First (estimated) numbers on KU borrows and author payouts:
http://www.publishingtechnology.com/...uthor-earnings
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Nearly two months on and the service seems to have been well received by readers. So much so that Amazon issued a bulletin to KDP authors announcing it was adding a launch bonus of $500,000 to the $2,000,000 monthly pool of money from which enrolled authors are paid every time a user downloads one of their books and read more than 10% of the content. It also announced that for July it would waive the stipulation that authors only get paid if a reader gets past the 10% point and added a further $285,000 to the fund to pay royalties on books that had been downloaded and opened.
At this point it’s also worth pointing out that this $2,000,000 pot of money also includes the $1,200,000 that was set aside for Amazon’s older lending scheme the Kindle Owners Lending Library. The fact that Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited with a fairly modest bonus pool (only an additional $800,000) and then chose to up its size not just once but twice suggests the service has so far exceeded expectations.
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While Amazon tries not to release hard numbers about the scheme into the wild, enough KDP authors blog openly about how much they earn from the programme for us to make a few guesses.
June 2014
Total monthly pool = $1,200,000
Estimated payment per borrow = $2.25
Estimated total number of books borrowed in June = 533,333
July 2014
Total monthly pool = $2,785,000
Estimated payment per borrow = $1.80
Estimated total number of books borrowed in July = 1,547,222
Assuming these numbers are accurate, the launch of Kindle Unlimited resulted in Kindle users downloading an extra million books in July 2014.
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More at the source.
It should be noted that the per-read payout to the indie authors is roughly equal to the royalties a traditionally published author earns on the sale of a $10 ebook. And that it works out to a 60% payout on a typical $3 indie title.
The real measure of KU success is still to come: how many readers subscribe long term and how many checkouts they consume. If future months show consistent payouts and checkouts, or even pool size growth, the experiment can probably be deemed a success.