For authors with ebooks on Amazon, in your royalty report you may see up to three Amazon KDP lines for each ebook, each corresponding to the type of ebook sale:
- Standard – a regular purchase of your ebook.
- Free – Promotion – how many Amazon customers ordered your ebook while it was in a free promotion (therefore no royalty)
- Kindle Edition Normalized Page (KENP) Read – the total number of pages read by Amazon customers.
In this article, I will explain the Amazon ebook royalty type which causes the most confusion – KENP.
When you publish an ebook exclusively through Amazon, you have the option to enrol your book in KDP Select. This gives you access to a range of marketing tools, including running price promotions, and offering your book for free for a limited period, to boost your sales ranking. You can read more about KDP Select here.
Enrolling in KDP Select also means your book is included in Kindle Unlimited, which is essentially the Kindle lending library – customers pay a monthly fee to have access to ebooks, rather than purchase them, and you receive an amount per page read of your book (yes, Amazon can and does track how much of each ebook is read on Kindle devices!).
‘KENP’ royalties are counted per page; the number of pages read by Amazon customers subscribed to ‘Kindle Unlimited’.
Pages read by Kindle Unlimited customers will appear on your sales statement as “KENP” – Kindle Edition Normalised Pages. For ebooks that are popular, the KENP figure can be in the high thousands, or greater.
With KDP Select, some authors feel that they are missing out on unit sales, as the number of pages read (“KENP”) can be high while the royalty may seem quite low.
We suggest it is better to see KDP Select as an enhancement to sales. An alternative way to reach a wider audience, given that many Amazon customers have already signed up to access books that way to read on their Kindle devices. And every page read will count towards your sales ranking. Even if they don’t finish the book, you’ll still be paid for all the pages they have read.
So, provided you are selling your ebook exclusively on Amazon, KDP Select is a great way to boost your ranking, and your sales income, as well as reach a wider readership.
There’s no obligation to use KDP Select, so the choice is yours.