Amazon Paid Out Over $300 Million in Royalties via Kindle Unlimited Last Year

02.02.2020 Nate Hoffelder 2 Comments

In 2019, authors and indie publishers earned more than $300 million from the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select Global Fund, Amazon announced last week. In total, Amazon has paid out more than $1.1 billion since the launch of Kindle Owner’s Lending Library, in late 2012. (KOLL was the precursor and beta test for Kindle Unlimited, which launched in July 2014.)

Millions of independent authors have self-published millions of books through KDP since the earliest iteration of the service launched in 2007 (it wasn’t called KDP until a couple years later, and in fact most indie ebooks in the Kindle Store on launch day were drawn from Mobipocket’s catalog).

Additionally, thousands of independent authors earned more than $50,000 in royalties last year, with more than a thousand surpassing $100,000 in royalties in 2019 through KDP.

Amazon did not share any other book sales states or publishing figures last week, when it reported total revenue of $280.5 billion for the 2019 fiscal year. This represented an increase of 20% over 2018. Net income also increased 15%, to $11.6 billion.

I wonder how much was paid through Audible? Amazon Publishing?

image by protohiro via Flickr