Today brought with it a change in the Amazon marketplace with the Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP) Read. The big question out there that authors are asking is “how much will the royalty per page actually be?” I’ve seen the estimates and even made my own (currently planning on something in the $0.006 range), but we won’t really know until the royalty reports hit next month.
Whether this is going to end up being a good thing or not is still up in the air, but here are a few of the thoughts I’ve had as I’ve pondered this change.
Length. If you were an author focusing on shorter books, the KU program has very likely been a win for you up to now. However, with this change it seems that it will make sense to either write longer books or just a lot more of them. Ultimately, the more pages you have out there, the more you would stand to benefit.
Quality. In their announcement email, Amazon said the following:
“One particular piece of feedback we’ve heard consistently from authors is that paying the same for all books regardless of length may not provide a strong enough alignment between the interests of authors and readers. We agree.”
While this may be true, I can’t help but think that they’re also trying to find a way to get better quality books in the marketplace.
I’m not here to judge the work of another author, but let’s face it, there are a lot of poorly written books on Amazon today. And it was to be expected when Amazon opened the door wide open for self-publishing. But with this new ‘pay-per-page’ system, it really comes down to engagement. If authors can’t write quality books that readers will actually want to read from start to finish, will they fade off into the sunset? Seems to me that this is going to be one of the side effects of this new system.
So how do I personally feel about the change? I’m not 100% certain just yet, but it seems to me that it will reward good authors who can connect with their readers. For me and all the books that I have an interest in, they’ve proven so far to be well received, and the shortest one, according to Amazon’s page count, sits at a lengthy 378 pages, with the longest one at a ginormous 750 pages!
Until that royalty report comes in next month, I’ll just do my best to wait patiently, watch the ‘read pages’ add up, and cross my fingers that the $0.10/page example in Amazon’s announcement email comes true! Not going to count on it, but I can dream can’t I?