This post is for all the authors out there using or testing out Kindle Direct Publishing during July, 2o15. You may be aware that Amazon announced a change to how authors will be paid for KDP unlimited downloads starting in July, 2015. Rather than receiving a payout for each download that happened during the month, Amazon has chosen to level the playing field, as it were, and pay a royalty per page read. If you want more opinions on this change, please see Hugh Howey’s recent post. He covers it well. For those of you who tried to read Amazon’s explanation and still walked away confused about how the new KDP Unlimited payout works, I have created a quick Microsoft Excel calculator that contains a simple calculator with the example given in Amazon’s post, and then a simple calculator that you can edit with your own book information to try to estimate your royalty earnings. Here’s the link to the calculator (requires Microsoft Excel to work, but you might be able to upload it to google docs and get it to work there—something I didn’t test). Enjoy:
