This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Welcome back to Side Hustle School. It's gonna be a big week over here. Excited to bring you a new episode every single day and I will be on book tour starting on Tuesday. So I'll share that with you along the way. As always, thank you so much for listening.
Thank you for being part of this community. And today we're embarking on a literary journey as we address a question that some of our aspiring writer listeners may have on their minds. Okay, so this is Ethan. He has been crafting his novel over the past, I don't know, however long. But he's coming to completion and the question arises, how best to publish?
And how should he make his work accessible to readers? So in Ethan's case specifically, he's thinking about Kindle Unlimited. Now if you haven't heard of Kindle Unlimited, it's a program by Amazon where readers can pay a flat fee. I think it's $15 or so a month and they gain access to thousands and thousands of titles from which they can download and read. And the authors earn royalties based on the reading, but the specifics of it remain a bit of a mystery.
So that's what Ethan is wondering about. Let's see if we can unravel this together. Delve into the world of Kindle Unlimited from the perspective of an author, which is not me. Actually, I don't use Kindle Unlimited, but I'll talk about that a bit more in my answer. Let's hear the detailed question from Ethan after this quick message from our sponsor.
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Greetings from Flagstaff, Arizona. I'm Ethan, a writer who's been steadily working on a novel for a while. As I get closer to completion, I've started looking at publishing options. I know that a lot of people in my situation use Kindle Unlimited and I know that authors earn royalties based on the number of readers, but I'm not entirely sure how the whole process works or how earnings are calculated. Can you explain KU from the perspective of an author who publishes on it?
- Ethan, great question. I don't think we've ever talked about Kindle Unlimited, at least if I can recall correctly. And my books are not on KU just because it's kind of an exclusive deal. So that's maybe one thing to be aware of as an author. If you wanna enroll your book in KU, you have to be part of the KDP Select program, Kindle Direct Publishing.
It means your digital book can only be sold on Amazon. You can't sell it on iBooks or Google Play. And my publisher requires that we don't have exclusive distribution. Like we have to be able to sell in lots of different platforms and areas. So you gotta make that choice kind of on the front end.
If you're self-publishing, you can do it. But if you're publishing traditionally, then it's a little bit more complicated. So to get into the royalties, as an author publishing in this format, you earn royalties every time a page of your book is read by a Kindle Unlimited subscriber. So Amazon takes all the money from subscriber fees. It's the last thing I read was $17 million a month.
So lots of money. And they kind of divide it up based on the pages of books that have been read. So that's the key factor. If you have a 300 page book, somebody downloads it, but they only read a couple of pages, then you're not gonna get paid basically. But if you write a thriller or a romance, that keeps the pages turning, you know, and then you write a sequel, you write a trilogy, you write a seven book series, and people just can't get enough, well, that's where you're gonna make money, okay?
So people that have figured out how to game the system, I shouldn't even say game, it's just a strategy, right? People who have done well on this platform, this system, they understand that's what is required. Now for some specifics, I found this quote online. I don't know how accurate it is, but the quote is, the payout for pages read has been around just under half a cent per page for the past year. So that's a statistic that someone's claiming.
Obviously it could change every month because it depends on the subscription fees that are taken in. It depends on the total number of pages read across the whole audience. But, you know, it kind of gives you like a little ballpark figure, basically. If you get lots of people to read, to not just, you know, download the book, but to read the book, that's the key point. You know, traditional book sales are all based on purchase of the book, whether it's the ebook, the audio book, the print book.
It doesn't matter whether you actually read. In this case, it matters a lot. So keep that in mind. Could be a good option for some people. Well, it is a good option for some people.
Others, not so much. So think about your goals. Think about what you're trying to do. Do you want to reach the most many readers as possible? Do you want to get paid on the number of pages read?
You know, think about that and create an overall publishing strategy. Ethan, once again, the most important thing is, congratulations on almost finishing the novel. That's great. Let's get to fully finished. And I hope you get a chance to share that with the world.
Listeners, if you have a question or an idea, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Excited to feature them each week, along with updates from listeners as they launch and grow their projects. I'm also excited to get on the road this week and meet with many of you in person. Again, chrisguillebeau.com/tour or social media, 193 countries on Instagram. That's all for today.
You're listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
