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 Forrester expects ebook sales to reach $966
million in 2010, predicting that ebook sales will triple to nearly
$3 billion by 2015. With ebook sales to exceed $1 billion in 2011,
it seems inevitable that ebooks will outsell print books in the not
to distant future.
Ebook readers tend to buy a LOT of ebooks: the average ebook
reader – including people who don’t have an e-reading device or
e-reader – already consumes 41 percent of books in the form of
ebooks. Moreover, two out of three books (66 percent) read by
someone with an e-reader is an ebook.
Source: James McQuivey, “eBooks Ready To Climb Past $1
Billion,” Forrester Blogs, November 8, 2010
Thus adding another casualty to a traditional industry by way of
digital and giving birth to new money making opportunity for
"indie" writers.
Meet Amanda Hocking.
Amanda Hocking is 26* years old. She has 9
self-published books to her name, and sells 100,000+ copies of
those ebooks per month. She has never been traditionally published.
This is her blog.
And it’s no stretch to say – at $3 per
book*/70% per sale for the Kindle store
– that she makes a lot of money from her monthly book sales.
(Perhaps more importantly: a publisher on the private Reading2.0
mailing list has said, to effect: there is no traditional
publisher in the world right now that can offer Amanda Hocking
terms that are better than what she’s currently getting, right now
on the Kindle store, all on her own.)
The beauty is, you don’t have to be traditionally published to
sell a lot of ebooks. Take this monthly sales figures taken from
the December 2010 listings on the Kindle store. Of this list, only
six have had previous print deals with major
publishers.
Blake
Crouch – 2500+
Nathan
Lowell – 2500+
Beth
Orsoff – 2500+
Sandra
Edwards – 2500+
Vianka Van
Bokkem - 2500+
Maria
Hooley – 2500+
C.S.
Marks – 2500+
Lee
Goldberg – 2500+
Lexi
Revellian – 4000+
Zoe
Winters – 4000+
Aaron
Patterson – 4000+
Bella
Andre – 5000+
Imogen
Rose – 5000+
Ellen
Fisher – 5000+
Tina
Folsom – 5000+
Terri Reid – 5000+
David
Dalglish – 5000+
Scott
Nicholson – 10,000+
J.A.
Konrath 10,000+
Victorine
Lieske – 10,000+
L.J.
Sellers – 10,000+
Michael R.
Sullivan – 10,000+
H.P.
Mallory – 20,000+
Selena
Kitt – 20,000+
Stephen
Leather – 40,000+
Amanda
Hocking – 100,000+
Writers and bloggers can now make a significant amount of money
in this digital age thanks to ebooks. With that said, here's how to
become a Kindle author:
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Create a copy of your book in HTML format. (You could also use
TXT, or DOC, but HTML converts to Kindle the best.) Design a cover
image and save it in JPEG format.
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Sign up for an Amazon Account if you do not already have one. Go
to "https://dtp.amazon.com/mn/signin"
and click "Sign Up."
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Go back to the Amazon's Digital Text Platform log-in page and
sign in.
-
Select the "My Shelf" tab. Click "Add New Item." Enter your
book's product details, which include the book's title, a summary
description (restricted to a 4000-character limit), author's name,
publisher's name (which if you're self-publishing is your name),
and an ISBN number for your eBook. Amazon does not require books to
have an ISBN number to publish in Kindle. It's purely optional. But
an ISBN number could help to give your work more credibility. If
you'd like to purchase an ISBN number for your eBook, you may use
the link in the Resource section of this article.
Select the language of your eBook. Enter a few keywords that
describe your book's subject matter (this will be used to help
customers find your eBook). And select the overall subject category
you would like your work to be listed under.
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Select your Digital Rights Management (DRM). To restrict
unauthorized access and copying of your work, select "Enable DRM."
DRM is intended to protect your work against free distribution.
There is some debate as to whether eBooks that do not have DRM
restrictions actually sell better because books without DRM allow
the user greater flexibility. If you choose to publish a Kindle
eBook without DRM restrictions (opting for the honor system
instead), to protect your work you could include a note on your
copyright page that requests that readers respect the work of the
author by not passing free copies of it along. Make your choice
carefully--DRM or no DRM. Once the eBook is published in Kindle,
you cannot changed this setting.
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Upload your cover image. Click "Save entries," then confirm your
content rights over the material you're publishing. Upload the HTML
file of your eBook. The Amazon Digital Text Platform will
automatically convert this file to Kindle. When prompted, preview
your eBook to check it for errors or formatting issues. If you need
to make any modifications to the file, download the Kindle
formatted file of your eBook from the DTP. Make your edits, then
upload the file again.
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Set the suggest retail price for your Kindle eBook. Click
"Save," then "Publish." It will take two to three business days for your eBook to show in Kindle
listings. But when it does, you will officially be a Kindle
author.
Read more:
How to Become a Kindle Author | eHow.com
http://www.ehow.com/how_6522046_become-kindle-author.html#ixzz1FIWJKxi8
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