Well, seeing as I was the one who accidentally created this thread 4 years ago, and since there have been 11,328 views, I think it's only fair to post an update. :)
Everything has gone to hell. A few years ago, Kindle set up a lending program, wherein each Amazon Prime member could borrow 1 e-book per month for free and members that bought Kindle Unlimited membership ($10 a month) could read as many e-books as they wanted. Of course, the e-books would have to be enrolled in this KDP select program in order for it to work.
Each month, Amazon would allocate a chunk of money to be divided between all the books that got borrowed. Each "borrow" was worth between $1.20-1.80, depending on the activity level that month, the amount of money to be divided, etc. That system primarily benefited authors with short books or short stories: why write a 400-page novel that will be borrowed just once if you can write 40 10-page short stories and get paid for 40 borrows? The system paid as soon as a reader got 15% into your e-book. Since most of
my e-books were of the "short and sweet" variety, I too was one of the beneficiaries.
Eventually, however, the frustrated long-book authors lobbied Amazon to change the award system. And Amazon listened, and thus the KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages) system was born, and thus began the decline. Under the KENP system, Amazon would end up using an algorithm to measure how many standardized pages your book consisted of. Then they'd measure how many pages readers actually read. Then they'd tally up the number of all the read pages from all of the borrowed books for the month, split that month's fund evenly and pay the authors whose books actually got read the most.
Sounds like a nice system in theory. In reality, however, there were two issues:
1. People with very informative but somewhat short books ended up getting extremely little money. At its best, the KENP system paid $0.006 (that's 0.6 cents) per every read page. The e-book I've worked the hardest on, and that I'm most proud of,
Buffett's Biggest Blunders: the Greatest Inventor's Greatest Mistakes, contains a wealth of concise information for all the investors out there. However, since it's only 78 pages long (what can I say - I hate creating bloated books like the "for Dummies" series), at $0.006 per page, I'd get only $0.47 every time somebody read my book. Ever since then, the already low payout started dropping even lower. I believe it's at $0.004 per page now. Why, you ask? Because...
2. People cheated. A lot. The Kindle library got flooded with 10,000-page books that consisted of nothing but utter gibberish, recipes, etc. Sometimes, the books would start with a halfway-decent story that was written to bypass the cursory Amazon review process when submitting the book. The protocol for checking the number of pages read was also broken: if somebody were to jump from page 1 to page 10,000, the author would have been paid for all 10,000 pages. (Which would have netted the author a sweet $60 profit!)
Some of those "books" had descriptions that advertised a huge giveaway (new video game console, a gift card, etc) for borrowing the book, going to the last page, entering the code word on that page on such-and-such site, etc, etc. It might not surprise you to learn that no prizes have ever been actually awarded. Heh.
On top of all that, scammers set up "click farms" wherein dozens (or even hundreds) of participants would borrow each other's e-books and go straight to the end, effectively enriching one another. Rumor has it that a particularly industrious teenager (14-year-old?) in the States made over $70,000 by abusing the system.
The worst part was that it was all perfectly legal and within the rules Amazon had set up for the new lending program payout. The long-book writers, who were initially so ecstatic about the reform, ended up succeeding in driving the short-book writers out of business. However, when scammers with 10,000-page e-books got on the scene, everybody's share of the profits plummeted. Amazon didn't do a whole lot to fight the scammers, aside from limiting the e-book length to 3,000 pages.
Like many other authors, I withdrew my e-books from Amazon's lending library, making them available only through purchase. It might be a bit petty, but I'd rather not have my Buffett book read at all instead of being paid a paltry 47 cents for all my hard work. I did, however, cash in on the "super-long book" craze (though in an honorable, non-scammer way, mind you) when I put together
Legends&Lore from Around the World - the world's largest and most comprehensive collection of mythology. (The best thing about myths is that they're in public domain mwahahaha) It's roughly 14,000 pages long - I published it just before the 3,000-page cap went into effect. I'm pretty bad at promoting my own books, which is why the long and "real" sci-fi book I'm writing now will be sold to an actual publisher, to have actual professionals do it all for me. Even so, despite having little if any publicity, Legends&Lore gets me a nice chunk of change every time somebody decides to borrow it and flip through some ancient myths. :^D
That was an isolated exception, though, and it had taken me weeks of work to collect all the myths, format them, edit the book, find a way to compress it
just so in order to upload it, etc, etc. If you're just starting out, I'm afraid the e-book party is over, at least for the time being. You can always sell your book on Amazon without the "borrow" option, which would also allow you to sell on other sites - Barnes&Noble, Apple e-book store, etc. (
Smashwords is a nice one-stop portal for that.) Technically speaking, if you enroll your book into Amazon's lending library, you're not allowed to sell it elsewhere. I don't know how strictly that's actually enforced, but why take the chance?..
There - I think this novella-length post describes most of the developments since this thread's OP. ;) Post your questions here if you have them and I'll do my best to answer them.