A Total Mystery: Number of Pages Read

KU-Numbers

Still worth to be on Amazon KDP Select?
You might have read this recent blog post here at SavvyBookWriters.com/blog.  I just came over a discussion on Amazon KBoards.  Title:  Amazon is intermittently admitting to errors in it’s KU page reporting.  KBoards is a discussion board for owners of Kindles, readers of Kindle e-books, and writers of Kindle e-books.

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Mystery: Number of Pages Read?
Have you ever wondered how Amazon is able to figure out and correctly state how many pages of a certain book were read? And what happens if the book is read only a year or two later? And does Amazon even increase their own revenue, when they do not pay the author?  Question after question…  And discussions by authors for over this topic for years now.
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Becca Fanning wrote: “For the past few weeks dozens of authors have been reporting that their page read counts on new releases have been…off. Not off by ten percent, but by 50-95%.  These are for consistent releases with expected patterns of performance (as expected as you can be in this industry).  Sales numbers and sales ranks are as expected, but page reads are drastically lower. Just to make a few points clear: the pool of authors who have noticed things aren’t right includes those with fewer than five books under their belt and NYT bestselling authors with over 100 books who regularly break into the top 100 or top 50.”

And further: “As authors have started to come together in their genre-focused forums and support groups, they started to compare their data and take action.  Emails began to fly, initially meeting with a stalwart wall of “We looked into your pages read and can confirm that they are accurate.” Most of us took that and gave up. But one didn’t. They insisted on getting someone on the phone and elevating their issue up the chain.

On Friday Sept 30, Amazon admitted that there’s a problem on their end and that they have to get their legal team involved.  Since then, a handful of authors have gotten emails stating that a “small number of pages” were erroneously left out of their reports and were now being credited due to a software glitch. One author saw their September page total go up by a little over 1,000 KENP and another saw it go up by over 30,000 KENP.
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The author who first broke through the Amazon shield wall and got the admission that there was something wrong hasn’t received an email about additional page credit yet.  In fact, concurrent with these developments this weekend, Amazon was still emailing authors with massively suppressed page reads that everything was fine.
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Authors are advised:
“If you recently published and your page reads look off, you should reach out to Amazon and let them know.  If you have books enrolled in KDP Select and you think your reported page reads have been unusually low recently, you should send an email to:
ecr-support@amazon.com and kdp-support@amazon.com. Provide them with data and if your numbers don’t look right, be firm.  You might get results that are worth your time.  Others have.”

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When I canceled my own KDP Select in summer for all my books, I did it only out of a feeling that something isn’t right in the Amazon statements, regarding the “pages read” in the KindleUnlimited program.  But how can you prove it to them?  It’s always better to have full control over your business – and I hate to call them up, so I pulled the plug.  I am glad that I stepped out a while ago, when I found these writer’s post.
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More details from bestselling writers are discussed in an article at the Digital Reader.
Read the whole discussions at KBoards and also this one.

 

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