Self-publishing · Less obvious
Kindle Unlimited and subscription reading
Paid by the page-read rather than the purchase — a library card with a royalty pool.
Subscription platforms pay authors from a monthly pot, according to how many pages of their books were read. For some genres this is the majority of digital income. For others it is a way to give the book away. Exclusivity is usually the price of admission to the largest pool. That price is worth calculating, not assuming.
- Typical pay
- A fraction of a cent per page read, from a pool that Amazon (and rivals) reset. A well-read series in the right genre can out-earn purchases; a literary one-off often will not.
- Ceiling
- Uncapped
- Speed
- First money in weeks
- Effort
- A real extra job
- Needs
- No book required
How it works
- 01
You enrol a digital title in a subscription programme, usually in exchange for digital exclusivity during the term.
- 02
Readers borrow rather than buy. You are paid from a pool based on pages read, not on the cover price.
- 03
You can un-enrol at the end of each term and sell the title wide instead.
How to start
- 01
Look at the top of your genre in the programme, not at publishing-industry Twitter. The data is on the bestseller lists.
- 02
Series, a regular release schedule, and a clean first chapter do better than a standalone masterpiece.
- 03
Track reads against what you would have made on 70% purchase royalties. Decide with a spreadsheet, not a philosophy.
Watch out
- 01
Exclusivity means your ebook is absent from every other shop, library programme, and subscription service.
- 02
Page-read rates move. Do not build a mortgage on last year's pot.
- 03
Stuffing a book with extra pages to game the pot is how accounts get closed.
A subscription page-read is a strange way to be paid for sentences, but it is not stranger than PLR. Both are 'someone read it, here is a share of a pot'. The writers who resent this model are often writing books the model was not built for. That is information, not an insult.