Kindle Unlimited Payout at a Record Low $1.33 in March 2015

Nate Hoffelder

Kindle Unlimited adoption continued to grow last month, but unfortunately it grew faster than Amazon ‘s willingness to fund it.

Earlier this week Amazon released the latest statistics on KDP Select, the program used to fund indie author and publisher participation in Kindle Unlimited. Amazon reported that the pool for KDP Select for March 2015 had been increased to $9.5 million. They also announced separately that the payout for each time an ebook was read had dropped to $1.33.

Grab an envelope and crunch the numbers, and you’ll see that ebooks in KDP Select accounted for about 7.14 million reads.

That is a new record for KDP Select, and compared to January 2015 it represents an increase of about a million additional ebooks being read.

The number of ebooks read by Kindle Unlimited subscribers has continued to grow ever since the program launched last July, but unfortunately the funding for KDP Select isn’t growing quite as fast. While Amazon has increased the funding each month, the increase has been kept to a minimum. As a result, the average payout continues to stay low:

The payout per ebook read hasn’t exceeded $1.54 since Kindle Unlimited really got started in August 2014, and my current financial forecast is that Amazon is going to keep it that way.

Authors and publishers would be advised to plan on the payout staying low, and act accordingly.