KDP
Latest
iBook Lessons: Picking vendors, price, and exclusivity
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. There's a dilemma faced by many new ebook authors: how to sell a book for "not much at all" and still earn a decent living. Apple and Amazon policies complicate this decision. Amazon offers a multi-choice royalty system (all prices are USD). You can charge up to $2.98 for your ebook and earn 35% of the list price. That equates to just over 34 cents for a $0.99 ebook. charge between $2.99 and $9.99 for your ebook and earn 70% of the list price less delivery costs, which are $0.15 per megabyte. For big illustration-filled books, this can be a deal breaker. TUAW reader Rosie McG's color photo book ships at over 40MB in size. She writes, "With my book priced at $9.99, my net would have been less than zero." charge between $2.99 and $9.99 for your ebook and earn a straight 35% of the list price with no delivery fees. That equates to between $1.05 to $3.49 of earnings. With Apple, you earn a straight 70% royalty on all sales, regardless of price and you can add up to 2GB of content. So long as you deliver in straight EPUB, without using iBooks Author, you can also sell in any other outlet. So there's no question, right? Sell in both places, and just try to make the most of the Amazon situation as best you can, yes? It turns out the situation isn't so simple, especially for new ebook authors. That's because the $0.99-book, which earns you 34 cents at Amazon and 69 cents at Apple, is the workhorse of the new author. It, like its App Store-based compatriot, represents many authors' first step into self-publishing. And Amazon, with its Kindle Direct Publishing arm, has thrown a big monkey wrench into this decision. That's because Amazon has two weapons on its side. First, it's monster presence in the ebook arena. Kindle titles can be read on nearly any platform you throw at it, from iOS to Android, OS X to Windows. That alone gives Kindle books a cachet not found with iBooks. Authors report that the majority of their sales, by quite a margin, come from Amazon. It's not unusual for the Amazon-iBooks split to be closer to 75%-25% than 50%-50%. It's a big incentive to pick Amazon. The second incentive is KDP Select, Amazon's exclusive borrowing program. In exchange for committing your book exclusively to Amazon, your title can be borrowed for free by any Amazon Prime member. Each member may borrow one title per month. If they choose yours, the reward is vast. A $0.99 book that normally earns 34 cents will bring in over $2. This May, the earnings were $2.26 per borrow: over 6 times your normal earnings. (Amazon has not yet announced June earnings. April earnings were $2.48, March $2.18, February $2.01.) To get in on this, you must drop your book from iBooks and any other vendor, and agree to an exclusivity period of 90-days at a time. KDP Select is transformative. It changes your list price from "Do I really want to waste a buck on this book" to "Oh, that book was good, let me pay a little extra to keep it." Psychologically and emotionally, you get to keep that $0.99 list price to entice a value-reward tradeoff from potential buyers, but the real money comes from getting people to give it a try. Both Steve Sande and I have participated in KDP Select since it launched this past winter. And it's been a surprising source of income for a couple of our books (on using the Kindle Fire with 3rd party content and for setting up the device's email). Neither topic was Apple-related and both books outperformed our hopes in terms of earnings for borrows. The $2.99 books, which would earn us under $2 per sale after delivery charges, consistently earn more than $2 per borrow due to the well-funded KDP library pool. And that brings me back to the fundamental question. How would you, yourself, advise a new author to choose given this situation, especially for the $0.99 or $1.99 first title? Would you recommend going for KDP Select exclusivity and borrowing earnings or would you suggest marketing to iBookstore and the other outlets? And, given our TUAW audience and their likely book topics, would writing a book specifically about an Apple-related subject-matter affect that advice, and if so, how? You tell us. Add your comment below and sound off about iBookstore, the KDP Select program, and markets.
