I don’t actually like Amazon. However the Kindle people spoke and I listened. After checking that, yes, I can release my ebook for sale on the Kindle legally (that was a weird conversation), I sat about doing it. I really wanted to self-publish on lulu, but … well, Amazon was easier. There. I said it. They actually know what they’re doing, and made it surprisingly painless! Of course, that they want you to write it in .docx, export to html, then upload a zip, was a little nuts. They also let you upload ePubs, which I have, so that was a lot easier.
I am now a Amazon Author or publisher. Whatever. And I have two books up on Amazon:
There’s no DRM on these puppies, and while, yes, it costs $7.99 to download, that’s because Amazon takes a really hefty chunk of change. See for every $5 you donated to me, I got $4.50 from Paypal and WePay. Amazon takes 30% or 65% of your money for every sale. Now I know, you’re thinking ‘Why would anyone pick the 35% option!?’ In the ‘real world,’ publishers give writers around 15% in royalties. Seems like a rip off at first, but look at what goes into all this. Writing, editing, typesetting, printing, binding, shipping, advertising, etc. And I’m skipping all that to go at it alone.
So why would I pick 35% for epublishing, when all they’re doing is webhost plus bandwidth? If you pick 70% royalties, then you get 70% of the cost, minus ‘shipping.’ Shipping, by the way, is electronic delivery. You’re paying for the bandwidth. Fair enough, works out to about $0.05 for every country. But also with 70%, I can only charge between $2.99 and $9.99 US for my book. So the max I can charge is $9.99, which will ‘net’ me $6.96. With 35% I can charge up to a couple hundred ($299.99). Now here’s the dillema. How much to charge. If I max out and go to $9.99 (damn it, I wish they’d just say $10!), I may look greedy. Then again, I did all the work here, do I not deserve my $7 per book? To get the $4.50 I was getting via donations, I’d have to charge about $6.75 for the book, at which point I may as well charge $7. Then again, the average donation I got was actually closer to $8.
Which is how I ended up at charging $7.99 you see. I don’t expect to break the bank. Hell, I don’t expect lightning to hit like that again. But it was kinda cool. By the way, you don’t get 70% for all countries, just the ones that allow it. The rest get you 35% instead.
The biggest hassle, other than price, was sorting out the various fields, which in and of themselves, weren’t that hard. Took me an afternoon, and I had the books approved by later that day. I found an error (I’d uploaded the wrong cover, go me) and made a fix, for that I waited a day for the republish and the image to show up. Weird, but not complicated.
I have to say, Amazon is a hassle, but far less than other places that say ‘You need to make an ISBN’ and ‘You must follow these formatting guidelines.’ which are cryptic and … You know, if they really wanted to make things easy, someone would make a nice form where you could upload your book, sans cover and author pages and copyright. Just the book content, right? Then once it’s uploaded, from epub or docx, you create your author ‘page’ and place it where you want (front of TOC or behind) and then copyright page ditto. Finally you upload your cover. If an ISBN is required, you make it for them. Remember, self publishing is something that you should be helping people do! Otherwise what’s the point?
Amazon (mostly) hits that one on all the marks. Why not iBooks, you may ask? The tool sucked. No, really. I wrote a doc in pages (Apple’s version of Word) and you’d think I could upload to iBooks and it would auto-format. Nope. Also there was the restrictive bit. Apple’s terms say that any content produced with iBooks Author that is for sale is to only be available on the iBookstore. Free ones can be distributed anywhere you like, but iBooks Author only exports to the .ibook format (and PDFs) so if you want to free-distribute (which technically is what I do here), you have to use a flat PDF. Okay, that isn’t really terrible, the epub to pdf ratio is 1:70. But then I can’t ‘sell’ on Amazon! Amazon, by the way, only locks me down if I’m using the KDP Select program. At least I think so. I read the legalese a few times.
Fairness to be had, I don’t feel that it’s ‘wrong’ for Amazon or Apple to restrict what you can do when selling your books. It’s free, you get what you pay for, as it were. Both Amazon and Apple take a 30% cut, and all things being equal, Amazon is a better choice. Of course you can still download them ‘for free’ if you want to from my ebooks page. Donations, as always, are welcome.
Comments
4 responses to “Amazoned”
Awesome!
I just ordered both. 🙂
It’s all your fault, that I actually got off my ass and finished them 😉
Based on you talking about it, I finally delved into e-publishing through Amazon this weekend, too. I’ve done 4 traditional books, and sold 1 fiction ebook through my site for a while … but Amazon’s reach into the market is definitely worth the hassle.
Oh, and the lockdown with the KDP Select program is only for a limited (3-month) period of time. It’s because your book will be available in the borrow-for-free Prime program and they don’t want you competing with yourself and hurting the rest of the pool.
Yeah, but I’d have to remove them from my site for 3 months and I don’t want to 🙂 That means 3 months of no one being able to download for free, which I’m still a proponent of (see also: Why I didn’t iBook).
I wish it was easier to take, pay later, and not have it be all nagware.