Legend has it that Dostoevsky was paid by the word and Dickens was paid by installments, leading to great tomes heavy on description, or chapters that followed familiar formulas. Now, Amazon's Kindle's Direct Publishing platform may change the landscape of modern writing, at least for e-books published through the company. Recently, Amazon announced that starting July 1, it would pay authors per page read, rather than by the number of copies borrowed from Amazon.
The Kindle Direct Publishing platform lets authors self-publish and set prices for their works. When a self-published book is rented through the Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners' Lending Library programs, Amazon traditionally paid authors out of a special fund for each download (or "borrow"), although readers are allowed to borrow the title for free. Now, although authors will still be paid out of that same fund, the amount they're paid will change to favor authors who can get readers to keep turning pages.
In this new scheme, Amazon detailed, an author of a 200-page book that 100 people only read halfway through would be paid as much as the author of a 100-page book that 100 readers read all of. But if that 200-page book author can get readers to finish the whole book, they will make twice as much as the author of the 100-page book. The pool of cash that Amazon pays authors out of changes monthly. The Atlantic notes that this month, the fund is $3 million.
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