Slashdot Mirror
Thinking of Publishing Your Own $0.99 Kindle Book?
An anonymous reader writes "There's been a lot of talk recently about $0.99 Kindle eBooks, after publishers were accused of spamming the market with low-quality titles. Author Keir Thomas published two $0.99 computing books in March and has some figures for those who might want to have a go, as part of his Adventures in Publishing series of blog postings. Thomas says he loves the democratic nature of the Kindle Direct Publishing system, and points out one of his self-published books tops Amazon's Linux charts, besting titles by all the major publishers."
I'm hopeful that the success of these independent authors (legitimate ones) will bring the prices down on ebooks from the publishing houses. I miss the $10 cap.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
So if I publish a book through amazon i get to keep 30% of the profit, but if i make an smart phone app i get to keep 70% of what i sell. seems a little lopsided. I dont think that the tech / operating cost for books publishing is much different than an app store.
It's all well and good that Amazon charges a listing fee of $0, but this is, as recent articles have pointed out, producing quite a bit of crap spam. It's not the least bit "democratic" to enable anyone to post books for free if genuine creative books are drowned out by spammed crap, keeping anybody from ever actually seeing the content.
I don't see a $10 listing fee as being that much of a deterrent for someone that has actually produced a real book (think of the value of the number of hours that go into even a short book), and a big deterrent to those that produce worthless spam.
Did he just criticize the idea of a ten dollar listing fee as a barrier to entry for reducing spam?
No way. Maybe for a booklet you'd want it to be less, but if you put one *thousandth* of the amount of time and effort into a book that any decent author does, five or ten bucks for the book listing is much less than that. A listing fee is not, realistically, a barrier to entry.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I love how you have to fork over 65% of the revenue to Amazon. I think that number should be flipped. The author is doing the heavy lifting here. Amazon is just providing the platform through which it sells. Hell, they don't even market the product. They just put it on their platform and everything else is automatic.
As someone who has written several books (ok, shameless self-promoting link to the latest one) I might suggest that you raise the price. Sound counterintuitive? People may be looking at your book and the price point of $0.99 and thinking "this might be a scam or reprint of some material already on the web." By raising the price to say $9.99 or $14.99 you're still below the traditionally published books but also give the appearance of extra value; the consumer is getting something valuable.
I know nothing of the self-publishing world, though I have considered it at various times. But if I was going to be publishing something for Kindle I'd likely be setting it at a higher price point to give my book separation from the spam.
Oh, typically royalties are in the 8% to 15% range for tech books, depending on the publisher and the deal being offered. The royalties are sometimes higher on the eBook versions. However, realize that the royalties are off of the wholesale price not the list or sale price. So if retail on JavaScript Step by Step is $39.99, Amazon has it for $25, but the publisher sold it to them for $20, I get a percentage of the $20 not of the $39.99.
YMMV.
Steve
Self editing. Applies equally to ebooks and old fashioned paper ones.
That is the basic text. The really useful stuff like the index, code examples, tables, etc. you could sell for another $4.99.
We aren't just talking about a poorly-written story, or maybe copies of some government documents usefully collected together, or eHow putting together article compendiums.
Most of the spam this article (and the other articles) have been referring to have been one of the following:
1) Somebody else's articles, posts, e-books, etc. Copied entirely without attribution or compensation to the original author.
2) Public domain works where the "editor" did a really bad job copying it over, and where there are other, superior, 99-cent (or free) versions available. Of course, you don't realize it's badly done until you've purchased it.
3) Just completely random junk that has nothing to do with the title.
Amazon books-especially Kindle books-just as in the iTunes music store uses the "long tail" business model: the vast majority of the products listed make very few, if any, sales. But semi-automated listing, marketing support, royalty aggregation and payment can encourage publication of works that would be too-long bets in the physical world of editing, design, tree-chopping, and trucking copies around the world.
I am quite happy that my young children's work, Spinners, is listed at Amazon for $0.99; it gets me a spot in Amazon's Author Central, it is a working introduction to both self-publishing and electronic publishing, and most importantly, immediately delivers a creative original work before millions of readers in the UK, DE, and the US. And, too, no one can predict which works may go viral and sell many orders of magnitudes than expected. But even if that does not happen, for $0.99 you are making available an illustrated book delivered in seconds that may be a wondrous ten minutes of quiet sharing between a harried father and his daughter before her sweet dreams.
http://www.amazon.com/Spinners-ebook/dp/B00571B9LQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1308869902&sr=1-1
"Two blind spiders, Spencer and Spike, show the rest of the spiders in their tree the value of friendship and cooperation over sight."
I have to completely agree with the parent comment. I am currently in the final phases of editing a (traditional, printed) book. I originally thought the editorial process would be a breeze (hey, after all I use LaTeX for my typesetting – is there anything beyond that) but... Well, not only has reality proven me wrong, but as the style and editorial correctors give me their comments in writing (I'm writing for my University press), I have had to learn more than a bit in the process.
And of course, editing for print is completely different from editing for e-readers. I do, however, want to make the book available for e-readers as well (I also usually prefer reading on my Kindle than lugging a large book with me), but many of the principles already used should be enough for a first version.
Of course, and on a much more personal topic: I am interested in making the book available in an open format (most likely .mobi, which is most compatible among readers). Of course, .mobi is translatable (in my limited experience) to both the more popular ePub and to the Kindle AZW formats with no quality loss. But, will Amazon accept listing a free book, available under a CC-BY-SA license, in their catalog? I'm not too optimistic.
Not actively necessarily, but their payment scheme certainly pushes people towards a 2.99 price point. At 2.99, you take in 70% or 2.10. At 99 cents you get 1/6th of that. So it's more profit to you to sell 20 copies at 2.99 than 100 at 99 cents and less money for Amazon. Of course, if you're going to sell 6x as many copies or more at 99 cents, then you might as well go 99 cents. It's clearly better to sell 600 copies at 99 cents than 100 at 2.99, since you're going to make the same money, but reach more readers and gain name recognition for future books.
The sticky point is how to value name recognition. Maybe it's better to sell 10,000 copies at 99 cents than 5,000 at 2.99, even though you would make 3x more money at the second price point--if your second book will be out soon and you plan to sell *it* at 2.99 to 10,000 people now willing to shell out a bit more for a name they know.
It seems to me that the attempts by schools, universities etc. to detect plagiarism would be useful in this area. The problem of course is that plagiarism isn't illegal per se, e.g. if a spammer rips off a source like Wikipedia there's no legal recourse.
But it would mean that sites like Amazon would be able to detect these worthless books and put up a warning.
mbzfzts is not a word !!
Not yet, but now that you mention it, it might just become the default Linux filesystem some day.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
Sometimes it isn't so much that spam is a problem:
http://cthulhuchick.com/296/this-is-why-we-cant-have-nice-things/
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
There ought to be a serious business for E-Book Editors out there... providing a certain level of editing quality--perhaps with a graded pay/service model that enables authors to pay for editing services but not break the bank.
http://www.beanleafpress.com