Amazon to pay self-published authors ‘per-page-read’

Amazon will pay self-published authors in its Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners Lending Library on a new pay-per-page-read model from 1 July, reports Publishers Weekly. The change is in response to feedback from Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) authors, who complained about a loss of income after enrolling their titles in the lending programs. Author royalties will depend on how many pages of a book a customer has read, as opposed to how many times a book has been borrowed, with the payments to authors taken from a royalty pool, the KDP Select Global Fund. Amazon has developed the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC) to standardise page length for counting, taking into account settings such as font, line height and line spacing. In a statement, Amazon said it agreed with ‘constant’ author feedback that ‘paying the same for all books regardless of length may not provide a strong enough alignment between the interests of authors and readers’.

Category: International news