• Skip to main content

William F. Brown

Action Adventure Thrillers

  • Home
  • Books
    • Bob Burke Action Adventure
    • Our Vietnam Wars
    • Amongst My Enemies Series
  • Translations
    • Bob Burke auf Deutsch
    • Amongst My Enemies auf Deutsch
    • Bob Burke en Espanol
  • About
    • My Screenplays
    • Contact
  • Blog
  • Free Book

Kindle Unlimited

Kindle Unlimited: The New Paperback

September 26, 2016 by William F. Brown Leave a Comment

Amazon rolled out the Kindle Unlimited program a little over two years ago. While they continue to tweak it and it does have its flaws, I think it will prove to be the most revolutionary step in publishing since the e-book itself, and perhaps since the first paperback was published in 1939 by Pocket Books. They priced them at $0.25 each, at a time when a reader’s choices were $2.50 – $5.00 hardbacks for the wealthy, library books for the literate but less wealthy, the Book of the Month Club, and Reader’s Digest, which surprisingly is still doing fine today.  Pocket Books priced the first paperbacks at $0.25 with the expressed intention of bringing affordable books within reach of the masses. Naturally, all of the major publishing houses laughed at them, as they have at nearly every other innovation since the Gutenberg printing press. Their reaction to paperbacks was a precursor to their reaction to e-books. That lack of innovation has always been at the heart of the publishing house’s problems. Within five years, however Pocket Books had sold over 100 million copies, and no one was laughing anymore.

Kindle Unlimited
William F Brown
Suspense Thrillers

The economics of book prices are interesting. The first Pocket Book paperbacks came out at the end of the Great Depression. A postage stamp cost $0.03, gas cost $0.10 a gallon, and bread was $0.5 a loaf. At $0.25, it was roughly the same as a gallon of milk, or a pound of butter, chicken, or coffee. More importantly, they were priced at about 10% of the cost of a hardback book. That was a lot of money back then, which is why hardback books were mostly found in libraries. According to government statistics, inflation has totaled 1589% since then, which means that 1939 Pocket Book would cost $4.22 in 2016 dollars and that hardback around $42.20.

Think about that for a moment. First, that 10 to 1 spread between hardbacks and paperbacks hasn’t held up over time. The average paperback today is more like twice that and new paperback releases are normally in the $10-14 range. Meanwhile, the average new hardback still manages to stay under $30, so that 10 to 1 spread now is more like 2 or 3 to 1. While a new, big name e-book in the Kindle store comes out at $10 to $14, the price doesn’t stay there for long. After about 6-8 months, they are normally discounted to the $6 to $9 range, still, in a 4 or 5 to 1 spread to the hardbacks, and the average e-book on Kindle costs less than, roughly equivalent to that $0.25 Pocket Book in 1939 dollars. In fact, many readers only buy the Free or $0.99 e-books on the Sale pages, making Kindle the equivalent of the old public library for the frugal among us. One conclusion you can reach from these numbers is that e-books have had a larger effect on hardback book prices than they have had on paperbacks.

The growth of e-book readership has been phenomenal. Technically, they were first “invented” in the 1930s, but they only reached any level of popular use in the past 20 years, following the introduction of the Sony Reader in 2006, and the first Kindle in 2007. Today, over half of all adults own some type of reader or tablet. More significantly for authors, Amazon now sells 65% of all e-books and 85% of all self-published e-books. In 20 years, the e-book and Kindle have grown to become the twin, 800-pound gorillas in the publishing industry, but their biggest impact may be yet to come.

That comment brings us to the Kindle Unlimited subscription service, which Amazon launched in July, 2014, initially to compete with Scribd and Oyster from HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. At that time, the three services had similar sized libraries to choose from; but like everything else, Kindle just seems to do it better. Kindle Unlimited’s offerings have now grown to over 1 million books. Scribd and Oyster have grown as well, but none of the three offer their first rank bestsellers as part of their subscription services. If you are a reader however, and go through three books or more a month, at $9.99 per month the Kindle Unlimited subscription service is a no-brainer.

