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."
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!
Bullshit. There are people "publishing" 50-100 "books" a day that are utter garbage. And I don't mean that it's bad writing, I mean that it's rip off recycled crap. There's so much junk flooding the market that it makes actual works indistinguishable from everything else. The only way these works get found out is if someone actually pays for it and reads it, and then bothers to comment. Even a $1 entry fee would do wonders to limit this. The WHOLE POINT of Amazon is it's ability to find products and see reviews before you buy. If you can no longer do that, then why not take your legitimate work and use the rest of the free web for self advertizing, serve the file yourself, and keep 100% of the profits?
Content doesn't rise to the top because it's "worthy", it rises to the top because it has positive reviews. Whether those reviews came from adoring fans or solid marketing is almost irrelevant.