iBook Lessons: The absolute beginner
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. I get asked this a lot: what is the absolute minimum it takes to get started in ebook publishing. The answer is this: a manuscript in Microsoft Word .doc or .docx format, an Amazon account, and a smile. Everything else is gravy. With just those items, you can get started publishing on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) system and start earning money from what you write. Just agree to KDP's terms and conditions, provide Amazon with a bank account routing number for your earnings, and if you are an American citizen, a Social Security number. You can find all the information you need to provide on this webpage. You can use a personal account to set up your direct deposit, although you'll probably want to set up a separate business account instead. Check around for whatever free checking deals are currently in your area. These days, in the US, expect to leave a few hundred dollars deposited in the account in order to skip fees. Once you've signed up, you head over to your KDP dashboard to upload and describe your ebook. You won't need an ISBN, you won't need to pre-format your book for mobi or EPUB, you just select the doc file from your desktop, upload it, and let Amazon do all the rest. It's insanely easy. What's more, your Kindle book can be read on nearly any platform out there from iOS to Android, from Mac to Windows. In exchange for selling your book, Amazon takes a fixed 30% of the sales price (which may range from $2.99 to $9.99) off the top plus "delivery fees," which amount to $0.15/megabyte. In other words, Amazon is not the place for you if you intend to sell image-heavy picture books. There are two exceptions to this model. First, if your book costs under $2.99, you must sell it using a flat 35% royalty option (they keep 65% of list price). Second, if you want to bypass the delivery fee model, you may opt into the 35% program for higher-priced ebooks. What if you absolutely need to sell through iBooks? Then, you'll either have to start doing a bit more work in terms of securing an ISBN, filling out paperwork and contracts, and converting to EPUB, or you can look into a third party-Apple approved aggregator. Apple requires: ISBN numbers for the books you want to distribute Delivery in EPUB format, where the book passes EpubCheck 1.0.5 a US Tax ID an iTunes account backed up by a credit card An easy way to work through this is to sell through an agregator like Smashwords. In exchange for a further cut of your profits, they distribute your ebooks to a wide range of stores, including the iBookstore. Instead of earning 70%, you earn 60% and Smashwords handles all the distribution details, including ISBNs. They promise: Free ISBNs Free ebook conversion to nine formats Free unlimited anytime-updates to book and metadata Regardless of where you publish, spend as much time as you can writing a compelling book. And, don't forget the proofreading! [For Federico Viticci, who asked]
iBook Lessons: Publishing costs
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Andrew Hyde jumped into the ebook business with both feet. After fully funding a KickStarter project to raise start-up costs for his "This Book is about Travel," he published his manuscript to a variety of vendors. His outlets included Amazon's Kindle store, Apple's iBooks, and B&N's Nook, as well as Gumroad, a DRM-free PDF seller. What he found is that a ten-dollar ebook with lots of pictures brings home quite different earnings, depending on the vendor. In particular, he got hit -- and hit hard -- by Amazon's delivery fees. His 18 MB ebook costs him US$2.58 per Amazon download, which is a substantial overhead. Amazon details its delivery charges on this KDP help page. As an author, you pay $0.15 per megabyte in delivery charges, in addition to the 30% off-the-top costs Amazon charges. An image-heavy book will hit you hard in the pocketbook. That's quite different from Apple, which is happy to host resource-packed ebooks for a straight 30%. Hyde points out that delivering the same content using Amazon Web Services S3 would cost about a penny for each five downloads, bringing the Amazon mark up to about 129,000% in his calculation. So why sell Amazon? It's the demand. 51% of his Kickstarter supporters requested Kindle format, and 73% of his first 300 digital orders were Kindle. For all that Amazon charges, you don't make money on the books you don't sell. Hopefully, if enough authors speak up, Amazon will adjust its fee structure -- especially since many deliveries now happen over WiFi, not just Whispernet. Apple is providing an ever improving alternative for many readers, as I can personally see over time in the shift in sales of my ebooks. With its iBooks Author tool, allowance of books of up to 2GB in size, and strict 30% cut, Apple makes resource-rich books a more attractive prospect, assuming authors can find their customer base. Amazon remains the 800-pound gorilla in the ebook room. That may not always be so. Thanks, John Fricker
