Is Amazon’s KDP Select Worth It?

What is KDP Select?

After you’ve published your ebook via Amazon, you’ll have the option to enroll it in KDP Select. Basically, in exchange for granting Amazon exclusive ebook rights for 3 months (or more), you get additional benefits.

What does exclusive mean?

It means you won’t make the ebook available for sale anywhere else. The only place to get it is through Amazon. That means if you’ve already published it through Smashwords or you’ve made it available on your own website or blog, you have to remove it before you enroll. They’ll check.

Again, this is only for 3 months. So if it’s not working out like you’d hoped, you can remove it from KDP Select and sell it through whatever other methods you’d like.

What’s the benefit of enrolling in KDP Select?

* You get 70% royalty on more non-US sales, rather than 35%.

* You can offer EITHER a free promotion for a short period of time (“Free Book Promotion”) OR a discount promotion for a short period of time (“Kindle Countdown Deals”).

* Your book is available in the “Kindle Lending Library”. Amazon Prime members who own a Kindle can borrow your book for free. […]

Cover Reveal – What Should I Write About?

My own personal cover reveal. Here’s the cover to my next book, which I hope to have up on Amazon soon.

Disclaimer: I reserve the right to tweak it further. :)

Introduction to Ebook Publishing

I thought we should start off with some definitions and some explanations of what this site will be talking about. What is ebook publishing? Why would anyone want to do it? What’s the point of it? Why’s it worth my time to think about? And a thousand other questions you might have. So let’s get started tackling the big ones.

Traditional Publishing and Ebook Publishing

The traditional route to publication was and is for an author to write a book, then shop it around to agents and/or publishers, until one of them nibbles. You want an agent to handle your sales and contracts. You need the publisher to give you money, produce your book, and sell it.

This is a fine way to go. Once you’ve written your book, your agent and publisher are going to do a large share of the work. You’ll most likely get paid up front (an advance on royalties) and you won’t have to worry about the production and business side of the process more than you want to. Or not much more than you want to. The main drawback is all of this can take a lot of time. I’m talking years. Many years.

[…]

Introduction to the Site

Hi, and welcome to the site!

I created this site to help people write, publish, and sell their ebooks. I’m in the fairly early stages of doing this myself, so I’ll be sharing what I know so far, what I’ve learned along the way, and what I continue to learn and discover going forward.

Why Ebooks?

It’s really so simple to publish an ebook and make it available to the world. It can be fast, especially as you gain practice. It can be free, depending on how much of the work you want to do yourself.

That said, I will also be talking about the process of creating print books. I have discovered so far that that is not as fast, though still quite inexpensive.

What Are You Going to Talk About?

Oh, all sorts of things! Here’s just a few:

* Coming up with ideas of what to write about. * How to research the market before you write. * Methods of writing a nonfiction book that involve less writing than you think. * Formatting for Smashwords, formatting for Kindle, formatting for CreateSpace. * Covers, covers, covers. * How to outsource your cover design, formatting, or other things you […]