Actually, they'll pair you with someone else and you don't pay for it . . . but there's no discount. If you pay for a pairing, then the buyer gets 5% off the two books, so supposedly you'll sell more copies.

I'm not sure the pairing with another author and splitting the cost would work. It would depend on whether the pairing was mutual . . . meaning if I paired Cracked Throne with Skewed Throne, the buyer would get the paired deal if they went to Cracked OR to Skewed. Then the splitting the cost idea would work. If you had to state: "Pair Skewed with Cracked" and they'd only get the deal if they were at the Cracked site . . .

Doing it that way would seem stupid though, on amazon's part.