Amazon held steady on the Kindle Unlimited KENP royalty payout to authors for November 2015 with a rate of $0.0049 per page read.
The previous months’s KENP payout was $0.0048 per page read, so I’m regarding this latest payment as being at the same level due to the vagaries of rounding off figures.
Noevmber is the first month that Amazon has stopped its one-size-fits-all pay rate worldwide and balancing out the differential in paying less for markets such as India will have been a factor in helping Amazon to maintain the KENP rate for the US and UK markets.
The KDP Select global fund hit yet another record high at $12.7 million following October’s $12.4 million and September’s $12 million.
The November rate is welcome news for authors who became concerned after the KENP rate fell sharply from its initial level of $0.0057 per KENP when Kindle Unlimited switched to pay-per-page in July this year.
Dividing the total November fund by the KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Page) rate ($12.7 million/$0.0049) results in 2,591,836,734 — that’s means a total of nearly 2.6 billion pages read by Kindle Unlimited members in November. That’s only a small rise from 2,583,333,333 in October and 2.4 billion pages in September.
Amazon has now paid out a total of $118.1 million to authors with books enrolled in KDP Select during this calendar year. The KDP Select fund has been set at an initial $12 million for December, so the total paid out on KU over 2015 will end up at more than $130 million — and that’s without taking into account the substantial All-Stars bonuses paid out each month to top-performing KU authors.
November is the first month that Amazon has set different KENP rates for different markets, notably India where the subscription rate for KU is just $3 a month, a third of the charge for the US.
It looks like the November rate for Kindle Unlimited borrows in India works out at just $0.0016 per KENP, which is a third of the US rate and probably a fair reflection of the difference in subscription rates.
In the UK, the KENP rate for November was £0.0032, which is a third of a penny per page and a match for the $0.0049 rate in the US at the present exchange rate. The Kindle Unlimited subscription rate in the UK is £9.99 a month (just over $15 at the present exchange rate), which is 50% higher than the US subscription deal of $9.99.
Research by The Fussy Librarian ebook promotion website has found that many authors have been benefiting from substantial increases in their income since Kindle Unlimited switched to the pay-per-page system.
Pay-per-page is paying off for many Kindle Unlimited authors