Amazon to pay authors according to how many pages people read

The company will pay self-published authors on its lending services per page from next month.

(Photo By A man reads a Kindle in Victoria Tower Gardens. Image: Getty.)

From the beginning of July, a clutch of authors self-publishing on Amazon’s site will no longer be reimbursed based on how many people download their books. Instead, the company has announced, those operating through the site’s Kindle Unlimited and Lending Library book borrowing services will be paid according to how far customers actually get through their books.

Amazon says the move is a response to “great feedback” from authors, who had asked that the company “better align payout with the length of books and how much customers read”. Authors of longer books, who were presumably pushing for change in the first place, may be a little disgruntled to find that the new system may result in them earning less than before.

At the moment, the site’s direct publishing division sets a monthly “Select Global Fund”, which is then divided among authors according to how many people have downloaded their books (this month, for example, it was $3m). Now, that amount will be divided among the number of pages read by customers that month instead.

Oh, and before you ask – the old “big margins, big font” trick won’t work here. Amazon has developed something called a “normalised page count” based on standardised font, line length and spacing, and will calculate the number of pages read accordingly. An author of a 100 page book read 100 times cover-to-cover this month would therefore earn $300 if 100m pages were read in total.

It will be interesting to see first whether the move makes it to other Kindle products; and second whether it affects the way authors structure their work. When novels were regularly serialised in the 17th through 19th centuries, the practice understandably resulted in a higher volume of cliffhangers, and more episodic chapters. An ambitious Amazon self-publisher might well try to end every page mid-sentence, or with a particularly tantalising bit of description.

Big-hitter authors like Thomas Piketty should hope that the funding model doesn’t make it up the literary food chain – last year, the Wall Street Journal estimated that most people only made it through a couple of chapters of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. We have an inkling that the David Foster Wallace estate wouldn’t be too happy, either.