True, the Kindle Unlimited library only includes books that are part of the Kindle Select program and “exclusive” to Kindle, which unfortunately is less than half of of their total library, primarily the better, self-published books. Unfortunately, it does not offer many new releases, books that were brought out by the major publishers, or books from front line authors, except their old ones. Still, for $10/ month, there are a lot of good books available for an avid reader, and Kindle is now experimenting with ways to expand their book availability options to Kindle Prime. 

For authors, the question has been whether to go exclusively with Kindle Select and get your books eligible for the Kindle Unlimited program, or stay out and try to market them through the other independent e-book publishers such as Smashwords and others. My writing friends have gone either way depending on how much they dislike or don’t trust Amazon. I understand those feelings, but my writing income has doubled as a result of the Kindle Unlimited “Nominal Pages Read,” and it now provides 60% of my books sale income, so don’t let your suspicions or emotions pick your own pocket. More about that in my next blog piece.

William F. Brown, is the author of 8 action, adventure, suspense novels on Kindle, Kindle Select, and Kindle Unlimited. To read about them or subscribe to the blog, go to my web site, http://box5462.temp.domains/~billbro4

 

Filed Under: My writing blog Tagged With: e-book publishing, Kindle select, Kindle Unlimited, My blog, My writing blog, Writing blog

The New Kindle Normalized Page Counts — My Writing Blog #3

April 10, 2016 by William F. Brown

If you’re a writer, I’ll bet you didn’t know Kindle came out with an all new KENPC or Kindle Edition Normalized Page Counts on February 1, did you? Like a lot of things, they just, “slipped it under the door.”

My last blog post took up the subject of the Kindle Unlimited program, which I consider to be the most dramatic change the book publishing since the paperback book. You can find that piece on my blog, if you are interested. Not that anyone really understands Kindle or Amazon to begin with, but one thing I know for an absolute, moral certainty is that as soon as you think you understand what Amazon is doing, they up and change everything again. Well, that’s what they just did with the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Counts (the KENPC to us e-book pros.)

Kindle Edition Normalized Page Counts, A Wanted Man, Freedom's Forge, My Writing Blog, Book Review, Book Reviews, 1st Chapter, Thriller Screenplays, Thriller Novels, William F Brown, About Me, Thriller Novels, Cold War, Middle East Thrillers, Action Adventure
William F Brown

I have all eight of my books exclusively on Kindle and enrolled in Kindle Select, which allows them to be listed on Kindle Unlimited. It’s a monthly subscription system which Kindle launched in July, 2014, initially to compete with Scribd and Oyster from HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. For $9.99 per month, you can download all the books you want from the Kindle Unlimited library. It doesn’t include everything on Kindle, but it’s not bad. And for ten bucks? All the books you want? That’s a no-brainer for anyone who reads more than two or three books a month. It’s a great deal. Period.

That said, the question from the beginning has been how they handle author’s royalties when there isn’t really a unit sale. The simplest thing would have been to pay the authors the same 70% net, as if it were a sale. Obviously that was too simple, because that isn’t what they did. The problem first arose with the earlier Amazon Prime. Amazon decreed that the author would receive X dollars per download. The X ended up being roughly two thirds of what the author would have gotten from the sale of the same book. Not quite fair? Probably. Then again, it was a new system that they were piggybacking onto free deliveries of their other merchandise, and the downloads represented “sales” and income the author would not have otherwise gotten.

That brings us up to the launch of Kindle Unlimited and the all can download a month for $10 program. Using a variation on Kindle Prime, they began by establishing a pot of monthly cash. For the sake of argument, let’s say $1million. Each month, they then divided that by the number of books downloaded by their subscribers, and you again got that number per book. After a month or two, it was okay by me. My royalty checks about doubled from what I was getting from my book sales alone, so I couldn’t argue.

