Over 1,000 indie authors earned more than $100,000 through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing during the year to the end of May 2020 and ‘thousands more independent authors earned more than $50,000’.
The figures are revealed in Amazon’s 2020 Small and Medium Business (SMB) Impact Report which covers more than two million independent sellers, authors, content creators, delivery providers, developers and IT solution providers in the US.
The report mainly focuses on the company’s SMB sellers and doesn’t give any more detailed figures for KDP earnings. The figures for indie authors are. in fact, the same as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos first gave back in 2018 and which were repeated in the 2019 SMB report. Whether those vague numbers have grown and by how much are, of course, a matter of speculation.
It’s interesting to compare the figures from Amazon’s SMB reports for the past two years which both state that the number of SMB sellers which had topped $1 million in sales over a year had risen by 20% in each year.
The 2020 reports adds that, on average, American SMB sellers each had over $160,000 in sales, up year-over-year from approximately $100,000.
The KDP Select Global Fund has been booming over the first half of 2020 as ebook reading has risen amid the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns.
The KDP fund total for the first six months of 2020 is up by nearly a quarter when compared with the first half of 2019 and has been paying out the equivalent of over $1 million a day for the past three months.
Kindle Unlimited KDP Select Fund total leaps by nearly a quarter for the first half of 2020
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