Apparently Kindle sales make up over half of Amazon’s sales now. I read a blog about the benefits of Amazon’s Direct Publishing for Kindle, so I had a look at it. Apparently some already successful authors are going that route rather than through traditional publishing.
It costs essentially nothing to get published. They take part of the sales price. You get either 35 per cent or 70 per cent of the list price. If you go for the 70 per cent option, you have to pay a distribution charge before you get your royalty. It is only a few cents though.
One problem is that they deduct withholding for U.S. taxes. I looked into that once before when I was on Associated Content. It would cost me to get that back and it was more than what I’d get back. However, that was for a very small payment. If I got some decent sales, then it would be worthwhile.
Their website explains how to create your own e-book.
I tried out two of the programs they recommend: The Mobipocket Creator and the Kindle Previewer.
Note: These programs do not appear to be still available.
The Mobipocket Creator wasn’t too hard to use, although I can’t get it to create a table of contents. I’m not very happy with the quality of the result though. I played around a little and got it to look better, but I’m still not satisfied. I think that with a little more practice I can get an e-book that looks good. I need to study some other Kindle books and see what they look like.
I’d like to publish my book Walk in the Snow on Kindle. I have it for sale on Lulu as a hard copy and a PDF file now, but I think I may get better sales if it is on Amazon. I’ll wait until I get the hang of the e-book creation first.
Note: Only a revised of the book is available now as an e-book: https://www.lulu.com/shop/james-morison/walk-in-the-snow-a-collection-of-stories-and-articles/ebook/product-1m4ermrp.html