I get asked this question more than almost any other: when you read one of my books on Kindle Unlimited, am I better off than if you’d bought it outright?
The short version: usually yes, but not always. And the answer tells you more about how publishing actually works than any “support indie authors” Instagram post ever will.
Let me show you the numbers. My numbers, from my 20 books, not some thinkpiece based on an industry average scraped from a Reddit thread in 2019.
How Kindle Unlimited Actually Pays Authors
Kindle Unlimited is Amazon’s all-you-can-read ebook subscription: £9.49 a month, unlimited borrows, no late fees and no snooty librarian tutting at you for returning Dan Brown with crumbs in it. Readers borrow, authors get paid per page read. Not per borrow, not per book opened… per page. If you borrow one of my novels, read the first chapter, then abandon it because you’ve decided you’d rather do the hoovering, I earn for those pages and nothing else.
The pay rate comes from something called the KDP Select Global Fund, a pot of money Amazon tops up every month. Authors get a slice proportional to the pages read of their books. In practice the rate wobbles around £0.004 to £0.005 per page. Amazon counts pages using its own standardised measure called KENPC, rather than the actual page count of the paperback, which stops anyone gaming the system with inch-wide margins and a font the size of a motorway sign.
Meanwhile, when someone buys the Kindle edition outright at £2.99, I receive a 70% royalty. After Amazon takes its delivery fee, I get roughly £2.08 per sale. Simple.
The Real Numbers from My Catalogue
Here’s where the myth of “buying always helps authors more” falls apart. Below are the actual earnings per full read versus per sale across a handful of my titles, using the midpoint KENP rate of £0.0045 per page.
| Book | Sale royalty | KU full read | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who Sent Clement? (670 KENP pages) | £2.08 | £3.02 | KU, by 45% |
| Meeting Mungo Thunk (664 KENP pages) | £2.08 | £2.99 | KU, by 44% |
| Headcase (563 KENP pages) | £2.08 | £2.53 | KU, by 22% |
| My catalogue average (~540 KENP pages) | £2.08 | £2.43 | KU, by 17% |
| The Last Stop Video Shop (467 KENP pages, £3.99 edition) | £2.79 | £2.10 | Sale, by 33% |
| Beyond Broadhall (395 KENP pages) | £2.08 | £1.78 | Sale, by 17% |
The pattern is clear: longer novels favour Kindle Unlimited, shorter ones favour direct sales. Who Sent Clement? clocks in at 670 KENP pages, and a full read nets me nearly a quid more than someone buying it outright. Beyond Broadhall, on the other hand, runs to a lean 395 pages; there, a sale beats a full read by about thirty pence.
There’s a second factor: cover price. The Last Stop Video Shop retails at £3.99 rather than the standard £2.99, pushing the sale royalty up to £2.79 and tipping the balance the other way. If I ever found the nerve to price a novel at £5.99, sales would win every time. I haven’t found the nerve.
The Caveats (Because Nothing in Publishing Is Ever Clean)
Three things stop the picture being as rosy as the table suggests.
Not everyone finishes the book. If a KU reader bails at page 50 of a 540-page novel, I earn about 22p rather than £2.43. Harsh, but fair. If you’ve ever read the opening chapter of a thriller and thought the author has the prose style of a damp tea towel, you won’t have harmed their income much by giving up at chapter two.
The KENP rate isn’t fixed. It floats every month depending on how much Amazon throws into the global fund and how many pages everyone collectively read. In a good month it nudges £0.005. In a bad month, authors who’ve been around since 2017 mutter darkly about it and threaten to “go wide”. I’ve had months where the rate felt like Amazon had emptied the jar, left a handful of coppers, and then posted a photo of the receipt.
Returns exist for paid sales, too. Buying a book and returning it within seven days (which Amazon cheerfully allows, apparently treating ebooks like a dodgy pair of trousers from Next) wipes out my sale royalty. Returns don’t happen with KU reads. Once the pages are counted, they’re counted.
On balance, across my catalogue, Kindle Unlimited works out slightly better per engaged reader. Not dramatically… enough to matter over a year, but not enough to panic about if you’d rather own the book outright.
What This Means If You Want to Support an Author
If you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber reading this and wondering whether to borrow my books or buy them from guilt, here’s the simple answer: borrow them. For most of my titles I earn more that way, you get to read the book as part of a subscription you already pay for, and everyone goes home happy.
If you’re not a KU subscriber and you’re paying for my books outright: thank you, sincerely. £2.99 well spent. I’ll use the royalty responsibly — by which I mean on coffee and printer ink.
If you genuinely want to go the extra mile for any author whose books you enjoy, a review after finishing helps far more than either a borrow or a sale. Algorithms notice. Amazon’s recommendation engine is essentially a slot machine powered by reader ratings, and reviews are the coins.
The Bottom Line
Do authors make more from KU or from sales? For me, and for most novelists writing full-length fiction: Kindle Unlimited, usually, by a small but meaningful margin. For shorter books or premium-priced ones, the sale wins.
Honestly, though, I’m just chuffed anyone wants to read one of my books at all, and I’ll never take that for granted. A reader is a reader, however they come by the book.
The really important thing is the reading itself. A sale that sits unopened on a Kindle forever helps me with a one-off royalty and nothing else; a KU borrow, finished and reviewed, helps me with earnings, visibility, and the recommendation algorithms that push the book to the next reader. The best outcome for any author is a reader who actually turns the pages, whichever way they got hold of the book.
If you fancy testing the theory, Who Sent Clement? happens to be the longest novel in my catalogue and therefore the title that rewards me most handsomely per KU read. Borrow it, read it, let me know what you think. I’ll take the £3.02, thank you very much.