There are a lot of different aspects that go into a book. What format to choose, Where to publish, and how much to charge, being among just a few decisions that an author makes. Thankfully the format has mostly been decided upon with the ePub format. However, some companies like to have their own format for ebooks.
Herein, I will describe my experiences. My background in publishing ebooks is as follows: 7 Books, 5 Titles, 3 Platforms, 3 applications, 2 formats, and one hot mess. That is the easiest, and most succinct, way to describe publishing an ebook in today’s environment.
Let me start by describing my process of writing. I usually begin writing everything, including this post, in TextEdit on my iMac. I use TextEdit because it’s a plain text editor. It’s nothing fancy, I have tried other applications but this works best for me. Depending on how in-depth the item is, I will start with an outline and then move onto the actual writing. Sometimes I can whip something out quickly, other times I must sit and think about it. That’s my writing style in a nutshell. Now, onto the platforms.
There are three major platforms for ebooks. Apple’s iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle, and Google’s Play Store. Each have their own pros and cons, as one would expect. We’ll tackle seven categories for each platform; Uploading, Review Process, Pricing, Reporting, Royalties and Payments, Management, and Updating. We will look at each of these in-turn for each of the three platforms. There are some things that all of the platforms have in common, we will look at these now.
Commonalities
Despite being different platforms run by very different companies, there are some similarities between the three platforms. These includes, accounts and payment details.
All three of the companies require you to have an account. In the case of Amazon and Google this may be an existing account you have with them. However, with Apple, if you have a developer account, you cannot use that to also publish ebooks. I’m not sure why this is the case, but it is entirely possible that it is due to the way iTunes connect operates and the fact that an ebook publishing account with Apple does not cost anything where as their developer accounts do.
Along with having an account, you must also provide payment details. The items included in payment details are Social Security Number (or other Tax identification number), Routing Number, and Account Number. This information is necessary because they will furnish the IRS, or other local tax authority, with this information. When you sign up for an account, they will walk you through entering information. You will also be required to furnish the information for payments.
These are pretty much where the similarities end. Let’s begin looking at each of the markets, and we’ll start with the big one, Amazon.
Amazon
Amazon is the giant when it comes to selling pretty much anything. Ebooks are no exception. Amazon has its Kindle devices, which are amongst the most popular, if not the most popular, ebook reading devices on the market. To coincide with the device, Amazon also has their own ebook format. Well, multiple formats. Amazon has AZW and KF8. These are both proprietary formats, but they are used for delivery not for uploading to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform.
Uploading
Amazon makes uploading your ebook very simple. You basically have two pages of information to fill out. The first page consists of the Title, Version Number, if it’s part of a series, Contributors, a description of the title, Public Domain status, Search Keywords, the book’s cover, and the actual book. Amazon accepts the following formats: ePub, doc, and azw formats. If your book is not in AZW format, Amazon will automatically convert it to a Kindle-friendly format.
Pricing
The second page consists of determining the cost for each region in which Amazon sells. As of this writing there are 11 regions. Amazon has a royalty system that consists as follows: $0.99 to $$2.98 You will receive 35% royalties. Anything above $2.99 will provide you with 70% royalties, but will also require you to pay a delivery charge. The delivery charge will be based upon the size of your book. If you have a fiction book with very few images, this makes life much easier and will require less of a delivery charge. You will see the estimated size of your ebook, after it has been converted. The rate of delivery depends on the territory in which it is sold. Here is the cost, as of this writing:
Amazon.com: US $0.15/MB
India on Amazon.com: INR ₹7/MB
Amazon CA: CAD $0.15/MB
Brazil: BRL R$0.30/MB
Amazon.co.uk: UK £0.10/MB
Amazon.de: €0,12/MB
Amazon.fr: €0,12/MB
Amazon.es: €0,12/MB
Amazon.it: €0,12/MB
Amazon.co.jp: ¥1/MB
Amazon.com.mx: MXN $1/MB
There will always be a minimum delivery charge of 0.01 in whichever currency.
Now, you always have the option of receiving 35% royalty, even on an item that is priced between $2.99 and $200. This method may be best if you charge $2.99 for your ebook and it is a 15MB file. At that price, you will effectively have no profits and may even owe. 35% of $2.99 is better than 0% of $2.99.
Review Process
Amazon does a bit of a review, mostly for spelling, upon uploading your document. Outside of this there really isn’t a “review process”. It is published as is. It generally takes 12 hours for your ebook to appear on the Amazon.com and 24 hours to appear on Amazon’s other markets. Amazon does keep you abreast of your ebooks current status. Amazon does also send you an email when your ebook is live. Despite the quick turnaround, there is no way to specify when a book can go live.
Reporting
Reporting is a big thing for any author. I know I prefer to keep tabs on how many copies of a title that I am selling and Amazon, unsurprisingly, makes this very easy as well. You can view your ebook sales in near real-time. This is done from the KDP dashboard, simply by click on “Reports”. There are four reports total. “Month-to-Date Unit Sales”, “Prior Six Weeks’ Royalties”, “Prior Month’s Royalties”, and “Promotions”. The last one “Promotions” has been recently added and applies only to KDP Select titles. The one that I tend to look at the most is “Month-to-Date Unit Sales”. In this report a report of each of your titles, with Units Sold, Units Refunded, Units Borrowed (if you allowed the option) and Free Units.
The second report, “Prior Six Weeks’ Royalties” will show The week, the Title, The number of Units Sold, Units Refunded, Royalty Type, Average List Price, Average File Size, Average Offer Price, Average Delivery Cost, and Royalty (in US Dollars). This is where you can see how much your ebook costs to deliver, if you chose to use the 70% royalty.
Royalties and Payments
Royalties are paid 60 days after the sale. Generally, this means that anything you sold in July is paid in September. Royalties are paid to the account that you specified in your initial account setup. In order to be paid, you must have made at least $10 in royalties. Royalties are after delivery costs are deducted.
Management
At any point, you have the opportunity to change the pricing of your book. To do this you can simply click on the book, click on the “Save and Continue” button at the bottom and then you’ll be brought to the second page. You can then adjust the pricing as you see fit. This works well if you want to put your book on sale, or just change the price permanently. One thing to keep in mind though is the price, as mentioned above. If you drop below the $2.99 threshold, you’ll need to go down to the 35% royalty rate.
Updating
In conjunction with management comes updates. In order to update a book on Amazon, you simply have to Click on the title and upload the updated copy of the title. The update will act just like a first-time upload and check for spelling mistakes and taking between 12 and 24 hours to complete. If you do update a book, users will not automatically receive the update. They will have to delete their current copy and re-download the copy from the Amazon store. They should also receive an email from Amazon stating that there is an update to the title and how to update their copy.
Overall adding and updating titles on Amazon is very simple and painless. The realtime reports make life a bit easier for authors to see just how well their book is selling. The major downside to Amazon is the delivery fees, if an author chooses to take 70% royalties, as well as the lack of automatic updating can deter some authors from publishing their books with the retail giant.
Final Thoughts
Publishing an ebook on Amazon is a very simple, painless process. Initially publishing a book and updating a two page simple process. The update process for customers is less than idea, given that they must delete and re-download the title. Overall, being the biggest store on the planet for just about everything, publishing an ebook on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing is a very safe bet.
Stay tuned for part two, of this three series, on Google Play.
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