The Kindle Unlimited payout rate to authors for March stayed steady at $0.0047 per KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Page).
In February, the rate was $0.0048 per KENP, which looked like a 14% rise on January’s $0.0041, but was, in reality, more on the same level as January as Amazon brought in a new method of calculating ebook page count (KENPC) which reduced page counts for a lot of authors.
The March rate does mean that Kindle Unlimited seems to have found some sort of short-term stability.
In the UK, the KENP payout for March is £0.0031 (around $0.0044) while in India, where Amazon have brought in a lower level of subscription payment and are paying a lower KENP rate than elsewhere, the figure for the month is Indian Rupee 0.10428571428 (roughly equivalent to $0.0016, which is one-third of the US rate).
The KDP Select Global fund was set at an initial level of $12 million for March and Amazon topped it up with $2.9 million to make an odd total of $14.9 million.
That’s a relatively small increase on $14 million in February, which was, of course, a shorter month, and it’s still below the January total of $15 million. It makes me think that the Kindle Unlimited business growth might be levelling out for Amazon.
Dividing the total monthly fund by the KENP payout ($14.9 million/$0.0047) should give an indication of the total number of KU borrows in terms of KENPs read for March and this works out at around 3.17 billion KENPs. That’s up by a relatively small amount from 2.98 billion KENPs in February, which is the only month you can compare like with like as the KENPC recount came into operation in February.
The figure for total borrows in January under the old KENP count was 3.6 billion KENPs, so it looks like the recount has taken out around half a billion pages, which could represent something like a 14% fall overall, a lot different from the plus or minus 5% claimed by Amazon when the recount was announced.
The long and the short of the new Kindle Unlimited KENPC recount