Amazon has recently
come out with the July payments to writers and publishers for the
Kindle Unlimited program. The payment per page that had been bandied
about by writers, previous to Amazon's announcement, was 0.6 cents
per page, or 60 cents per hundred pages. The actual amount turned
out to be 0.578 cents per page, or 57.8 cents per hundred pages, a
remarkably close figure. Evidently, somebody out there had a
reliable source of information.
This payment
schedule obviously incentivizes writers to produce longer works. In
our case, the Kati of Terra books all clock in at 1000 to 1100
standardized Kindle pages. At the current pricing schedule, that
works out to $6 per borrow, a very nice rate indeed. And the Kati
books have had a nice burst of borrowing, by our humble standards,
since the change in pricing took hold. :)
Each of the Kati of
Terra books have a word count of about 250,000 pages, and a
standardized Kindle page count of something over a thousand pages.
That means a standardized Kindle page works out to about 250 words.
Interestingly, that's about the speed at which your average reader
reads – 250 words per minute. So, a typical reader costs Amazon
about 0.6 cents for every minute of reading, or 36 cents for every
hour, or about a dollar for every 3 hours. Assuming that Kindle
Unlimited customers pay Amazon about $10 per month to be in the
program, that means the average reader can access about 30 hours of
reading, before Amazon begins to lose money.
That's about 7 hours
per week, or an hour per day – not a high rate of reading for a lot
of us, but I am sure that Amazon's data scientists did a lot of
research to determine the point at which readers were satisfied, on
average, and where Amazon makes a tidy profit. Most subscription
services, in any industry, take advantage of the fact that most users
will only make light use of the service. Think of all you can eat
salad bars – most of us get filled up pretty quickly, so the
restaurant can afford this apparently limitless offer. Similarly
with spas and gyms – their deals are predicated on the expectation
that most people simply will not make as much use of the service as
they think they will.
In the previous
version of Kindle Unlimited, writers got paid by the download,
generally about $1.50 per download, regardless of the length of the
book (assuming that readers got to the 10 percent point of the book).
So, Amazon was losing money once readers downloaded and read 7 books
(7 X $1.50 = $10.50). If the reader focused on short stories (say
10,000 words), that meant Amazon might be losing money before the
reader hit even 75,000 words, or 5 hours of reading time. That's
quite a difference from Amazon's current break even point of 30 hours
reading.
As it happens,
Dodecahedron Books is in the happy position (so far) of doing better
under the new system than the old, since our novels skew to the
longer length. In fact, since the switch, our borrows have gone from
about 50:50 short stories versus long novels, to nearly 100% long
novels. That may just be a coincidence, or it may be that Amazon is
doing guerrilla marketing for the longer books. After all, we Indies
don't have much of an idea of what Amazon is doing in the background,
via its emails to customers or other marketing vectors. There are no
doubt times when our interests align with theirs, to a more than
typical extent. And Amazon does seem to be pushing longer works,
right now.
All that being said,
Amazon's business tactics and short-term objectives are constantly in
flux. While writers can't help but be influenced by Amazon's tactics
(as they see them), the writer's best strategy is probably to write
in the genre, and at the length that they do their best work.
P.S. One other
interesting thing about the new payment system, is that a publisher
or writer can get a pretty good idea of their books' completion rates
and time-to-completion rates. By that, I mean the percentage of
books that are completed and the time it takes a typical reader to
complete a book. By both measures, the Kati of Terra and Witches'
Stones books are doing admirably well. In fact, I am rather surprised by
just how voracious readers can be – the fine art of enjoying a good
read is far from dead.
And here are some
links to these excellent books :)
Kati of Terra
Book One:
Kati of Terra
Book Two:
Kati of Terra
Book Three:
Witches' Stones
Book One
Witches' Stones
Book Two
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