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franzus

> Lend Royalties

I have the bad feeling that it's somewhere in the range of Spotify royalties where Lady Gaga gets ~$100/month.

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It's 100% more than they get when a physical book is lent.

So, still $0?

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Amazon splits a pool of money monthly between opt-in (KDP Select) authors based on number of lends: http://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/KDPSelect

Edit: Couldn't find anything similar from Barnes & Noble (it seems like something they'd advertise heavily if they did it): http://pubit.barnesandnoble.com/pubit_app/bn?t=support

That's a completely different system where Amazon themselves "lends" the book to Prime members only. LendInk allowed people who bought Kindle books to connect with people with which they could use their "lend to anyone you like" feature, which is included as part of the "purchase" of the Kindle book.

In some cases, Amazon went as far as to simply buy a copy at full price and then only give access for the regular lending period to promote the Kindle Lending Library, but that was only for high profile books like The Hunger Games where they couldn't strong-arm the book publisher to agree to better terms. If this doesn't sound like it makes sense, think of it as a loss-leader for Amazon Prime for Kindle (device) owners.

Thanks for explaining this scenario. Is there no other scenario where an indie author would receive compensation for lends of their books facilitated by LendInk?

An Amazon KDP published indie author would only gain possible exposure through this system, and never direct compensation. That said, as an indie author I like the idea of LendInk and would be happy if people were buying my novel and then sharing it there: it would mean there was interest in the book and it would mean reaching more readers who would potentially seek out more of my novels and become potential future customers. I actively gave away hundreds of digital copies of my novel over a 24 hour period to gain exposure, so I have no beef with a site like LendInk.

Several countries, including UK and Canada, levy royalties from libraries for lending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right

Contrast to the marginal revenue (for the artist) for CD sales and iTunes downloads.

The artist gets very little in any of the cases.

There was a blog post about Spotify by a musician which compared the figures, and IIRC Spotify's royalties were like 100 or 1000 times less, so yes, there's a significant difference.

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