In my previous blog http://jojenner.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/diary-of-aspiring-writer-how-to-e.html
I looked at how easy it was to e-publish. From that a number of questions have
come back as to how payment/royalties work and how much control Amazon has. I will
attempt to explain my understanding and the choices I made because of this
understanding. I am not saying this is the way everyone will want to go and I
am not saying this is the correct way but this is my way.
As part of the process of uploading
the book onto Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) you are asked if you have the
publishing rights and if so do you have the world rights. You will then be able
to publish your book in all the different countries where you have publishing
rights.
When you first come to upload you
book you will be asked to key in details of you book. This includes the title,
a description of the book and details of the author. If you are publishing an
anthology by a number of writers you must get their permission to publish. You
can enter all the authors’ names in the book contributors section. You then
will be asked to select categories. This will highlight your book under search
criteria within Amazon. Be careful as the main categories are all non-fiction. I
was the top selling English book on family relationships on Amazon France for a
few days until I discovered my error. You have to find the fiction category and
then drill down to select your category. Don’t worry if you want to change it
after you have published as you can go back into the book and change these
things very easily. You will then be asked to upload the book and the book’s
cover.
The next section looks at pricing
and publishing rights. First you clarify whether you have worldwide rights of
just specific rights in certain countries. Once you have established the
countries you can publish in comes the hard part, the royalties you will
receive and the price of the book in the many different countries you will
publish in.
There are two different royalty
percentages 35% and 70% and you, like me, might go ‘Well obviously I am going
for the 70% royalty’, but it is not that simple. First of all if you go for the
70% royalty the cost of the electronic delivery will be deducted from your
royalty, with the 35% royalty, delivery costs are covered by Amazon. The
delivery price is different for different territories but it is approximately
10p per megabyte of data. My file is only 175kB so this would be negligible for
me. The reason I eventually chose the 35% option was one of pricing. With 35%
option the lowest price you can charge is $0.99 but with the 75% option the lowest
price you can charge is $2.49. I am a new writer and the book is a small
anthology of flash fiction stories. I could not justify charging more than
$0.99 and didn’t think anyone would pay any more than that.
Once you have chosen the price on
Amazon.com you can then either chose a different price in all the other
territories or just link it to the Amazon.com price and Amazon calculate the
exchange rates to come up with the prices. I chose the latter option as I have
friends all over the world and thought this would be the easiest option.
Finally before completing the
process you are asked it you would allow the book to be lent. I ticked this
purely because I do not in any way want to stop people being able to see my
book.
You then click the save and publish
button and the book goes off to KDP. Within an hour they will confirm that the
book is okay to be published and then twelve hours later it will be on Amazon.
I believe the book stays on Amazon
and unless their terms and conditions are broken they will not remove it.
You can change things as you go
through and also you can join KDP select. With KDP select you have access to
other resources which I have not yet explored but it does mean you are tied to
Amazon for the first ninety days and not allowed to offer the book for sale on
other platforms during that time. I have not yet explored what KDP select has
to offer me, but I will investigate, as anything that can help get the word out
is worth utilising in full.
Jo’s
first Anthology – So the Feeling shows is available from Amazon at the links
below
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