KENP blues

For those who don’t know, KENP stands for Kindle Edition Normalized Pages.  As I understand it, since people can change the font size when they read ebooks on various devices with various sized screens, ebooks don’t really have a set number of pages.  So Amazon, I guess, set some number of characters as a “page.” The reason to do this is for the authors.  When you read an ebook with Kindle Unlimited, you’re not buying the actual ebook, but the authors still get paid.  What happens is Amazon takes some of the money from your Kindle Unlimited subscription fee, and sets it aside in this massive pool.  If in one month ten million KENPs have been read, they’ll divide that pool by ten million and give the authors their share based on how many “pages” of their ebooks were read.  That way, if someone only reads ten pages before stopping, the author still gets something. 

Now, on January 2nd, I saw that someone had read ten pages from one of my ebooks.  I know this because it shows up in my author reports.  Now, the ebook in question has 77 KENPs, but maybe they were just reading on their lunch break.  Who knows.  I waited, and waited, but they must have lost interest and didn’t pick it back up.  That’s a tad sad, but understandable.  At least they gave it a shot.  As one unknown author in a sea of millions, sometimes that’s the best we can get.

Then, on January 14th, I saw that twenty-five more KENPs were read.  At first I hoped this person had come back, but then I saw that these new pages were from Japan.  Oddly enough, fourteen were also from that first ebook, while the other eleven were from a different one.  It’s highly unlikely that two people in Japan each found one of my books on the same day, so I assume they started reading one, but lost interested, but they gave me another chance by starting another of my books, only to give up on that one as well.  Because – in the two plus weeks since then – my reports haven’t shown any more KENP read.

In less than a month, two people – at least – have started reading one of my ebooks, only to give up ten or fourteen pages into it.  Am I glad people are reading my stuff and I’ll get a little bit of money?  Yes.  Is it depressing that they gave up reading my stuff?  Definitely yes.  Will I go nuts trying to solve the unanswerable question – since they didn’t leave any reviews – of why they gave up?  No, it just sucks that I had a “sale” two days into the year which I had hoped would be a sign this would be a good year.  But here it is the beginning of February and I have the KENP blues.