Staceycarroll.org uses Amazon affiliate ads. If you click on an Amazon ad, Amazon may track you. If you purchase an item after clicking on an Amazon Affiliate link, I may earn a small commission. Staceycarroll.org does not track you nor try to "improve your viewing experience" with cookies, and we do not sell your information. The whole goal of the website is to provide you with informative articles and adult fiction books that you may want to read.

If you’re a new author or an author who’s never enrolled their book in Amazon KDP, you may be wondering what it is and how it works. Amazon’s KDP program is a subscription service for readers. It’s called Kindle Unlimited, and it provides unlimited reading of digital books on any device that has the Kindle app. The program offers a 30-day free trial, but the service is $9.99 a month after the 30-day free trial. There’s also a second category for readers called Kindle Prime. This is for individuals who have an Amazon Prime membership. For authors, it doesn’t matter which service readers subscribe to. It all falls under the same service – KDP Select.

KDP Select

 

Enrolling in KDP Select is easy. It’s a checkbox. Once you click that checkbox, your book is enrolled in KDP Select for at least the next three months. During that time, Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Prime members who stumble upon your book can download it and read it for free. If you ever want to disenroll your book from KDP Select, you must uncheck that checkbox and wait for the book to timeout of the program.

Books That Are Eligible for KDP Select

Books enrolled in KDP Select cannot be available in digital formats anywhere else. This means that if you have your ebook available on Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books or even your own website, you’ll have to remove those versions prior to enrolling in the program. What you can do is keep your paperback books on sites that allow paperbacks, but your digital book will be exclusive to Amazon.

Why Authors Enroll in KDP Select

Authors enroll in KDP Select for a variety of reasons, but the primary reason is that they want to increase their reader base quickly and maintain a certain book rank that is hopefully higher than the one they have via only selling full copies of their digital books.

Broaden Their Reader Base

Readers who are enrolled in KDP Unlimited or who have Amazon Prime memberships are less likely to buy a digital book. They may still buy paperbacks, but as a whole, paperbacks don’t sell as well as digital books. This means that enrolling in KDP select could significantly broaden your reader base. According to Statista, 101 million people are enrolled in Amazon Prime as of 2018. How many of those people take advantage of the book part of the program is unknown. As of this writing, I could not find stats for Kindle Unlimited members. Amazon can be pretty tight-lipped about their sales and membership numbers, so this is no surprise, but you can assume there are a few because Amazon wouldn’t have it as a service if it didn’t have members.

Maintain or Increase Book Rank

A couple page flips can increase a book’s rank dramatically, making it visible to more readers because it appears higher in the search results. This means that a book that was sitting with a rank of 1 million might be able to maintain a new rank of 500,000 with a few KDP page flips per day, and I’ve seen KDP books regularly maintain ranks between 55,000 and 150,000, which is significantly better than a rank above 1 million.

Increase Overall Monthly Book Income

Authors want readers to read their books, like them, review them and talk about them, but it’s also a business. Many authors are looking to swap from their day job to writing full time. Writing is really a calling, and whatever we do during the day isn’t really what we want to be doing. It’s simply paying the bills. One way to potentially increase book sales and royalty income is by enrolling in KDP Select. Each page flip is worth about .005 cents. Though, it does vary. This means that if someone flips through an entire 300-page book, it’s worth $1.50. If you can get 1,000 page flips a day, you’ll increase your monthly book income by $150. That could be a week’s worth of groceries or a cell or car insurance bill.

Why Authors Don’t Enroll in KDP Select

Authors don’t enroll in KDP select due to the limitations. A KDP select ebook is only available on Amazon, which eliminates the ability to sell that same ebook other places and potentially attract more readers due to being on more platforms. It can also lower your monthly income, depending on your current whole books sales.

Ebooks Are available in Fewer Places

To remain eligible for KDP select, the author’s ebook must only be available on Amazon. This could actually decrease the book’s visibility to spite the fact that Amazon now makes up about 80 percent of the book market. This means that if an author has significant ebook sales on another platform, they wouldn’t want to enroll it in KDP select and hope their Barnes and Noble fans start buying paperbacks or switch to Amazon.

Income Could Actually Decrease

Depending on how many whole ebooks the author is selling per month, their income could actually decrease. Most ebooks are priced somewhere between $2.99 and $4.99 with a few bold authors choosing to charge more. At a price of $2.99, the author earns about $2 a book. At $4.99, the author earns closer to $3.40 a book. A 300-page book enrolled in KDP Select earns a maximum of $1.50 per book. This means that the author would have to sell twice as many books per month to earn the same income. For example, an author selling 100 300 page books a month at $2.99 would earn $200, but it would take 40,000 page flips to earn the same income. That’s roughly 1,333-page flips per day. 

The decision to enroll or disenroll in KDP depends on a lot of factors, and it’s primrily up to the author and where they are at in their career. For new authors with few readers, it may be a good idea to enroll in KDP Select to see how the book performs. For established authors with a solid reader base, it may not be such a good idea.