I wrote a YA fiction novel, created the cover and eBook myself, and submitted it to Amazon KDP and did basically no further promotion of substance. I've been selling 40 copies a week at $3 each, at roughly $2 in royalties per sale. Not amazing money, but enough that I'm happily working on my second novel—and it took less time to create the novel[1] than to create the iPhone game I made, and I've made significantly more in less time with the novel (AND without the yearly developer fees).<p>The book bounces around the 10-30k sales rank for eBooks and has only four reviews (all positive). The thing that most helped sales was making a POD version of the book available through CreateSpace (also Amazon) which cost me about $15 in printing and shipping fees for proof copies. Almost nobody buys the print version, but just the existence of the option seems to make the $3 eBook appear to be a better values. I'd say the existence of the print book resulted in a 3-4x increase in sales.<p>Clearly my case is different from that of the author of the linked article, but I figure it could be of interest to anyone who clicks that link.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.syncingdreams.com/2012/06/dragon-master-post-mortem-part-1.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.syncingdreams.com/2012/06/dragon-master-post-mort...</a>
Always great to see the numbers, but I think the key thing about Amazon is if it's treated as merely a supplementary channel, you'll get supplementary results. Those I know who've done well on the Kindle have really had to work hard on building up Amazon as a channel.<p>It's a bit like if you have a video to promote. YouTube can drive crazy numbers of views, but if you focus on self hosting it on your blog, get a few HN and Reddit posts, etc, you'll have far more self hosted views than YouTube views if you upload it to YouTube as a secondary channel. I suspect so it goes with Amazon and the Kindle Store.<p>I guess what I'm getting at isn't that you can assume Amazon is a bad/small market for a particular book, but that you can't assume it'll work without putting in some dedicated effort to nurturing it.
As someone that has only sold self-published ebooks (where I keep 98% of the profit), I always forget how bad the split is on "real" platforms. The fact that (in the publishing world) 35% is VERY VERY GOOD, blows my mind even more! I can't imagine having a business model where I share >50% of my profit with a company.
eBooks at some point is great, but don't you think there is piracy of the eBook and if it's pretty popular it will be up on the internet within few weeks.<p>i think amazon should be like a library or youtube for ebooks. So the user can subscribe the books they want it should be something similar to safaribookonline.
<a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20104755-264/amazon-e-book-subscription-publishers-should-join/" rel="nofollow">http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20104755-264/amazon-e-book...</a><p>Amazon has limited the capability of eBooks, eBooks can be like iBook(iOS App) where the book has capability of videos and multimedia. What is the difference between the book and device if it was just the text with picture.