3/23/2023 0 Comments Kindle unlimited historyThe biggest was the fact that KU 1.0 (as it later became known) paid all authors equally based on each individual book that was borrowed. Within a few months of KDP Select being launched, some of the issues with the original program started to make themselves apparent. However, the benefit was a super-easy way of getting a new revenue stream – generally higher than you’d receive by having your books ‘wide’ – plus access to exclusive promotional tools like a 5-day Free Promotion in which you could give your book away for free (and rack up huge earnings thanks to the spike in visibility this lead to.) The rumble of complaints This meant you’d be sacrificing all the income you might get from Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and Smashwords. However, the increased number of Kindle Unlimited subscribers (or, more accurately, their subscription money) soon balanced that out and kept the payout for each book that was borrowed at roughly around $2 a title.įor indie authors, the downside was that being part of KDP Select meant that you had to pull all your books from other sites and vendors and make them exclusive to Amazon for a 90-day period, with the option to renew at the end. The more books got borrowed each month, the smaller the share each author would receive – and with the fund starting off around $2.5 million in July 2014, this quickly lead to Amazon subsidizing the program with their own cash (for example, in August 2014, they paid $500,000 into the KDP Select Global Fund to keep author’s earnings higher.) Instead, it was more like a big communal pool that got divided up by collective subscription payments (minus Amazon’s percentage) divided by number of borrows. The fact that authors didn’t know how much they’d receive until after the fact was kind of a new thing – I’d describe it similarly to how pirates earned “pieces of eight” from the loot of each raid they’d participated in, but that makes it sound WAY cooler than it actually was! Readers could borrow a maximum of ten books at any one time – although downloading a new one for free was as easy as ‘returning’ a previously-borrowed title.Īuthors, on the other hand, would receive a percentage of that month’s KDP Select Global Fund (I imagine it like it was a big pit of money that Jeff Bezos threw everybody’s monthly subscription into) based on the number of times their books were borrowed. For $10, Amazon customers could subscribe to this program and have the option of ‘borrowing’ an unlimited number of books every month, as long as the authors of those books had made their titles exclusive to Amazon through the KDP Select program. In 2014, Amazon introduced the now-familiar program called Kindle Unlimited. The Introduction of Kindle Unlimited – KU 1.0 If you’ve heard talk on author forums about “KU 1.0” and its later iterations, but aren’t quite sure what the exact differences between them are, we’ve prepared a brief “cheat sheet” for you which might help you better understand how this all started, and why it’s gotten to where it is right now. Six years later, however, the way authors got paid for participating in Kindle Unlimited has changed drastically – and over the course of those years, the way Amazon transformed the compensation model has dramatically altered the way authors approach being successful. The best part? This program also paid authors! In 2014, Amazon introduced Kindle Unlimited – a kind of ‘Netflix for books’ which allowed subscribers to download and read as many books as they wanted for just $10 a month. And for those of you that lived through it, you may still want to take a nostalgic trip down memory lane… Of course, knowing how KU worked in the past doesn’t change how it works now, but there are probably some newer authors out there that are interested in reading about how the program evolved, and why. So I discussed it with Ginger and we decided it would be worth putting something together. I did find some blogs and references that discussed specific changes from one version of KU to another, but nothing that really laid the entire history out all in one place. For the purposes of fact checking, I went looking for an article that summed everything up for me but failed to find anything. I was editing an article a few weeks ago, and there were some references to Kindle Unlimited and its various iterations.
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