Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) team announced this week they continue to see strong response from customers to the Kindle Unlimited (KU) book borrows scheme and are adding a bonus of $4.25 million to the previously announced base fund amount of $3 million. This brings the total fund to $7.25 million for the month of December.
KDP released the following report “to share some initial results from the first few months of Kindle Unlimited” with its stable of participating authors and independent publishers:
• Renewal Rates – Authors have chosen to renew their titles in KDP Select at rates in excess of 95% in each month of 2014.
• A La Carte Sales Growth – During the 5 full months since KU launch (August to December 2014), royalties to KDPS authors from a la carte sales have grown faster than a la carte sales on KDP overall or Kindle overall.
• Adding in the payments for KOLL and KU over that time, total royalties to KDPS authors more than doubled when compared to the same period in 2013.
• Total earnings on titles priced $2.99 or greater are growing faster than the overall average. The same is true for titles 150+ pages in length.
A KDP spokesperson says, “To further highlight the KDP Select books that are most popular with customers, we will again award “KDP Select All-Stars” for December to the most-read authors and titles in the U.S., U.K. and Germany. We’ll spotlight each All-Star author and title on applicable detail pages.
“These awards will come with financial bonuses and recipients will be contacted in the next few days. For more information on All-Stars, visit https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A2X66QXB12WV2. Anyone with a title in KDP Select—even a debut author with a single title—can qualify if their work becomes a customer favorite. We will also pay a separate bonus for Kindle Owners’ Lending Library loans in Japan.”
The spokesperson says, “We’ve gotten lots of great feedback in the past weeks and months, including a bunch of ideas on how to further improve the structure of the program and make it work better for authors and readers alike. Like everything we do, we’re looking hard at all your feedback and we expect to keep tweaking and improving the program in the future.”
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Morcan Books & Films 
I think KU is the model for the future and that others will imitate it. Actually I think subscriptions will be a universal form of ownership.
You may well be right Stephen. The initial fears of participant authors/indie publishers were totally understandable regarding KU, but the inevitable teething problems are rapidly being ironed out…in our experience at least. Would love to hear from other authors re their experience of KU.