by admin on February 25, 2010
The Kindle e-books revenue deal to 70/30 with the writer or publisher getting the 70% side. The change is happening on June 30.
Amazon is probably making the change to the payout for Kindle books to convince more authors to create Kindle copies of their books, work directly with Amazon to publish their Kindle books, and make it more beneficial for writers to sell Amazon Kindle versions than the other e-book formats.
I have a feeling that a lot of bloggers will start to cobble together some e-books and I am certain that a lot of self-published authors will make a Kindle version. I know that I have a few ideas that I have been kicking around to take a stab at the Kindle market. The Kindle store will be flooded with e-books with an enormous variance in quality.
Amazon’s challenge will be giving readers a way of sorting through the mass of Kindle books that will become available but they are pretty good at stuff like that.
I mentioned that I have a few Kindle book ideas rattling around in my head. I was brainstorming the other day to try and pick one of them to commit to when I had a realization. A totally obvious one but it caught me off guard anyway.
Somewhere along the path of writing, editing and formatting the Kindle e-book, it is going to need to be proofread. Like by a professional. I do well enough to keep myself happy in the instant publishing online blogging world but selling an actual product as a Kindle book requires a higher degree of professionalism in my mind.
All of you people that do that sort of editing and proofing professionally should really start to think about how you can connect with the bundles of Kindle
authors that will be cropping up this summer and how much you will want to charge to prepare books for the Kindle store.
by admin on February 2, 2010
Amazon and publisher Macmillan have been fighting back and forth over the pricing of Macmillan’s Kindle e-books. Amazon tries to keep prices at or below $9.99 and Macmillan wanted Amazon to charge up to $14.99.
Amazon initially made all of the Macmillan e-book inventory unavailable for purchase for a little bit. Eventually, Amazon caved and agreed to let Macmillan set the prices of the e-books at a higher price on Amazon.
I’ve read a lot about Macmillan trying to gouge the consumers but this really isn’t about how much money Macmillan makes on the sales. Amazon is currently already paying a higher price for the e-books and selling them at a lower price and just eating the loss.
Amazon probably figures that lower priced e-books will sell more Kindles and will make it harder for other e-book sellers to compete.
So it sounds like Macmillan is really fighting to keep the expectations on what readers should pay for e-books at a higher level. Also, having the e-books priced higher will encourage people to buy more paper copies and less e-book copies which keeps their existing business model safer.
Either way, I predict Macmillan will probably end up on the losing end of the battle in the long run as big name authors will eventually start negotiating their own e-book deals directly with the sites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble or working the deals through their agents and completely shutting the publisher out on the e-book rights and small name authors will probably start working directly with Amazon this summer when Amazon starts paying the authors 70% of the sale price.