iBook Lessons: Style sheets
One of the challenges Steve Sande and I face, when building our ebooks, is to present our manuscripts with reasonable typographic flair. That's harder than you might first think because readers can customize many ebook features, including fonts. In iBooks, they may choose sans-serif Seravek over, say, serif'ed Palatino. Instead of worrying about particular font mixes, we found we needed to concentrate more on the layout geometry. These issues included relative font sizes (e.g. how the heading font size compared to the text font), indentations for lists and notes, in-paragraph spacing that controlled how dense each paragraph was wrapped together and between-paragraph spacing. Over time, we've evolved our in-house style sheet to define how each of these elements are laid out in our ebooks. Our latest effort, Pitch Perfect (left) looks a bit different when compared to our first ebook, Talking to Siri (right). We've gone a lot bolder with our font sizes, are using hues for subtitles (the Siri fonts are all solid black), and have tuned a lot of the layout. For example, we increased the paragraph to paragraph spacing for easier reading. We have developed these styles in Word and Pages, where you can tweak each of the paragraph characteristics and save them into named styles. In the following screen shot, you can see our basic paragraph characteristics, defining how stretched our characters are (not at all), the spacing between lines, and how much padding to add before and after the paragraph. When creating standard ebooks, these characteristics form the basis for ereader layout. It's then up to the reader app, whether iBooks, Kindle, or whatever, to decide how to finalize the presentation. You don't have a lot of say on the ultimate way the page will be seen by the reader but you can express your preferences for relative differences. Apple's iBooks Author changes that approach around entirely. By extending the EPUB standard to their own proprietary ibooks format (adding XML namespaces and CSS extensions), Apple has allowed authors finer control over ebook layout. When you create a book with Apple's tool, you're ensured that what you create is what the reader experiences. The following screenshot is from our iBooks-only title Getting Ready for Mountain Lion. Each typographic and visual element was laid out precisely in iBooks Author. From page breaks to figures to text, we could exactly preview each page as the reader would see it. What's more, Apple provides six high-quality style sheet templates for you to work with. You do not have to design your own styles to create eye-catching, beautiful manuscripts. Just choose an existing layout, and work from there. We did extend Apple's "basic" style template for "Getting Ready" because we used layout elements (such as in-text notes) that went beyond Apple's layout vocabulary. We also tweaked some of the styles we were given, including the blockquote element, to better match the way we were using our examples. iBooks Author allows you to save your customizations for re-use (File > Save as Template). The third party app Book Palette ($9.99, shown below) provides 20 custom templates built in this manner. Book styles range from cookery to business writing, brochures to glossy product overviews. The limits with Author, of course, are that you cannot distribute paid content outside of the iBooks store, that you cannot distribute to other platforms like the Nook or Kindle, and that you cannot create versions for iPhones and iPod touches. Author is iPad-only, Apple-only, iBooks only. For those reasons, when we had to choose which avenue to develop Pitch Perfect with, we decided on a standard EPUB. This allowed the book to be read across the iOS platform line, and on the Kindle and in Kindle apps. After using iBooks Author's beautiful layout tools, it's hard to go back to Word and Pages but it's a place that, for now, better serves our layout needs for a larger potential market.
