Kindle Unlimited Is Now Kindle+. AI Audiobooks Just Joined the Buffet

I’ve called Kindle Unlimited a buffet before. Readers pay one monthly price and eat whatever’s on the table, and the cooks get paid out of one big tip jar, split by how many pages got eaten. Amazon just added an audiobook station to the buffet and renamed the restaurant. The tip jar is the same one, with some extra money dropped in that nobody’s allowed to count.

The email went out to KDP Select authors this week, and one of them shared it in an AI writing group I follow. Kindle Unlimited is now Kindle+. Audiobooks are part of the subscription. And the audiobooks that get in automatically are the ones Amazon’s own software narrated.

I don’t have books in the program. I left KDP and publish through IngramSpark, and I tried Kindle Unlimited years ago with mediocre results. But I’ve been telling authors to plan for audio for a long time, because audiobooks outsell every other format of my own books. This change puts audio in front of a lot of subscribers who weren’t buying it before.

What changed when Kindle Unlimited became Kindle+?

The name, mostly, for readers. The price stays at $11.99 a month in the US, and new subscribers still get a 30-day free trial. Amazon says the new name fits a subscription that now covers ebooks, audiobooks, magazines and comics, and the plus sign matches what customers expect from a subscription.

Authors get the real change. Audiobooks are now included for subscribers in the US, with other countries promised later. Authors anywhere can enroll eligible audiobooks for US listeners.

Virtual Voice audiobooks, the ones KDP generates with AI narration, go in automatically when the ebook is enrolled in KDP Select. Amazon’s email says no action is needed. Those titles also land in the Audible Plus catalog.

ACX audiobooks can qualify too, with conditions. Written Word Media’s breakdown says an ACX title needs exclusive distribution through Audible, Whispersync for Voice turned on, and the Pay for Production model, where you paid the narrator up front. Royalty Share and Royalty Share Plus titles are left out at launch.

How does Kindle+ pay authors for audiobook listening?

By the page, out of the tip jar.

Amazon pays Kindle+ listening the same way it pays reading, through the KDP Select Global Fund, and it says it’s adding money to the fund to cover the new listening. It hasn’t said how much.

You get paid the first time a subscriber reads or listens to a given page. If the same subscriber reads a chapter and then listens to it on the drive home, you’re paid once. When the two formats pay different rates, Written Word Media reports you get the higher one.

Your KENP report now shows pages read and pages listened as separate lines, and the prior month’s royalties report rolls them together. Audible Plus listening shows up with your Audible royalties.

The missing piece is the conversion. How many pages is an hour of listening worth? Amazon hasn’t said. It also says it will “evolve the fund to reflect those differences” between reading and listening as it learns how people use both. That sentence is the one I’d underline. A rate that’s set later can be set lower.

Will Kindle+ audiobooks lower ebook page-read payments?

Amazon says no. Its email says reading keeps getting paid by the page as it is today, and the extra money is there to cover listening. I’d take that at face value for the first few months and keep an eye on the per-page rate after that.

The fund is one jar. Every page listened is a page that gets paid out of it. If listening takes off and the extra money doesn’t keep pace, the jar gets cut into more slices, and nobody has promised how big the extra money will be next year. Authors who’ve been in Kindle Unlimited a long time have watched the per-page rate move before. Written Word Media flagged the same risk.

Who wins right now? Authors who already have an ebook in KDP Select and a Virtual Voice edition. They did nothing, and their audiobook just went in front of millions of subscribers who can listen at no extra cost. That’s hard to complain about.

For now, it’s free money, and authors in the program should take it.

Is AI narration good enough for Kindle+ listeners?

Yes, for a lot of books. I’ve said before that AI narration is a welcome arrival. Human narration is expensive. The cost keeps a lot of finished books out of audio for good.

I know the bill. My narrator on one book charged around $200 for every finished hour, and the book ran eight hours. Most indie books never earn that back.

Software can read your words aloud. You still have to sit through it and judge how well it reads them. Some books need a human, a memoir told in the author’s own voice or a novel with a dozen characters. Plenty of books don’t need one. A how-to book narrated cleanly by software is better than a how-to book with no audio edition at all.

Some authors and narrators won’t like that Amazon’s AI-narrated books get in automatically while human-narrated ACX books have to meet conditions. I understand the frustration. But the tool doesn’t decide whether a book is good. Listeners do, and they’ll stop a bad narration a lot faster than they’d stop a bad ebook.

What about ACX royalty share audiobooks?

They’re out for now. That stings for authors who went that route. Under Royalty Share, the narrator takes half the royalties in exchange for no up-front fee. At one point I had 27 audiobooks out, many of them on royalty splits because I had less money then. Some narrators were good and some weren’t, and under a split you wait seven years before you can redo a bad one. Those titles now miss the Kindle+ audience too, at least at launch.

If you have a Pay for Production title on ACX, check that it’s exclusive to Audible and has Whispersync for Voice turned on. If both are true, it’s likely eligible already. If you’re planning a new audiobook and you want it in Kindle+, the choice is between paying a narrator up front or using Virtual Voice.

Should authors who left KDP Select go back for Kindle+?

Not for this alone, because the trade hasn’t changed.

Kindle+ still runs on exclusivity. An ebook in KDP Select can’t be sold anywhere else. The new name didn’t change that rule. If you went wide because you wanted libraries, Kobo, Apple Books and your own store, an audiobook bonus doesn’t undo any of those reasons.

My own reasons are different. Amazon shut down my KDP account over a paperback subtitle change, done the way its help pages said to do it, and no human would look at the appeal. My books now go out through IngramSpark. It reaches Amazon anyway and lets me pick every other store. The price is that none of my books can be in Kindle+. I’m fine with that. When I tried Kindle Unlimited years ago, the results weren’t worth the restrictions.

Plenty of authors do well in the program, though, and for them Kindle+ is a straight gain. If your ebook is already in KDP Select, your audiobook just got a bigger audience for free.

Narrators are the group I’d watch. If listeners get used to free AI narration in a subscription, the pressure on narration fees goes one way. A good narrator still makes a good book better, and for my own bigger books I’d pay one outright. But the low end of the narration market just got cheaper.

What authors in KDP Select should do about Kindle+ this month

Open your KENP report and find the new pages-listened line. If you have a KDP Select ebook without an audio edition, try Virtual Voice on it and listen to the result yourself before you publish it. Check your ACX titles for eligibility. Then write down this month’s per-page rate, so you’ll know if it moves.

If you’re still deciding whether to be in the program at all, my piece on Kindle Unlimited or going wide covers the trade-offs, and nothing in Kindle+ changes the exclusivity. My ACX audiobooks article covers producing audio the traditional way. The Publishing & Marketing Hub has the rest, and my book publishing services can get your ebook and audiobook out the door. The buffet has a new station, so watch the tip jar.

From the author

Publish Your Book
I compare KDP, Draft2Digital, Lulu and IngramSpark in this one, and it skips the screenshots on purpose so the strategy holds up when Amazon renames things again.

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