A while ago, when Amazon announced a new way of paying royalties based on read page counts, authors and publishers threw their arms up in despair. The reality was, it was most likely to affect self-published authors and only with the books ‘borrowed’ rather than purchased, which I discussed in my first blog post on the subject.

It’s been happening now for several months and we finally have some data on the subject. For those of you sensible enough to just enjoy reading rather than killing yourself writing, monthly royalties are broken down by territory and then again by purchased and the amount you’ve earned by total pages read.

The other me works with data to fund the writer me, so this little method, no matter how crude, fascinates me. I’m all about data driven decisions and it would be foolish for someone not to analyse the data they have available and use it to inform their strategies. At this time of year, when I’m planning for 2016, it will certainly influence things.

So, what do I know?

• The United States is my highest paying market
• The UK is my second highest paying market
• In the US, I don’t sell many more books, but my ‘borrowed, total read pages’ payments are three times that of sales, bumping it into the lead
• In the UK, this is just above total sales by little more than a couple of quid each month
• My other markets are Canada and New Zealand and I’m happy to just have people buying books from there given how damn expensive it was when I’ve lived/travelled there

Borrowing with Kindle Prime has clearly taken off more in the States than the UK and other countries, that’s for sure. The good news for me is that when people borrow my first book The Crochet Killer (shameless plug) they read more than just the first few pages and give up. They tend to read the whole book, which is fantastic news for me. And I completely understand not shelling out the cold hard cash for an author you don’t know if you have an alternative, it’s essentially the same as using a library.

So there you have it. Borrowing a book and reading it can still make an author happy. None of the figures I’ve talked about above have been massive, certainly not enough to be a full time writer and that whole private island thing is still a million miles away. But enough to let me know that people are reading and enjoying my writing, which is what we all do it for in the first place.