Self Publishing Today

I’ve just attended a webinar about the Amazon Kindle product, titled “Leveraging he Kindle – How to maximize the Kindle’s benefits to your readers and your business” presented by Joe Wikert of John Wiley & Sons. The webinar was for the most part aimed at book publishers, but in the self-publishing world the word “publisher” is really synonymous with “author”. Even if you’ve hired self publishing company like mine (Dog Ear Publishing) you still will perform many of th functions of the traditional indie book publisher – and you should be aware of what new and upcoming publishing technologies mean to you.

The Kindle – for those of you who don’t know – is Amazon’s relatively new e-book reader. The reception in the traditional book industry has been fairly cool, with most publishers unsure of what impact, if any, the thing might have on their bottom line.

Joe’s presentation brought to light a number of ways the Kindle might be important to you, the self-published author. (I’m skipping past all the iintro stuff – like what the Kindle does, how it does it, why it’s ‘clunky’ and that pretty much only books with no complex formatting or graphics work well).

A couple big points from the webinar -

No manufacturing cost on a ‘per unit’ basis. According to Joe, the retail price for Kindle books seems to cap at about $9.99. Most of the books in the Amazon top 50 Kindle seem to run from about $7 to $9.99. Amazon forwards 35% of the SRP for the Kindle product to the publisher/author. So, if your book is $9.99, you get $3.50… Pretty decent for no manufacturing expense.

No apparent impact (negative or positive) on print book sales. Dog Ear Publishing has a number of authors that have released Kindle versions of their books. As an average over the group, there appears to have been no significant impact on print product sales. That’s good in that it means the authors basically made ‘free’ money by releasing a Kindle. Since none of the Kindle product appeared in a ‘pre-release’ marketing version (they all released as entire books) I don’t know if additional demand was built prior to the book release.

A great way to leverage your content and turn it into either marketing materials or content sub-sets for whic you can get paid some amount. An example is an author that releases as a Kindle book a small excerpt of his book, and charges some nominal fee for the download. Another might be an author that takes each chapter of her book and makes it available as an individual Kindle product.

(another angle on this is the web site Scridb.com which I’ll discuss in another post Monday.)

Take a look at the webinar -it’s up for the next 90 days (you’ll just have to register) – you might find the Kindle becoming another tool in your book marketing plan.