Quote:
Originally Posted by booklover6
I just don't think it's viable, long term. For Amazon and for the KU system. Why the heck would Amazon pay an author $13.50 for a book that might be listed at $3.99? That makes no sense. Payout should be capped at the book's retail price, and to control that, a maximum price should be set. A realistic price. The KU payout shouldn't be based on pages once that maximum has been reached.
If they don't do this, it'll be another Scribd...it won't be "unlimited" any more. They'll have to place limits or they'll be so far in the red....
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Here is thing.
First off the 70% cap on ebooks is $9.99.
I noticed that JA Konrath has his Jack Daniels series in Kindle Unlimited. I know there are over 2000 pages in that series. It looks like the average price is $3.99 per book. Average length is 232 pages. If I borrowed and read all 10, (two are on pre-order at the moment), Joe stands to make $104.
Now the catch to KU is whereas Joe would make $104 on his $40 worth of books,
Lindsay Nell will make a nickel on her 99 cent book.
So yes Amazon will lose money on authors like Joe but they will make money on authors like Lindsay Nell.
So now are there more Joe's or more Lindsay's in Kindle Unlimited?
It is a totally different payscale than Scribd.
Retail price has nothing to do with borrows.
As a matter of fact if you do the quick math, the payout remained the same under either system. It is just distributed differently.
Now longer books which is what Amazon needed are getting rewarded whereas the short books are getting the short end of the stick.
Payout is usually 14 million. Does it matter how it gets distributed?
Now had the payout gone up substantially, it would be another story.
So payout same/distribution different. This means no change in the bottom line.
Note: The scale changes every month so Amazon can pay out what they want too.
They seemed to have settled on the 14. It could have just as easily been 10.
The difference between Scribd and Amazon is Scribd has no idea how much they will pay out each month because they have a set amount to pay each book per borrow and Amazon sets the amount they want to pay out and then divides that among the books.
Example:Scribd pays $2 per book if they get a million borrows, that is 2 million dollars. If the next month they get 2 million borrows that is 4 million dollars.
Whereas Amazon knows they will pay out 14 million dollars. So at the end of the month, they will look at the number of pages read and figure out what they want to pay per page. So one month, it might be $.005 per page and the next month $.004 per page. So the payroll stays the same.