Does anyone know how you are credited for Amazon Prime sales?

I was speaking to someone earlier and he said he'd just download my book for free as part of his Amazon Prime subscription. I wondered how the publisher gets rewarded for such sales.

I found the answer to this eventually. They are not treated as sales but like loans through the Kindle lending library. So you get paid based on the number of pages read NOT books downloaded.

Amazon does some coding magic to estimate page counts for books. Mine has a count of 421 which is much higher than the number of actual pages in the paperback.

There's no fixed amount per page, you just get a share of the pot.

Mark

I had no idea they paid for pages read.  That's interesting. Talk about taking advantage of how technology has decreased our attention span.

What will they think of next?  Maybe they'll start calculating how long it should take to read each page and pay based on the actual seconds/minutes spent.

Don't forget to tell your friend to flip through all the pages even if he doesn't read them entirely.

He's an accountant so no doubt he'd want to bill me for his time if I asked him to do that. :)

Suddenly, on the Amazon portal, I'm starting to see stats for pages read from Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners Lending Library.  8)

Amazon offers a beta version of their KDP reports data that shows pages read for a period of time that you, the author, specify. Here is mine for the past 90 days. Unfortunately, pages read has declined, even during the stay-at-home Covid virus time. I backed off on my advertising dollars so awareness has likely dropped.

Hi Michael

What advertising do you do?

Mark