Here's author J.A. Sutherland on the same topic
http://www.jasutherlandbooks.com/201...-loss-leaders/
On a straight-up sale of one of my books at $4.99, I get a 70% royalty — about $3.40 (there’s a few cents Amazon charges on top for a “delivery” charge – basically for storage and bandwidth).
For KU, it’s a per-page payment, based on the pages read. A “page” is determined by how the book would render on a predetermined Kindle device. Queen’s Pardon, for instance, is considered to be 682 standard Kindle “pages”, no matter how you display it on your personal device. In general, we get about half a cent per page, so Queen’s Pardon gets me, roughly, $3 for a KU read. Very close to the full sale royalty, and an amount I’m happy with.
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