Subscription Services

Your payments for Kobo Plus are based on the amount of time that subscribers spent reading your titles in a given month. Let's break that down.

Each month, we take the total revenue (we'll call that Monthly Revenue) earned from Kobo Plus subscriptions. We also take the total minutes that all subscribers spent reading that month. (Minutes Read). We divide the Monthly Revenue by the Minutes Read, which allows us to assign a monetary value to each minute of reading (let's call it Value per Minute Consumed). This value will fluctuate month to month based on subscriber number and total reading time.

Let's look at an example. Imagine we have 100 subscribers paying 9.99 a month each. Our total revenue for that month is 999. Let's imagine that those subscribers spent an average of 2 hours a day each reading. 2 hours a day for 30 days is 3600 (120 * 30 = 3600). So 100 readers spent a collective total of 360,000 minutes reading on Kobo Plus that month.

In order to pay our authors, we calculate the value of one minute of reading time. 999 divided by 360,000 =0.0027 (Monthly Revenue/Minutes Read = Value per Minute Consumed). The payment rate for authors on KWL is 60%. This means that for every minute a reader spends reading your book in this example, you earn 60% of 0.0027. A book that takes a reader 3 hours to read would therefore generate 0.2916 (180*0.0027) * 0.6) in earnings.

In our sales reports, we report minutes read in measures of 300 minutes. In the example above, this would come out to 0.81 cents per 300 minutes of reading time. These blocks of 300 minutes are how these will be reported in your monthly subscription sales report.

Shelf Indulgence takes 10% of your profit as a distribution fee.