizing cookbook writers in Particular seems strong, as people typically do not read a cookbook from beginning to end. In general, however, it strikes me as a little premature for writers it renounce Their craft. It’s at least worth waiting to see how the numbers actually shake out in August before hanging up one’s laptop for good, and if we 535-KENPC book somehow turns out to be worth less than 54 cents per copy, I will be grumbling the loudest.
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Lynn Messina grew up on Long Island and studied Angielski at Washington University in St. Louis. She has worked at the Museum of Television & amp; Radio (now the Paley Center for Media), TV Guide, In Style, Rolling Stone, Fitness, ForbesLife, Self, Bloomberg Markets and a host of wonderful magazines That have long since disappeared. She mourns the death of print journalism in New York City, where she lives with her husband and sons.
She is author of seven novels, Including Fashionistas , Which is in development as a feature film and has been translated into 15 languages.
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