Publishing on Amazon? Here’s what you need to know …
What do you need in your wheel house to publish a book. Here we are going to focus on Amazon. If you haven’t read Part 1 or Part 2 go here also if you are relatively new to this independent author journey I would suggest checking out these posts as well, The Payout Breakdown of an Author and What is An Independent Author.
I am not an expert, I have only what I have learned so far. So keep that in mind, if you want to go deep on amazon and all their little twists and turns. www.kindlepreneur.com seems to have a pretty good set of information. They do some free stuff and comments are enabled there so people can learn from each other.
Exclusivity! Do you want to be monogamous with Amazon or do you want to cheat on Amazon? Amazon will of course allow you to cheat on them, they can’t stop you. BUT they will pay you more if you are true to them and only them. This is what they call KDP Select. It is an agreement valid for 90 days that automatically renews every 90 days on your e-books only, not paperback. It puts your book on Kindle Unlimited which is the subscription service to readers so they don’t actually buy your book they pay monthly for access to a lot of books and these people read at a level that would shock most of us. The author gets paid per page, I make about $.15 cents per day with just 1 book out.
It also gives you a HIGHER royalty percentage of 70%, BUT it charges a delivery fee based on the size of your book. My Only Sunshine, is 345 pages long in a paperback book, it is a fiction novel and there are no pictures besides the cover, it costs $.08 cents to deliver the e-book. The delivery charge is only on the e-book. BUT if I had a book with pictures, especially like a cookbook or a childrens book with illustrations, the file size would be larger and the charge to deliver would be larger. There is a tipping point between the 35% royalty and the 70% especially if your book has a lot of pictures. You also should keep in mind what type of book your selling and whether or not most people buy physical forms or digital forms.
The act of physically publishing your book on amazon is about as hard as uploading a file to an email. As the author, assuming you haven’t made any commitments in other countries re: the book, you are free to distribute your book as you see fit. Amazon will give you an ISBN number (we’ll do a post all about that and the library of congress later). You need the number for the barcode on the back of the book. ebooks and physical books have different numbers. You can also buy a number if you intend to distribute it in other places. I did not originally buy the ISBN number and took Amazon’s free option. I wouldn’t categorize that as a mistake, as I plan on staying with Amazon exclusively for probably the next year or so but I would say with book 2 I will just go and buy my own number. Less hassle …
This post is already far too long so I’m going to stop here and do another one in a few days that will go deeper into categories, key words and book description. I think the most important thing to remember about Amazon is its a search engine. If you want your books to be seen by original viewers you have to find ways to get it in front of them. Just for fun go onto amazon and search My Only Sunshine, I bet dimes to dollars you get a lot of baby gear. When I search though, my book is at the top of the list.
Like, share, re-tweet, hashtag it, comment, do it all! I need the help 🙂 Thanks everyone!
