Payment per page?

In the old days Campbell et all paid authors per word.

Do note this ONLY applies to authors read by people with subscriptions, not sale of ebooks.

Amazon is switching to a “pay-per-page” royalties model for self-published Kindle authors ...
From July 1 the amount an author earns will be determined by their share of total pages read, the company has said. It will affect self-published authors on the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners' Lending Library.
"We're making this switch in response to great feedback we received from authors who asked us to better align payout with the length of books and how much customers read. Under the new payment method, you'll be paid for each page individual customers read of your book, the first time they read it," they said.

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Read more
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/23/amazon_switches_to_pay_per_page/

They aren't really royalties**, though, are they?

Amazon decides the size of the pot -- which does not look based on the total sales -- and divides it up. Changing from to pages-read-based division from percentage-of-book-read division merely gets rid of something that was driving books to be short (because if people can read no further than pages into one's book, make that 10% by only writing 90-page books).


** - As John Scalzi points out in this blogpost:

Amazon is still making KDP Select authors compete against each other for a limited, Amazon-defined pot of money, and no matter how you slice it, that sucks for the authors. [...] This June, every KDP Select author participating in Kindle Unlimited can not, among all of them totaled up, make more than $3 million. Why? Because that’s the pot. That’s how much Amazon wants to splash out this month, and no more.

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That's astonishing news. That means that Amazon will take the full asking price for the books it sells - presumably self-pubbed and traditionally published - but only drip royalties through as it sees fit. In effect, they are going to withhold rightful earnings and keep the money themselves, as they see fit.

EDIT: Hang on - no, wait - it's not for books sold, but instead royalties paid on books made available for free in the Kindle Direct and Kindle Unlimited borrowing programs?

Brian Turner said:

That means that Amazon will take the full asking price for the books it sells

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No, it's payments for authors in the subscription schemes, not per item actual sales.

Compare with how authors get revenue from physical libraries. Or films / music from subscription per month spotify / netflix etc. I'm not saying it's good or bad (I haven't a clue), but it does seem to be about subscriptions, not sales.

The author and the press are subsidising Amazon to allow them to offer FREE books to Prime members.

Then instead of the full asking price we get approx $1.4 per book borrowed. Now if they dont read it the royalty will be less. Who is to say that if Prime members couldn't borrow for free they may still buy. Currently Ian's book is selling 30 a day and is having 30 a day borrowed. I am considering my position on this.

Just had a look at the bulletin on this. I can see the benefits of it in certain ways. The crucial point is going to be how they've worked out some of the specifics. This only applies to lends.

For those that don't know, Kindle Unlimited essentially lets a reader borrow a book. The payment for the author comes through in that Amazon will set aside a pot of money per month normally $3 - $5 million. They then simply divide up that pot the total number of lends (subject to a reader reading more than 10% of the work)

The downside of that model has been that it has encouraged short stories and novellas to be published to unlimited which then net the same amount of money per lend as a full novel. The reader isn't bothered as essentially they can just move on and borrow another book after they've finished.

Applying a pay per page would, with this model would, in theory, reward those who are lending their full novels, and penalize those with shorter works.

The two points that fall out of this:

This, of course, isn't necessarily a good thing as length is no guarantee that something is better. And it may encourage authors to artificially lengthen their works. (Maybe there still is a place for Brians 700 thousand word first draft?)

Two, what datum is used to work out the pot. Have they worked out the average length novel and are paying by page for that? (so some one with the hypothetical average novel will get what they would get now, or is the datum set lower so only the super Peter F Hamilton get what the going rate now is?)

Those are things of concern to me.

I've not been a fan of subscription, as either a reader or writer, and this certainly doesn't change my mind.

Sample sizes are large enough to give a good indication of whether someone will like an author the vast majority of the time. E-books [barring rare exceptions] tend to be priced low anyway. From both sides of the purchase, just buying what one wants is the way to go.

This is actually rather interesting to view. you can see virtually real time how many pages have been read.

ralphkern said:

This is actually rather interesting to view. you can see virtually real time how many pages have been read.

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Where can it be seen? Link? Sounds cool

It appears to be an attempt at a modern "library" model, with flaws. In the case of a library, if an anthology is borrowed, the payment is made to the publisher which is then divvied up between contributors. For the case of short stories then Amazon is one massive anthology. Should an author be paid less because their creative offering is shorter, but more numerous than that of one offering with 200 pages?

Jo Zebedee said:

Where can it be seen? Link? Sounds cool

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It's on the KDP reports page.

I think it's all smoke and mirrors. Somebody somewhere is being swindled. In the mean time, looks like I may make more from borrows than unit sales...

Amazon uses a fixed pot they decide on in advance, I think $3M. That's not a modern version of a Library Royalties payment model. It's arrogance. So if there are many more readers the price per page goes down. They are just tinkering with how to divide the pot. There should be no pot, just a royalty rate, either per book or per page or a combination (a 2K or less poem or essay surely should get less than a 200K Novel?). If people read more per person or more people read the payment should rise. Perhaps the total pot is based on number of subscribers? If so that needs to be agreed with publishers/authors, but we don't know how pot is decided. A total Pot based on number of subscribers wouldn't be unreasonable.

The pot is $11m but that does seem like a pittance compared to what Amazon must be making. KDP select renewal coming up soon for me, so decision time.

I thought it was $3M?
Of course it changes.

It's 11 million this month

It's like a Lottery!

Much more chance of winning something though if you publish!

More likely to get money from unexpected legacy or left in a bin bag at your door than winning on Lottery. They are a tax on the more vulnerable poor.

The question is, how many total pages are read in a month. Clearly amazon must have that figure, or possibly not if it doesn't fit in a 32bit integer. Rather than lucky pot it should be a fixed price per page, but then there would be no mystery.

Latest report is around 0.006 cents per page. From the real time, This is working out a little better for me than the original model.

I can't see the data. I can see my sales on author central as normal - is that where it's appearing? I have send Amazon a help request and see what they say but I think it's because I'm trad published and therefore not registered personally for KDP. I wonder if anyone knows a way round that, or if I'm looking in the wrong place? Cheers

If it is 6c a page then on Ian Sales' book the royalty for KENP will be $3.8 which compare pretty well against the original $1.4 paid via KOLL

I like this!

Submissions now open for 1000 page blockbusters.