Exposed: How Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited Exploits Indie Authors and Gets Away With It

Imagine spending hundreds of hours writing your book — the late nights, rewrites, editing, formatting — only to get paid less than a cup of gas station coffee… and only if someone actually finishes reading it.

Welcome to Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s "subscription reading" service that claims to empower indie authors, while systematically exploiting them through opaque policies, legal traps, and micropayments buried in legalese. Most authors have no idea what they’re walking into. I cover all of this, and more, in my short guide Self-Publishing on Amazon: What They Don’t Tell You, written for indie authors who deserve to know what they’re really signing up for.

Let me break it down.

The KU Trap: Easy to Enter, Hard to Understand

At first glance, KDP Select (the program that gets your eBook into Kindle Unlimited) seems like a smart move:

• Free marketing tools

• Access to Amazon’s massive reader base

• Monthly royalty payments

  
  

But what most authors don’t realize is that this agreement comes with a quiet but powerful catch:

By joining KDP Select, you are granting Amazon exclusive rights to your eBook.

That means you’re not allowed to sell your digital book anywhere else — not on Apple Books, not on Barnes & Noble, not even on your own website — during your 90-day enrollment period.

Break that rule? Amazon has the right to:

• Withhold your royalties

• Suspend or terminate your account

• And claim you violated their terms (even if you never actually read those 20 pages of legal jargon)

  
  

You Don’t Get Paid for Borrows, You Get Paid for Pages (Sometimes)

Now here’s the twist that most new authors don’t realize until it’s too late:

You don’t get paid when someone borrows your book. You only get paid if they actually read it — and even then, only once per page, per customer.

So if someone downloads your book, reads 10 pages, and forgets about it? That’s 10 pages of earnings, which might amount to a few pennies. If they reread the book later? You earn nothing for those pages again.

And here’s the kicker: the amount you’re paid per page changes every month. It’s based on a mysterious “global fund” that Amazon controls and announces after the fact. There is no fixed rate. No transparency. No audit trail.

The Black Box: Zero Transparency, All Control

Amazon uses something called KENPC (Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count) to determine how many pages your book “is.”

You have no say in this.

• They decide what counts as a page.

• They decide where “reading” officially begins.

• They decide how far a user read — and you can’t see any of it.

  
  

There’s no reader-level data. No timestamp. No record of which pages were read or when. If you suspect underreporting? Tough luck. There’s no appeals process. No audit. No visibility.

It’s a closed system designed to benefit only one party: Amazon.

Legal… But Predatory

Amazon covers all of this with a thick layer of legal armor — Terms & Conditions that most authors never read, written in intentionally confusing corporate jargon.

It’s what’s called an adhesion contract — a take-it-or-leave-it agreement where one party has all the power, and the other (that’s you) has none.

Yes, it’s technically “legal.” But let’s call it what it really is:

A system that exploits trust, punishes independence, and buries its rules behind walls of text.

They know most authors won’t read the fine print. They’re counting on that. And once you’re in, they hold all the cards.

What Indie Authors Can Do

The good news? You’re not trapped.

Here’s what smart indie authors are doing to break free from the KU cage:

1. Go Wide

Distribute your book on platforms like:

• Apple Books

• Barnes & Noble

• Kobo

• Google Play

• IngramSpark (for library and bookstore access)

2. Sell Direct

Set up your own sales page using tools like Gumroad, Payhip, or BookFunnel. You keep 90–100% of each sale, own your customer list, and aren’t subject to Amazon’s algorithm roulette.

3. Use KU Strategically, Not Permanently

Use KDP Select for limited-time discovery during launch. Then pull out and go wide once you’ve built initial momentum.

4. Speak Up

The more authors talk about this openly, the harder it becomes for Amazon to maintain this illusion of fairness. The more awareness we build, the stronger our position becomes. If this resonates with you, I go deeper into these practices and how to protect yourself in my book, Self-Publishing on Amazon: What They Don’t Tell You. It’s a fast, no-fluff read built to empower authors before they publish.

Final Word

Kindle Unlimited isn’t “supporting indie authors.” It’s managing them — tightly, quietly, and for maximum profit.

If Amazon truly believed in empowering authors, we’d have:

• Real-time page-read tracking

• Transparent payout calculations

• The freedom to sell our work anywhere we choose

  
  

Instead, we’re given just enough crumbs to stay dependent, and discouraged from ever questioning how the system really works.

But the tide is turning.

If you’re an indie author, you owe it to yourself — and to the community — to look beyond KU and claim your power.

We don’t need a corporate middleman to tell us what our work is worth. We don’t need permission to sell our own words. And we damn sure don’t need a penny-per-page gatekeeper to define our value.

Own your voice.

Own your audience.

Own your future.