So lately I've been using this site to complain bitterly about the situation I'm in. But I have to admit, overall, my situation isn't so bad. I'm getting page-reads. I'm even getting a few sales. What I can't get right away, I get eventually. This is especially true of my new book which started out a little slowly but is doing ok now.

But here's today's bitter complaint: I got 212 page-reads today, but it only amounted to 29 cents. That's terrible!

Now I have to admit, the pennies are themselves no longer an issue. If 212 page-reads amounted to 40 or 50 cents, how would that change my life? Not much. I have kids who spend twenty or thirty bucks just in the process of breathing. So the difference here of 28 cents is not really that big a deal.

But here's my conclusion about what happened. Amazon pays us about .45, that's right, almost half a cent, for a page read. You read one page of my book, and that's what it gives me. So, if you read 212 pages, it should have given me about 50 cents. So why didn't it? Because most of those pages were read in India.

I am not sure why Amazon.com would give us .45 of a cent, whereas Amazon.in would give us more like .2 of a cent. It probably has something to do with dividing total revenue into total page-reads, meaning that perhaps KU is much more popular in India, and they have much more in the way of page reads to distribute, or, perhaps they sell KU for less than $10/mo. in India. It seems from what i'm seeing that amazon.in somehow has a different formula (it's definitely not .45/page). For whatever reason.

In fact, .45 itself is quite low, if you map out what's happening. Even for amazon.com, it's a formula that is made directly out of certain revenues divided by total page-reads, and they are very clear about not asserting total control to stabilize it whatsoever. That is, if the bottom drops out of the revenue, they'll simply pay us less and not worry about it, or if, conversely, KU becomes extremely popular and there are unexpectedly millions of page-reads appearing out of nowhere. I am, in a sense, competing against all other authors on KU for those reads that elusive as they are, someone is doing somewhere: reading some page of a book, taking a minimum amount of time on it, etc. I of course am giving some author some of these as I read their books.

I sometimes think that if I got 60 in a day I did pretty well. Lately I've been doing better: a hundred, two hundred. But at .45 a page it'll take well over 200 just to make a dollar. And I'm trying to get a dollar a day just to keep over my $30/month income goal. $30 is peanuts. I might as well be walking dogs for a living.

Fortunately people do buy my books, sometimes. Not often. Not even daily.

And fortunately I'm retired, I'm not living off of these peanuts.