INR6.39

Amazon has a programme called the Kindle Direct Publishing Select Fund - KDP Select.  The programme in a nutshell allows authors - like me - to make their books available for free to anyone who is a member of Kindle Unlimited or who borrows the book through the Kindle Owners' Lending Library - KOLL.

Every month I receive an email from Amazon Accounts Payable that lets me know a payment is on its way.  There's a payment report that lets you see how much money is coming your way.  This month I logged in and found I was to be paid INR6.39 - forgive me for not knowing the Indian Rupee to Pound Sterling exchange rate off the top of my head, I had to use Google to get an estimate of how much that was.  The answer, £0.07 which first of all, it seems pointless to even pay that, the cost of processing the payment is probably more than the payment itself, second of all, the way KDP Select works is that every month Amazon sets aside so many millions of dollars for the fund.  In that same month the total number of pages read across all books on all platforms by all authors around the world [you get the point] - every page read, is divided into the fund to return a price per page.  You as an author are then paid an amount based on how many pages of your books people read.

Owing to the way this works, it's not unusual to get varying sized payments from Amazon.  However £0.07 made me stop and think, first of all, I'm flattered someone in India actually showed an interest in my work, I can't for the life of me think why though.  Second of all I dug into the reports dashboard on KDP and found that there were a grand total of 12 pages read from one of my books - again the title in particular has left me wondering "why?" not least of all why 12 pages?

I don't normally question this sort of thing, for a start I don't normally drill down through my reports to actually get an idea of who reads my books, that's not why I wrote them.  It's like analytics here on this site, they are there because Blogger - the site that hosts this blog - provides them.  I never look at those either.  I know some people will scold me for that and decry me for not putting more effort into search engine optimization and all the rest of it.  Let me make one thing clear though, I know all about those things, I've used them professionally, I choose not to use them here because I genuinely don't care.  I mean no offence to anyone reading this blog, I am happy you are here, but this blog is very much treated like a diary that I write in that I happen to leave open online for anyone to read.  I have said before I would continue to write for this blog whether I got 1 reader or 1 million, or none at all, that's not the point.

The same is true to an extent with my books, I write them in the hope that they will help someone, and they do provide an income but it's not an income I rely on.  I have to say though £0.07 is the smallest single payment I have received from Amazon and I found the whole thing amusing.  Even more comical is the idea that before direct deposit payments were supported, Amazon used to send actual cheques.  If I had received a cheque from Amazon for 7p I think I would have actually kept it rather than depositing it purely for the novelty of having something that seems so ridiculous.

If anyone at Amazon KDP should happen to read this blog post, I'd love the option on the payments section of the reports dashboard to donate the money to charity, if that had been there that's probably what I would have done in this instance.