The Kindle Unlimited payout to authors for May showed a small fall to $0.0046 per KENP from $0.0048 in April although the KDP Global Select fund rose to a record high of $15.3 million.
There’s been a gently declining trend in KU over the last few months with $0.0047 per KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Page) in March and $0.0048 per KENP in February.
At the same time, the KDP Select Global fund has been steadily rising, with March and April each totalling $14.9 million after rising from $14 million in February.
It looks like total borrows to Kindle Unlimited members increased to around 3.34 billion KENPs in May, up from 3.17 billion KENPs in both April and March and 2.98 billion in February.
Kindle Unlimited is proving to be a difficult balancing act for Amazon in trying to maintain a decent payout without making losses on the KU business. Ebook subscriptions have proved to be a difficult sector to crack for any company. Oyster shut down in September last year and Scribd dumped titles that were proving to be too popular with its members and then scrapped its previously unlimted access to restricts users to just three books a month.
February was the first month of Amazon’s new method of calculating Kindle ebook page count (KENPC). The mysterious new page-count formula saw reduced page counts for a lot of authors, although Amazon claimed the effect would be plus or minus 5% of the previous page counts.