Amazon moves fast to widen reach of Estimated KENP Royalties metric

Amazon only launched the Estimated KENP Royalties metric in the US just a few weeks ago at the start of November but it has already moved to extend it to KDP authors advertising in the UK, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Australia.

The KENP Royalties metric aims to help authors measure the impact that ads are having on their Kindle ebooks enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. It estimates the royalties attributed to your Sponsored Products campaigns from customers who borrow your book from KU.

If the reporting date range includes days before the KDP Select Global Fund has been announced, Amazon says it will use the previous month’s KENP rate to estimate the royalties.

To view estimated KENP Royalties in your KDP dashboards, use the column picker to customise each of your dashboards and display the metric, with data reported from July 15, 2020. You can also view KENP Read (the estimated number of normalised pages attributed to your Sponsored Products campaigns) in addition to royalties when customising your dashboard columns.

What exactly does KENP Royalties tell you? For example, if a customer clicks a Sponsored Product ad featuring your Kindle ebook borrows it through Kindle Unlimited and reads 120 normalised pages on day 1, Amazon will attribute associated royalties to day 1 within your campaign dashboard and downloadable reports. If the customer reads a further 100 pages of your book on day 2, the the associated royalties will be reported on day 2.

You can find out more about the new metric here on the Amazon Advertising website.


Amazon Publishing ‘close to deal’ with US public libraries

In a separate move, reports indicate that Amazon Publishing is near to an agreement to supply US public libraries with ebooks from their imprints.

The Hill political news website reports that an Amazon spokesperson says the company is in ‘active discussions’ with the Digital Public Library of America to make its e-books available for library distribution and expects to be testing different models in early 2021. There are no details on possible pricing or lengths of licensing deals.

It seems likely that any public library deal would only be for ebooks from Amazon Publishing’s imprints. The company has a total of 16 imprints, with the best known being Thomas & Mercer, which focuses on the mystery/thriller genre, and Montlake, which publishes romance titles. Both these imprints publish titles which regularly take up the majority of the top spots on the Kindle best sellers.

It remains to be seen what the effect of public library lending would have on the paid subscription service Kindle Unlimited and Kindle store sales of Amazon Publishing ebooks, although the move would obviously bring the titles to a much wider audience.

Indie authors can offer their ebooks to public libraries through distributors, including Draft2digital and PublishDrive, which feature the OverDrive library channel, but indies can’t also sell through Kindle Unlimited as Amazon requires self-publishers to be exclusive through KDP Select for KU.


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