The iPad and the Kindle represent the two biggest markets available to independent publishers. They are the key markets in distributing your ebook and are the best ways to reach potential readers. I have found some frustrations publishing for both of them and I would like to share them with you.
Initial submission
In this area Amazon is definitely the easiest and quickest option. You simply sign-up for an account and submit your book as a word document. My book, ‘The Good Girl’ was available on Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de within two days of submission. The only down side is that the author has little control over how the text of the book will appear to the reader and, in my case, it meant having to create styles in Microsoft Word from a file exported from my writing software.
To submit files to the iBookstore you have to go through an aggregator. An aggregator is a third party that collates your information and packages your book before passing it to the iBookstore. I submitted ‘The Good Girl’ on June 21st, it is still not available for the iPad as I write. This is obviously very frustrating as it makes launching and marketing the book a lot more difficult. The upside is that I can submit a fully standards compliant ePub file that I exported from my writing software that requires no further editing and it allows me more control of how the book will look on the device.
Pricing
This is an area where I find Apple to be the better company to deal with. The price I set when I submit the file is the price the customer will pay when they buy the book. That may appear to be obvious but it is not the way it works with Amazon.
The price I set for ‘The Good Girl’ was $1.79. On the first day it appeared, the price on Amazon.com was $3.34. This makes it virtually impossible to have any real control over the price when you wish to run a special promotion, say in the run up to the holiday season. It’s difficult to advertise a price if you don’t know what it will be when the customer attempts to buy the book.
The time that the aggregator takes to pass on a change of price to Apple means that it is also problematic trying to run a promotion for a specific time. I have found this to be particularly frustrating, surely if you only wish to change the price it should not require the full review process. If the ePub file is the same then the change should be instantaneous.
The cover
You might think that this is a strange heading but the truth is the Kindle is not a great device to view images on. The iPad’s full colour display means the cover of my book looks exactly like the cover of the paperback, indeed the cover I designed. However, due to the limitations of the greyscale e-ink display used by the Kindle, I had to create a different cover for ‘The Reluctant Detective’ as the impact of the cover was lost for anyone browsing the Kindle store on the device rather than a computer. Sales of my first book only really took off on the Kindle when I changed the cover.
Royalties
Amazon pay royalties based on the price you set. If your book if less than $1.99 or £1.99 you will receive 35% of the price you set. The royalties rate is 70% if the book is priced at a higher level. You do not receive any royalties until your books have made at least £100.
With Apple you get paid at 70% regardless of the cover price. You also get royalties paid through your aggregator every month, thirty days after the month ends. These payments start when your book begins to sell and you don’t have to wait to reach a certain figure to trigger payment.
As the market for ebooks develops it may be that many of the little frustrations I have encountered will be ironed out but for the moment I will have to work my way through them to bring the Reluctant Detective mysteries to my readers.
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