Kindle Reads Payouts

Just the other day I admitted my slavish addiction to checking the "boards" or reading my kindle dashboard, hoping that someone somewhere is reading one of my books, or perhaps even buying one. No such luck, usually; I'm a starting author and sometimes it's pretty dry. It's getting better though, and in fact the last few days better than usual.

Unfortunately the kindle reads payout is at its lowest point ever. I realize that Amazon just takes the revenue from kindle unlimited, and divides it by the number of pages, so to some degree it's out of their control. It's a purely mathematical thing and they don't guarantee from one month to the next whether it will go up or down, because they're not doing the buying.

In fact, a lot of people stopped paying for KU when the price went up (maybe in July?), and possibly because of other summer activities (August vacations?) reads were down too. Although if reads go down the price for a page should go up, because there are less pages to split it amongst. I don't know but for whatever reason it's pretty low. At Amazon.com it's like .4 of a cent, and the others, co.uk, co.in, co.de, etc., are worse. India is the worst.

Thus you become naturally disappointed when it appears you have a read (a page should be a page, right?) but then the person is from India, so it adds almost nothing to your total. At a tenth of a cent per page, the whole Indian subcontinent could read my haiku and I'd probably owe them money. Ah but a read is a read. I try to keep my head up and say, anyone anywhere who is reading my book(s), that is good.

Then, if KU reads payouts get low enough, one has to rely more on sales. But sales are more wishy-washy and are more influenced by other factors. KU reads can be more consistent but if it's consistently low, or consistently disappointing you tend to go elsewhere. I can feel it to some degree.

What I'm really saying is that the free-market aspect of the system drives one's actions maybe more than necessary but it's inevitable to some degree. The system encourages you to keep on cranking out writing, yes, and that's good. But the system is also pressuring us and making us value .com over the others. It makes me privileged to be on .com. I should appreciate that. But I'm not so impressed by undeserved privilege.