the kindle effect

I am almost certain that I will do my own publishing of my book using KSP (Kindle Self-Publishing). It is pretty straightforward and lets you take charge of nearly all of the options available. KSP appears to be a boon for those who can't pony up the cash to get their works published by a firm.

~Tom

I'd like to highlight that those companies mentioned in the article that charge thousands for the different self-publishing services, are scammers. I've already self published and the amount I invested is not even close to what the article says those companies charge. Okay, my marketing effort has been little, but it's still to be seen what is those companies marketing proposal and if it's worth the stratospheric price they're charging.

Kiss,

Gacela

Because they charge way over the actual cost of the services. The article mentions Girl Friday Productions charging from $10000 to $30000. My goodness! That's enough to start your own editorial house. She Writes Press charges $5200 plus 20% to 40% of the profit. It they have already charged $5200, why taking 20%  to 40% of the profit? They have invested nothing; they are not entitled to further profit.

Amazon takes 30% of the profit (the author's royalties are 70%), because self publishing with them is for free and they are entitled to charge for the platform's maintenance. But why should a company that has already charge you for the publishing process receive part of your money?

Kiss

Gacela

Agreed. Even if they were throwing thousands upon thousands at marketing on behalf of the author, it's not going to help if your book is not up to snuff, or they're marketing the wrong way. Before using marketing services, find out who their clients are and look up how their books are doing on Amazon and other retailers. You can easily weed out the scammers from the real deal. If you have the money to spend, I think it's better spent on marketing the book yourself rather than trusting an outside source to do it for you. After all, you know best what your interests and needs are. Your needs and interests are going to be secondary to another party.

I can format an ebook in about twenty minutes using Calibre. Formatting paperbacks for Createspace takes a bit longer because of the extra bits involved, but it can be done in a short time using Word. Any service charging anything but a nominal fee for formatting should be treated with wariness. I understand some people are technologically challenged when it comes to such things, but it's not rocket science, and any number of guides exist to walk you through the processes.

Without marketing, there is little difference between the old vanity press and the new except instead of printing up books and storing them in your garage, you eprint books and store them on a server, all unseen but by the author with his shattered dream. The days of thumbing through books to see for oneself is replaced with a few first pages or selected at random. It is impossible for me to judge that way for non-fiction, and for fiction there is a necessary judgment of the basis of style whereby a kitschy style is evident from the outset, but a subtle consistent style is not. Vulgar is marketable; tawdry sells, and others have to find their way into their markets even if interesting plot and characters also sell. Oh, and what a bad idea for an author, except  for porn, to sell by the page. Kindle Unlimited used to pay the author the whole royalty if 10% of the book was read, and now it pays according to any large or small portion read. Never assume any publisher traditional or digital ever once has the interests of the author:

https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/2016/0 … unlimited/

it is easy to see why many authors were upset by the change to pay per page. Before KU, if you wrote a 150 page eBook, and priced it at $2.99 you would make $2.09 (after Amazon’s 30% royalty) off of a sale of that book and you would realize that revenue as soon as a reader downloaded the book. Under KU, that same book nets you $0.75, and that is only once a reader completes the entire book, which may happen within 24 hours or 6 months of the reader borrowing the book. Additionally, as an author you do not know what the payout per page will be until the following month, so it’s hard to determine what the max. value of your book in KU is in any given month.

... but the advantage of KU or Lending Library is that there is an implicit Amazon marketing for the book. However, the possible difference between $2.09 and $0.75 a book means that marketing is not free and reaches the level of a scam because neither the author nor reader, really, is served well. Once a reader has read past the first 10% of a book, he may judge a book, except for some literary fiction, perhaps, but having read 11% or 85% does not mean he has read the book and could be incentivized, if bound to pay the full price, to read it to the end, if $2.99 over $0.32 (11%) means much. There is all along a fundamental problem of pricing ebooks too low even when discounting for the fact that the book does not incur the cost of paper printing. The author should always be given a high fraction of the price for an ebook that involves no more than the cost of standing overhead for the ebook-server merchant.

If you have the money to spend, go for it. But after you learn how to format the subsequent books, you'll be wondering why you gave that money to someone else to do it in the first place.

There was a great blog post from an author named Kate Elle who made a very simple to use guide on how to make a clean ebook file using Word and Calibre. It's what I've always used as a model when making my ebooks. Unfortunately, she seems to have dropped off the face of the earth for a number of years and her website is now gone. Hopefully one day I'll get off my butt and make my own guide for new authors.

Calibre is self-evident. It's creating the input HTML document from Word that can be difficult.  You do not even have to make the ebook to upload to Amazon but rather that HTML document to Amazon specs. And then there's the cover art which not only takes computer skills not having anything to do with artistic talent but also a sense of what will sell the book.

I looked up a Ray Bradbury collection on Amazon, and the ebook does not appear to be in KU. Being traditionally published, he does not likely have the same royalty split that self-publishers have with Amazon. But assuming he (or his publisher) did, he would be getting $7 out of that $10 purchase as his royalty. KU rates only apply to books borrowed through that program. Books can still be purchased through the regular store, where a self-published author gets 70% of royalties on books priced between $2.99 and $9.99.

I made the Bradbury example to illustrate a point on the cheapness of some short stories that word-for-word are often more valuable than most novels and on how there is still an element of unfairness of charging per page than on whole content. Even under a modern Kindle contract, Bradbury would net before taxes 7 cents per story.