Not clear on Kindle - a few KENPC questions

Book Chic · Oct 9, 2015

Greetings fellow writers,

Math is not my first language. I've read several explanations about the KENPC payment plan, but I still don't get it. I have an ebook out, and just decided to enroll in the select program. I have questions. To simplify things, I will round out all numbers.

I enrolled my ebook on October 7.

My ebook is 90 pages long.

As of October 8, I had 160 pages read according to the KENPC counter.

So with that being said, five questions:

1) Does this mean that I will definitely be paid for 160 pages read?

2) If so, could you provide a make believe figure of the author fund "pot" and break down what 160 read pages will yield in terms of dollars and cents?

3) Should I look at my numbers like this: One person read the whole book (90 pages and another person read 70 pages and didn't finish?) Or could these numbers reflect different people reading snippets of my work?

4) Does kindle borrows affect your ranking?

5) I really try not to compare myself to others, but when trying to figure this out and reading other accounts, folks attest to 500 pages read within hours of putting up their work. So what is the normal period to expect reads to pick up?

Since promotion is currently a challenge, I'm hoping the KENPC situation eventually helps out in the royalty department.

All wisdom will be greatly appreciated!

Katharine Tree · Oct 9, 2015

1. Yes, you will definitely be paid for 160 pages.

2. Suppose the pot is $1000, and on all of Amazon this month, there are 1000 pages read. 160 are yours. You will be paid $160. If on the other hand the pot is $1000 and 2000 pages are read, you will be paid $80. Of course these numbers are highly simplified and the multiplier, so far, has been more like half a cent per KENP.

3. The best way to guess if anyone is finishing your book is to see if its whole length shows up as pages-read on one day, or on a couple consecutive days. One of my books is 1300 KENPs and regularly dings all of them at once, on one day. Many people only connect their Kindles to the internet--and only transmit this information--when they've finished the book they had and want a new one. Thus, pagereads often come in big chunks.

4. Amazon is secretive about how their ranking system works, but experiments suggest that yes, borrows do affect your rank.

5. Can't help you there, tootse. Sorry.

Super_Duper · Oct 9, 2015

you will be paid $0.005 (half a penny) per page read. I do believe it does affect your ranking, but Amazon ranking is all smoke and black magic so who knows.

Treehouseman · Oct 9, 2015

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your "best" day will be your first one, due to the appearance on the Hot New Releases, and your Best Month will be the first 30 days, after that you WILL see a sharp decline.

There are only a few ways to arrest this:

A) Promotions: If you pay for something like a Bookbub, a Books Butterfly or have some free days worked out, you may see a spike in sales outside of Kindle Select (ie: non-borrows) These have to be booked weeks in advance now, and they're very popular so they'll be choosy as to who they will take. Expect to pay big money.

b) Mailing list: The people with big first-day reads usually have an audience built in due to previous works sold.

A 90 page novella will probably get you about 0.45 c per full read.

Dennis E. Taylor · Oct 9, 2015

The number of "pages" counted by amazon does not reflect the number of pages that you think is in your book. They use some kind of "standard page" calculation. Mine, for instance, is just over 300 pages, but amazon counts it as 520 pages. I know this because I've gotten a number of reads or groups of reads that calculate out neatly to that number. It may be that your book calculates out to 160 pages.

In my case, I'm only losing .17 for a borrow vs a read, so I'm pretty happy with the system.

Book Chic · Oct 9, 2015

Wow, you guys continue to amaze me. Always a source of great info. I'm still befuddled on the math. But I'm guessing I won't be quitting my day job - when I finally get one - anytime soon! lol

Thanks a bunch.

WriterBN · Oct 9, 2015

Treehouseman said:
A 90 page novella will probably get you about 0.45 c per full read.

They're stingy bastards, but not that stingy. That should be $0.45.

LSMay · Oct 15, 2015

The math: basically they share out the fund so that each page read gets an equal share of the fund. That's why they can't give a straight number to start with - they don't know how many pages will be read. So, to make the numbers super easy, imagine the fund was $20. If 5 pages were read, the pay out per page would be 20/5 = $4. However, if 20 pages were read, it would be 20/20 = $1. If you use the real numbers, it works out to just over half a cent.

Somewhere - I think it's under promote and advertise - you can find the page count in KENP for your book. This will be longer than your print length (or estimated print length.) For example, Amazon says my book is approx 186 pages in print length, but they state it is 278 KENP.

My book came out in August. The first day was only part of a day and had 63 pages read. The second day there were a bit over five hundred pages read. Since then there have only been a few reads randomly spaced in time.

You can't really be sure how many readers are responsible for the page reads. It could be 160 people reading one page, or two people reading most or all of it.

Borrows do affect ranking, as well. As far as I can tell, with regard to ranking a borrow is no different from a sale.

Not clear on Kindle - a few KENPC questions

Book Chic

Katharine Tree

Þæt wæs god cyning

Super_Duper

Jedi Knight

Treehouseman

Dennis E. Taylor

Get it off! It burns!

Book Chic

WriterBN

LSMay