Jump to content

Disclaimer

Photo

An Author site vs. Kindleebooks


  • Please log in to reply
6 replies to this topic

#1 T Larae

T Larae

    New Member

  • Members
  • Pip
  • 16 posts
  • Literary Status:emerging
  • LocationUS Southeast
  • Publishing Experience:None, with the exception of my blog. I am considering going the self publishing route because after two years of querying, I still have no agent. Breaking in is hard to do, which brings me to this site. My blog is entitled Larae's beginnings www.earl1958.wordpress.com

Posted 16 March 2011 - 08:50 PM

I am considering self publishing one, possibly both my manuscripts as ebooks. How would Kindle affect me if I decided to sell on my site as well as thiers?
I haven't even looked at kindle... i. e what they require or anything. I'm just doing my homework at this point.

#2 RC Lewis

RC Lewis

    OCD for the Good of Mankind

  • Group Moderator
  • PipPipPipPipPip
  • 5,247 posts
  • Literary Status:agented
  • LocationUS Southwest
  • Publishing Experience:STITCHING SNOW will be published by Hyperion in Fall 2014.

Posted 16 March 2011 - 10:34 PM

My understanding, you can sell anywhere you want to--Kindle, the B&N Nook Store, Smashwords, your own site, etc. One thing to be aware of, though, is that if Amazon finds you're selling it for a lower price elsewhere, they can/will automatically drop the price in their store.
Stitching+Snow+Cover+Final+SMALL.jpg 
Stitching Snow
October 2014
Hyperion

#3 MzBuzz

MzBuzz

    Veteran Member

  • Members
  • PipPipPipPipPip
  • 264 posts
  • Literary Status:just starting, emerging, unagented
  • LocationUS Northwest
  • Publishing Experience:I freelance as a formatter for a local small publisher and anyone else that would like to hire me. I also perform technical editing, transcription, etc.

    I have one novel in final draft form and it's sequel in progress. I also have a mystery novel forming. Plus ideas for a thousand more...

Posted 16 March 2011 - 10:57 PM

Thanks, RC--good thing to know!

#4 Rick Spilman

Rick Spilman

    Veteran Member

  • Members
  • PipPipPipPipPip
  • 1,145 posts
  • Literary Status:published
  • LocationUS Northeast
  • Publishing Experience:My novel Hell Around the Horn is published by Old Salt Press

Posted 17 March 2011 - 07:12 AM

The issue can get a bit confusing when talking about formats and brands.

If you have the e-book on your server, you can sell your book, formatted for the Kindle reader, in a .mobi format. The Kindle books from Amazon are .azw, which is a variant of the mobi standard. Both are readable on Kindle. There is a free utility for PC that makes the conversion from word processing to .mobi fairly painless.

You could also sell a version in the .epub format which is readable on Sony and Nook readers. The iPad, iPhone and Ipod Touch can read either Kindle or epub files, if the appropriate free app is installed.

Selling straight from your server requires that you set up a shopping cart and deal with Paypal or one of the other e-commerce services.

Another option would be to sell your books through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and/or all the other available sites. One small but nice benefit is that by becoming an Amazon and a Barnes and Noble "affiliate" you will earn a commission on any books or products sold through your website. My blog is an Amazon affiliate, so anything sold through my blog (any time someone buys something on Amazon after clicking through from my site,) I earn between 4 and 7% commission on a sliding scale. The B&N affiliate program offers a flat 6%, if I am not mistaken. The nice thing is that if someone clicks through to Amazon and then also decides to buy a bicycle, groceries, DVDs or electronics I earn a commission on anything they buy. For example, though my blog has only links to books for sale on Amazon, yesterday I earned $25 dollars when someone bought a Dell netbook. I also earned $2.7 when someone bought bicycle handlebars.

Selling directly from your website will give you higher payments per book. On the other hand, selling though Amazon, B&N, the Apple store and other outlets may give you more exposure and higher sales overall.

#5 Erik Martin

Erik Martin

    New Member

  • Members
  • Pip
  • 15 posts
  • Literary Status:emerging
  • LocationUS Southwest
  • Publishing Experience:Thus far I have only had a few short items published. One was in Frontier Tales #12, online magazine, and another in 'A Year in Ink IV' a print anthology. I have also published 4 short stories on Smashwords and Kindle (two of which were the above published stories).

Posted 07 April 2011 - 05:23 PM

I have been dealing with this issue recently, not quite as far along with it as you. My website is still in its infancy, but I have been planning to do as someone already suggested by linking to B&N or such on my site as an affiliate. I see quite a few authors advertise their books on their sites and simple provide links to purchase it on Kindle etc.

#6 richard p

richard p

    Veteran Member

  • Members
  • PipPipPipPipPip
  • 367 posts
  • Literary Status:emerging
  • LocationUS Southeast
  • Publishing Experience:Two self-published books: "Battles and other stories" and "Only The Lonely" (a novel) on Amazon.com.

Posted 07 April 2011 - 05:44 PM

When you self-publish, you own all rights. So you can do pretty much what you want to do. When you self-publish, you become the publisher, and accept all liability for slander, etc. It's not mandatory, but highly recommended that you obtain a copyright for each novel. It'll cost you $35.00 each and take little time to do it on the internet, but getting your copyright in advance of needing it for legal reasons is prudent and will save you a lot of hassel should someone steal your work. (I'm not a lawyer, so check with your legal advisor about all of this if you want to be positive.)

http://richard-writi...ng.blogspot.com
Richard P Hughes a.k.a. R Patrick Hughes


#7 Rick Spilman

Rick Spilman

    Veteran Member

  • Members
  • PipPipPipPipPip
  • 1,145 posts
  • Literary Status:published
  • LocationUS Northeast
  • Publishing Experience:My novel Hell Around the Horn is published by Old Salt Press

Posted 07 April 2011 - 06:05 PM

I have been dealing with this issue recently, not quite as far along with it as you. My website is still in its infancy, but I have been planning to do as someone already suggested by linking to B&N or such on my site as an affiliate. I see quite a few authors advertise their books on their sites and simple provide links to purchase it on Kindle etc.


One advantage of an Amazon affiliate program is that if someone clicks on a book link from my sight and then goes ahead and buys something, anything else, from a laptop computer to a sack of dog food, I still get a commission. Supporting other authors by providing ad links to stores where readers can buy their books is a good thing under any circumstances. Getting paid a little for it is not bad either.

As you have links to your books in Kindle format on your site, being an Amazon affiliate would add between 4-7% to your earnings when anyone buys your books through your site. Of course there is no reason why you could not be both a B&N and an Amazon affiliate so long as your provide buttons linking to each on-line store.




0 user(s) are reading this topic

0 members, 0 guests, 0 anonymous users
http://agentqueryconnect.com?showtopic=2519&k=880ea6a14ea49e853634fbdc5015a024
agentqueryconnect.com?showtopic=2519&k=880ea6a14ea49e853634fbdc5015a024
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-15
74019
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:BFBLL76ZMTATDCP22JSXFVNHGBID35RD
<urn:uuid:be410077-2d11-467d-9d08-56edcc3ab447>
2014-04-16T16:09:30Z
50.28.75.74
sha1:CNUT3UDNL43JQ2COJ24YHJ6RCMRPPVRC
<urn:uuid:6a61a5fc-4d46-4cf9-b230-adfd6b19f4c8>
http://agentqueryconnect.com?showtopic=2519&k=880ea6a14ea49e853634fbdc5015a024
length
response
<urn:uuid:2265f2e1-c5cb-4b6b-a1cf-f4421055ed80>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-147-4-33.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-15
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for April 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf