The publishing world is evolving rapidly, and one of the latest additions available to authors is the Amazon.com Kindle e-book device and its readers. When Amazon.com first released the Kindle (November 2007), they couldn’t keep up with the demand for the e-Book reader. However, getting publishers to put books into Kindle format was just as difficult. Amazon.com itself sells over 17 million titles in its printed book warehouses, but they only have a small percentage of that number in Kindle titles. Not even 3% of Amazon’s titles have been converted from printed format to a Kindle e-Book equivalent. For now, the Kindle owners of the world have no choice but to choose from a much shorter list of books to read.
Creating a Kindle property is a terrific way to create a passive income stream. Publishing a book or article for the Kindle, Amazon.com only requries that you have an Amazon account. If an author has marketable material, or if an author would like to get real customer reviews on their book’s title before getting it printed and published by one of the self-publishing methods, the e-Book option is a very viable way to proceed. Once their book is released on Amazon’s Kindle, the author gains the the advantages of Amazon.com’s powerful online marketing capabilities to help them promote their product. Amazon.com is far and away the top online bookseller, and one of the biggest reasons for their success is that they give their vendors amazing tools to promote their own books and e-Books on the site.
Once any product is available for sale on Amazon.com, it is available worldwide. Kindle has an advantage in that it is an electronic product, so shipping costs, warehousing or international issues, other than possible language details, are not a problem.
Amazon takes a 65% cut of the retail sale price for the book. Any author who thinks that is too much needs to be aware that 65% is a fairly typical percentage for book distribution.
Books need to be ready for publication before they are released onto the world stage. They should be carefully edited, and a reasonable cover design needs to be part of the release plan. This is true for all printed books as well as all e-books. It’s possible to sell an e-Book without a cover, but experience shows those with covers generally sell much better. So Kindle is a perfect platform for previously self-published books where the content has been prepared, and the author owns the creative rights. The author can easily take their content and create a second product by taking advantage of the Kindle opportunity.
Kindle products stretch the conventional book publishing concepts and expectations to new lengths. For example, speakers who have workbooks can expand their potential reader base by publishing thier workbooks in e-Book format.
An ISBN is not required for publishing a product on Kindle, unlike conventional books, so even this initial cost of self-publishing can be avoided. If the original manuscript is in a word processor file, such as in Microsoft Word™ it’s generally very easy to save the content as an HTML document, ready for submittal to Amazon’s Kindle service.
Kindle readers are always hungry for more titles to browse, and now that Kindle reader applications have expanded to the Ipad, Iphone and Android platforms, even more e-Book readers are clamoring for new content. Any author with a valid Amazon.com account is eligible to publish content. So, this type of book publishing doesn’t require a publisher. The Kindle platform provides a completely new way to get books out into the world, and there is a lot of good content out there primed and ready for this great publishing opportunity.
Other e-book readers, including the new Barnes & Noble Nook, use the e-pub format. The Nook submission process is backlogged at this point in time, and the number of books available in this reader is also limited. This is a very new product, so stay tuned as more and more tools for helping authors enter this platform are being developed.
There is roughly a week-long approval process when using the Kindle development tool. Amazon.com verifies with the author that they own the rights to publish the book, so even if it is more informal than other publishing processes, Amazon.com still does their due diligence insuring copyright integrity.
Amazon.com is the world’s largest online retailer. With an approval process of roughly a week, it is possible these days to publish a book and release it on the world stage in less than a week, without a publisher – and with no expense for the publishing tool!
For specific directions on “How to Create a Kindle e-Book“, visit Getting-Published.com.
Become a “Passivillionaire” by publishing Kindle e-books! The tools are yours for the using. Happy publishing!