Dragon In The Rubble: August 2015

6 August 2015

Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP)

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...and what more I've learnt.

The first thing I've found out since my last post is what page count Amazon are using for purposes of calculating my pages read.

To find this value out you log into Kind Direct Publishing and select the Bookshelf.

Click on the Ellipses (...) button and select Promote and Advertise.

You'll find the page count at the bottom left hand corner of the screen.

For George and the Dragon this reads:

Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC) v1.0: 563

So now I know that my page count is 563 and that helps a lot.

According to Morris Rosenthal's back of the envelope calculation:

"An estimate for the Kindle Select royalty system that starts today is $0.0058, or 0.58 cents per page read. This is based on Amazon’s announcement that the global pool for July will be at least $11 million, and that last month, the number of pages read was almost 1.9 billion."

I believe the pot has been increased since this calculation but it does give us a good value to work with and that's 1/2 cent/page,

So here's my latest rather erratic chart showing the number of pages read/day for George and the Dragon.

Armed with the above I can start to make some sense of it.

Firstly what are they paying me per book?

563 x 0.5c = $2.815

So each book completely read pays me $2.81 that's a reasonable amount higher than the $2.04 I would get paid from a Kindle eBook sale on a $2.99 eBook.

Next what do my stats tell me?

Total pages read so far: 1255

Number of books equivilent: 2.23

Expected royalty payment: $6.28

What it still doesn't tell me is the number of people who have loaned a copy of the book or the percentage of the book that is being read per person. I'm sure there are other stats that I would like to have at my disposal that I haven't thought of yet.

I also now understand why Amazon HAD to make this change. Too many people were releasing too many short stories, serialising novels etc. If I serialised George and the Dragon into say 5 parts and these all got rented via KDP Selected I'd get 5 payments whether the book was read or not. This would have been of financial benefit to the author but must have been breaking Amazon's bank.

So there you have it; everything I have discovered about the new payment system in a nutshell.

I still think I'm going to switch back to not being Amazon exclusive.

Phil

4 August 2015

GoGoDragons

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...and what I did this last weekend.

The weekend just gone I took the family off up to Norwich. It's not a bad drive but it's still a good 3 hour drive, luckily I'm blessed with kids who sleep in the car.

The reason for this trip was two-fold:

1. I was doing my first ever reading of George and the Dragon

2. Norwich has been the host of GoGoDragons. Which is a two month long interactive arts sculpture trail bringing 84 large dragon sculptures and 120 school dragons to the City of Norwich.

I have to confess I was little disappointed with the turn out for the reading. However I did love the park in which it took place. It's got a fantastic little amphitheater built in to it. Also the owners of the opticians who had arranged the reading had also arranged for an amazing piece of artwork to be included on the wall over-looking the park.

I have to say I was nervous so it's maybe a blessing the audience was small. I'll know what to expect next time.

Before then and for a large part of the weekend we spent time look at all of the dragons on display in the city centre. We didn't get to see all of them but those we did see were fantastic.

Here are some of my personal favorites: