Via keirthomas.com (by Keir Thomas)
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There’s been a lot of fuss recently about $0.99 Kindle eBooks.
Essentially, ‘publishers’ are buying-in cheap content and packaging it into eBooks that they sell through the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program for $0.99. KDP lets anybody create and list a Kindle eBook for free. All you need is an Amazon account.
Amazon check all eBooks for quality but that’s to make sure things like layout are acceptable. They don’t really care what the content is, provided it fits within acceptability guidelines. Quite rightly too. Who are they to be censors or arbiters? And how could they even find time to read each book?
Giving it a try
As part of my regular but foolish publishing experiments, I put some $0.99 computer books on sale though KDP in March 2011 — Working at the Ubuntu Command-Line, and font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; line-height: 17px;" class="style"> Managing the Ubuntu Software System. Mine contain content written by myself, however, and not bought-in or culled from the web.
So does $0.99 publishing work, at least when it comes to computer books?
Yes and no. Did you really expect a straight answer?
Do it right* and you’ll sell thousands of copies. Working at the Ubuntu Command-Line is usually glued to the top of the Amazon best-seller charts for Linux and also for Operating Systems.
Something I’ve created all on my lonesome is besting efforts by publishing titans like O’Reilly, Prentice Hall, Wiley, and others.
Admittedly, a new release of Ubuntu came along in April. That helped. However, my Excel charts show sales of my eBooks ramping up, rather than tailing off now the hype about that release is over.
(It’s tempting to think of publishing a book as like exploding a bomb, in that sales die down after an initial peak. The truth is it’s more like a crescendo as the book slowly builds-up a reputation, along with those all-important Amazon reviews.)
Making money
But... You’re not going to make a huge amount of money. The royalty on a $0.99 book is $0.35. If you sell 1,000 copies, you’re going to make $350. The people who make a fortune at this are turning over 500,000 copies of their $0.99 eBooks.
I hear that Amazon frowns on the whole $0.99 eBook thing, and that critics are calling for the zero entry-barrier of KDP to be removed. They suggest Amazon charge a listing fee for each book — perhaps $10 or $20. This would limit the scams mentioned above.
This would be a huge shame. Through things like KDP and CreateSpace, Amazon is making proper publishing truly democratic and accessible to all. To get a Kindle eBook on sale, all you need is a computer with a word processor. That’s it. You don’t need up-front fees. You don’t need to be a publisher. You don’t need technical knowledge.
If you don’t believe that’s mind-blowing then, well, I feel sorry for you.
Check your sources
If you hear people campaigning against KDP, check-out their background. Are they authors who are listed with major publishers? Are they publishers themselves? It’s in the interest of anybody involved in traditional publishing to stop things like KDP in its tracks.
KDP is a dangerous thing. That’s why it’s so good. I’d like to see more companies offer services like KDP. Can you imagine what it’d be like if a major publisher embraced a similar concept?
The only bad thing from my perspective is that sales of my self-published Ubuntu book have dropped like a stone. This corroborates my theory that there’s only a set of amount of users and money within the Ubuntu ecosystem. But that’s a topic for another time.
Incidentally, if you’re interested in computer eBooks, check out WalrusInk.
* ‘Doing it right’ includes having high-quality content, correctly laid-out in the book, and putting together a professional cover. Having a good author background helps too. If the cover look like it’s designed in MS Paint and the author neglects to provide a biography in the blurb, you should know what to expect.