That system rumbled along through the fall and winter of 2014 – 2015, but you know how Amazon likes to tinker. In June they announced that effective July 1 last year, KU would no longer pay on a per book basis. They decided it was unfair to pay people the same amount “per book,” regardless of whether it was a 120-page book or a 320-page book. There’s some logic to that. And the replacement for that was the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Counts. Somehow, the Great God Amazonia knows how many pages people read of a book they download, and Amazon would pay the author an amount of money per page read. As with Kindle Prime, they established a pot of money each month and provided that by the total number of page turns, system-wide. This way, they said the author of a long book will make proportionately more than the author of a short book. Of course, e-books don’t really have “pages,” and the “length” depends on the specific device the reader is using, how the book was uploaded, the print size the reader is using, and the amount of “front” and “back” matter in the book, such as preview chapters and other things the author added. Since my books average about 380 pages typed, the text only, it was okay by me. That was the July 1, 2015 KENPC Version 1.0.

Unfortunately, the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Counts didn’t match anything else. It wasn’t the same as a book’s “print length” in the Kindle Product Details, or the number of typed pages in a Word manuscript. For my 7 Kindle e-books, KNEPC V 1.0 averaged 4% more than my Word manuscripts and 17% more than the “print length.”

Kindle gives us access to a lot of monthly sales numbers. Again for MY books, for the 7 months from July 2015 through January 2016 when V 1.0 ruled, I averaged $2.40 in net royalty income per book sale. That includes a range of book prices, discounted sales, promotions, countdowns, and all the rest, and I received the equivalent of $1.78 per “book” through KU, dividing my page turns by the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Counts of my books, or 75% of what I got from a sale. Interesting, and I think I understood the system.

Then… about two weeks ago, I discovered that they had quietly revised the system again and come out with a “new and improved KENPV Version 2.0. If you go to your KDP Bookshelf, look at the book title, and click on the “Promote and Advertise” tab, about two thirds of the way down the page that comes up, you will see, “‘Earn royalties from the KDP Select Global Fund.”  At the bottom of that section you will see a very small three-digit number which is your new Kindle Edition Normalized Page Counts V 2.0, and it doesn’t bear any resemblance to the old ones.

The Kindle pronouncement about the new Kindle Edition Normalized Page Counts system says that they were trying to equalize page counts across all the different reader platforms people use. Okay, but they are much higher numbers. In fact, for my 7 books, the V 2.0 page counts average 48% higher than V 1.0, and I am showing substantially higher page count numbers in my daily Kindle sales statistics. What does that mean? Probably nothing. If the pot of money has not increased, or they haven’t skewed the counts to a higher increase too some books over others, then all that these higher page counts do is dilute the fund, and we will end up receiving the same payment as we did under the old system. On March 15 we can see the February sales detail, and the picture should begin to clear. I’ll let you what I learn, and look again over the following 2-3 months.

William F. Brown, is the author of 8 action, adventure, suspense novels on Kindle, Kindle Select, and Kindle Unlimited. To read about them or subscribe to the blog, go to my web site, http://box5462.temp.domains/~billbro4

Filed Under: How writers write, Kindle Normalized Page Counts, Kindle Unlimited Books Tagged With: Kindle Authors, Kindle Normalized Page Counts, Kindle Royalties, Kindle Unlimited, KNEPC V 2.0

Writing Blog — Kindle Unlimited: The New Paperback

March 14, 2016 by William F. Brown

Kindle Unlimited – I believe that the Kindle Unlimited program which Amazon rolled out a year and a half a year ago will prove to be the most revolutionary step in publishing since the e-book itself, and perhaps since the first paperback book was published in 1939 by Pocket Books. They priced them at $0.25 each, with the intention of bringing affordable books within reach of the masses. Naturally, all the major publishing houses laughed at them, as they have at nearly every other innovation since the Gutenberg printing press. Within five years, however Pocket Books had sold over 100 million copies, and no one was laughing anymore.

