What is KDP Select?

KDP Select and you

As an indie author the self-publishing process can seem like a long and daunting road, from the moment you finish writing your manuscript you are faced with countless choices on how to bring this masterpiece to the public. Selecting editors, proof-readers, formatting, book cover design, advertising and of course, a printer or print on demand service, it can seem endless.

Being one of the industry leaders, KDP is a very popular choice with self-publishing authors looking to utilize the publishing wing of Amazon for their own book. And being part of Amazon, it does give you a large reach to wide range of readers in multiple countries.

If you have decided to use KDP for your book, then you will have noticed an option they offer with KDP select. So, what is KDP select and is it work signing up for?

Okay, KDP Select is a program where you opt to sell the digital edition of your book exclusively via KDP for a 90-day participation period, this means that your eBook cannot be sold anywhere else (that even includes selling it on your own website or blog), you can see the full terms for the fine details.

After this 90-day period you can choose to auto-renew or leave the program, what’s great is that your printed version of the book can still be sold via KDP and can also be sold via any other distributor while enrolled in KDP select, again, KDP select is just for your digital version of the book.

So, why would you enroll in KDP select?

Well, the first benefit is it makes the book available through Kindle Unlimited, this being a subscription program allowing users to read as many books as they like (and of course, your eBook will still be available to buy as normal). It also makes the eBook available to borrow to many international readers.

This can help in the ranking of your book, and you can also earn royalties from Kindle Unlimited, these royalties are paid on a per page read basis, so the more of your book that gets read, the more you can earn.

Earn 70% royalties on eBooks sold to readers within certain countries.

The program is also free to join and gives you great promotional tools to sell more books, promos such as countdown deals, free book promotions and Amazon’s literary contest.

Calculating royalties

These come out of KDP’s select global fund each month, this is based on multiple factors which include exchange rates, customer reading behavior, and subscription pricing. Author’s earnings are then calculated by their share of total pages read (up to 3,000 pages per title).
The example KDP uses is of a total fund of $10 million for a month with 100 million pages actually read, if this were the case, then:

An author’s eBook with 100 pages which was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $1000, calculated as follows: 10 million (KDP total fund) x 10,000 (total pages read for this author) ÷ 100 million (total pages read via KDP select)

However, and author’s eBook which had 200 pages and was only read halfway through on average would earn $1,000, again, they base payments on pages read. You can see their in-depth details on royalties here.

How do they calculate pages read of your eBook?

They use a system called KENPC (Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count), this calculates a count using standard formatting settings for font, line height and line spacing etc. non-text elements such as images, charts, graphs illustrations will also go towards page count. The system has been created to work across all devices and user settings upon those devices, all geared towards giving a more accurate count for each book and author.

So, is it worth joining?

If you are only selling your eBook via Amazon, then yes, however, if you are planning to sell the eBook via multiple other websites (including your own) then KDP select may not be for you.

KDP Select does offer some great promotional tools and benefits (along with having your book on a platform with a massive reach with Kindle Unlimited), it is certainly worth considering, even if you only use it for the 90 days.