Kindle Unlimited is key to Amazon's strategy—and writers' remuneration. Authors who self-publish on Amazon through KDP get a 70% royalty on books priced between $2.99 and $9.99, and a 35% royalty on books priced higher or lower than that, regardless of whether they participate in KDP Select.
Regardless of whether they participate in KDP Select, writers who self-publish on Amazon through KDP get a 70% royalty on books priced between $2.99 and $9.99, and a 35% royalty on books priced more or lower than that. That means if your book sells for $24.95, you'll earn $17.70 per copy sold.
If you opt to have your book published by a large publisher instead, you'll only be paid an advance against future royalties. Once the book starts selling, though, that amount will be released from your account. Also, while advances can range from $15,000 to millions, the average is just under $100,000.
After you've earned back your investment, any remaining profit is yours to keep. However, if you fail to meet sales targets, or if you decide to stop writing after publishing one book, then you lose everything - including your investment.
Royalties are calculated based on several factors, such as number of copies sold, pricing, and selection criteria (i.e. selection bias). Since self-published authors don't use an editorial team to choose which books to release or promote, all consumers have equal access to their work. This means that higher-priced books are likely to sell more copies and receive higher royalty payments.
Furthermore, unless the author enrolls the book in the KDP Select Program, Amazon will only pay 35 percent royalties on eBook sales to specific countries (KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing, and the website is www.kdp.amazon.com). Amazon also charges an electronic delivery fee for books having a royalty rate of 70% or above.
For example, if you were to sell a paperback copy of your book for $20 and have it shipped directly to an Amazon warehouse, they would only pay you $7. The rest goes to the publisher or distributor. For eBooks, they would only pay you $5, with Amazon taking another 30%. Of the remaining 70%, they charge you $1 for shipping the book and another $1 for each digital file added to your account. So the total payout would be $7 + $5 ($1 - $3.70) = $19.30.
The good news is that once your book earns $10,000 in monthly sales, it's automatically published into multiple formats for different markets. At that point, you won't see any difference between how much you earn from print books and how much you earn from e-books.
So whether you decide to self-publish or not, make sure to check how much you'll actually be paid for your work before you start writing it!
Amazon allows you to keep a larger portion of your money. Much more. Amazon's Kindle shop has a massive reach, with over 90 million Prime customers in the United States alone. Self-publishing with Amazon KDP is completely, definitely free. In a nutshell, Kindle publishing allows anybody to self-publish a digital book and sell it on Amazon. They take care of the distribution, the marketing, and the sales. You get paid every time someone buys your book.
There are two ways to publish using Amazon's service: through their own website or through other online retailers like Barnes & Noble or Apple Books. If you choose to go this route, remember that prices for electronic books are set by Amazon and can change at any time. Also note that these books cannot be converted into print copies.
You must be an established author with some success to use Amazon's service. This means that you must have published one or more books and made some amount of money from those works. In fact, according to an article on CNBC, only 1% of authors who try KDP succeed. That's why most people choose to hire editors and publishers instead.
However, if you're among the lucky ones who do succeed, then you could make a full-time living off your work. According to the same article, many popular authors make six figures per year through Amazon's service.
Self-publishing is becoming increasingly easy due to tools such as Amazon's KDP.
Authors whose works are part of the Kindle Unlimited collection are compensated by the total amount of pages read in any given month, rather than per "purchase" or "download." For almost a year, the compensation for pages viewed has been approximately slightly under half a penny per page ($0.00488 per page to be precise). However, as of July 2018, that changed and now authors are paid $4.88 for each page read.
That's over 11 cents per page! It's also about 17 times what they were paying before. That's a lot of money when you think about it: just three words on every page.
But is it worth it? That depends on how many pages you read. If you can spare only one hour a week then you won't make any money from KU. But if you can spare an hour per day then you could easily earn more than $100000 a year.
The choice is yours. You can either spend your time reading instead of working or you can write something worth reading.
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