Kindle Unlimited, My Writing Blog, Book review, thriller novels, action-adventure,
William F Brown
Thriller Novels

The economics of book prices are interesting. The first Pocket Book paperbacks came out at the end of the Great Depression. A postage stamp cost $0.03, gas cost $0.10 a gallon, and bread was $0.5 a loaf. At $0.25, it was roughly the same as a gallon of milk, or a pound of butter, chicken, or coffee. More importantly, they were priced at about 10% of the cost of a hardback book. That was a lot of money back then, which is why hardback books were mostly found in libraries. According to government statistics, inflation has totaled 1589% since then, which means that 1939 Pocket Book would cost $4.22 in 2016 dollars and that hardback around $42.20.

Think about that for a moment. First, that 10 to 1 spread between hardbacks and paperbacks hasn’t held up over time. The average paperback today is more like twice that and new releases are normally in the $10-14 range. Meanwhile, the average new hardback appears to be just under $30, so that 10 to 1 spread now is more like 2 or 3 to 1. While the new, big name e-book in the Kindle store came out at $10 to $14, the price doesn’t stay there for long. After about 6-8 months, they are normally discounted to the $6 to $9 range, still, in a 4 or 5 to 1 spread to the hardbacks, and the average e-book on Kindle costs less than, roughly equivalent to that $0.25 Pocket Book in 1939 dollars. In fact, many readers only buy the Free or $0.99 e-books on the Sale pages, making Kindle the equivalent of the old public library for the frugal among us. One conclusion you can reach from these numbers is that e-books have had a larger effect on hardback book prices than they have had on paperbacks.

The growth of e-book readership has been phenomenal. While they were first “invented” in the 1930s, they only reached any level of popular use in the past 20 years after the Sony reader came out in 2006 and the first Kindle in 2007. Today, over half of all adults own some type of reader or tablet. More significantly for authors, Amazon now sells 65% of all e-books and 85% of all self-published e-books. In 20 years, the e-book and Kindle have grown to become the twin, 800-pound gorillas in the publishing industry, but their biggest impact may be yet to come.

That comment brings us to the Kindle Unlimited subscription service, which Amazon launched in July, 2014, initially to compete with Scribd and Oyster from HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. At that time, the three services had similar sized libraries to choose from; but like everything else, Kindle just seems to do it better. KU’s offerings have now grown to over 1 million books. Scribd and Oyster have grown as well, but none of the three offer their first rank bestsellers as part of their subscription services. If you are a reader however, and go through three books or more a month, at $9.99 per month the KU subscription service is a no-brainer.

True, the KU library only includes books that are part of the Kindle Select program and “exclusive” to Kindle, which is about a third of their total library, mostly good, self-published books, and “last year’s” books from the front line authors. Still, that’s a lot of good books for an avid reader.

For authors, the question has been whether to go exclusively with Kindle Select and get your books eligible for the Kindle Unlimited program, or stay out and try to market them through the other independent e-book publishers such as Smashwords and others. My writing friends have gone either way depending on how much they dislike or don’t trust Amazon. I understand those feelings, but my writing income has doubled as a result of the KU “Nominal Pages Read,” so don’t let your suspicions or emotions pick your own pocket. More about that in my next blog piece.

William F. Brown, is the author of 8 action, adventure, suspense novels on Kindle, Kindle Select, and Kindle Unlimited. To read about them or subscribe to the blog, go to my web site, http://box5462.temp.domains/~billbro4

 

Filed Under: Business History, Good fiction writing, Kindle Unlimited Books, Kindle Unlimited Thrillers, writing blog Tagged With: Business History, e-book publishing, Kindle select, Kindle Unlimited, New Kindle Books

Copyright © 2023 · Powered by ModFarm Sites · Log in