iBook Lessons: Creating Amazon KDP tables of contents on MS Word for Macintosh
For whatever reason, many Amazon authors seem to be under the impression that you can only create a proper table of contents for Kindle Direct Publishing on Windows, not the Mac. Having just uploaded our newest book (Getting Ready for Mountain Lion) to Amazon, Steve Sande and I have invested a lot of time learning the quirks of KDP and its tools, as well as those for iBooks (but more about that in another post). For any of our readers who are also budding authors or publishers, we'll be sharing what we've learned in a TUAW series called "iBook Lessons." We thought we'd share our KDP Table of Contents strategy with you to help reduce the hair-pulling and frustration associated with document preparation. Here are the steps we use in Microsoft Word 2008 and 2011 to create our TOC. Create a fresh page and add Table of Contents text line, formatted with your favorite header style. Move your cursor just to the left of "Table". Choose Insert > Bookmark. Call the bookmark toc and click Add. This creates a bookmark before the title, named in such a way that KDP's automatic conversion tools will recognize it as the start of your Table of Contents. All the Kindle hardware and apps will be able to use it as well. Generate a temporary TOC, so you have an outline to start working with. Move to under your Table of Contents header to a new line. Choose Insert > Index and Tables > Table of Contents. Uncheck "Show Page Numbers". Click Options. Choose which heading styles you wish to include. If you use custom styles (e.g. H1 instead of Header 1) make sure to add a level for those as well. Typically, most ebook TOCs use either just H1 or H1 and H2. Your call. Click OK to finish options. Click OK again to generate the contents. Select the entire TOC, cut it, and paste it into TextEdit to be your guide to the next step. For each entry in the TOC, locate the start of that section in your manuscript. Set your cursor to the left of each section title. Again, use Insert > Bookmark to create a bookmark at that position. Name each item with a meaningful (and easy-to-recognize) tag. After bookmarking your entire document, return to the initial Table of Contents section. Paste the text from TextEdit back into your document as simple, unlinked text. For each item on your list, select the entire line: i.e. every word, not just clicking to the left of the name as you did to set bookmarks. Then choose Insert > Hyperlink (Command-K). Choose the Document tab, and click the Locate button to the right of the Anchor text field. Choose the bookmark you wish to link to, and click OK. Repeat for the remaining TOC entries. Once you've finished adding bookmarks and hyperlinks, save your work. Go to KDP and upload the file (you may want to create a testbed skeleton book entry just for this purpose). Download the .mobi file it generates and try it out on the Kindle Mac app and/or any Kindles or iPads/iPhones you have on-hand. Amazon's Kindle Previewer app is also available for download from KDP, and provides simulated views of your ebook on iPhone, iPad, Kindle, Kindle DX, and Kindle Fire. Always make sure you test each link to ensure that the bookmarks are placed properly. Also test the Table of Contents button in-app and check that it jumps you to the TOC correctly. Best of luck in your ebook / iBook publishing efforts, and look forward to more tips about publishing here on TUAW.
How Apple iBooks needs to compete with Amazon: KDP Select
Amazon has trailblazed; Apple has followed. Apple's iBooks program currently allows authors to self-publish ebooks. Authors create their own business built around iTunes Connect, just as they do for self-published apps. So where does Apple have room to improve? What follows is the first of several posts about how iBooks can improve to better compete with Amazon. In this post, I discuss Amazon's exclusive KDP Select program and what Apple can do in response. KDP Select When Amazon launched its recent KDP Select program, the independent publish world reacted strongly and negatively. KDP Select is built around exclusive Amazon listings, requiring authors to withdraw their titles from competing vendors like Apple's iBooks, Smashwords, and Lulu. If you want to participate in Select, you cannot sell your book in any form with any other vendor. You must enroll books for a minimum of 90 days. During this time, Select allows authors to loan their books for, well, free -- and promote their books by giving them away, again, for free. Sounds bad, right? As a lure, Amazon has promised a shared pot of $500K per month for December 2011 and monthly through 2012, with a total commitment of six million dollars. (The first month is over and Amazon has not yet announced per-borrow reward amounts; most involved are guessing in the range of cents-per-borrow.) What's more, it's a zero sum game: the more authors who play in the arena, the fewer dollars there are for each. Sounds bad, but is it a losing proposition for authors? Personal experience shows that for niche and underperforming titles, KDP Select is actually a great way to gain market traction. Target Market KDP Select with its unlimited free loans and exclusivity requirements is clearly not a game that any well-established book wants to play in. "Talking to Siri: Learning the Language of Apple's Intelligent Assistant" is an ebook by TUAW editor Steve Sande and myself that has been selling quite well on both Amazon and iBooks. It will soon debut as a print book with Addison Wesley/Que. We declined to enroll it in KDP Select. We could not see any advantage from withdrawing it from iBooks or offering it as a free loan book. Instead, we focused on a couple of our highly geeky Kindle Fire-specific titles. These titles cover Email and Third Party Content. In response to Amazon, we withdrew these from iBooks, added them to the KDP Select program and have seen surprisingly good results. That's because KDP Select trades off promotion for free copies. I personally used one of my five KDP promotion free days on Christmas for my Kindle Fire Third Party Content ebook. Mind you, this is a small very narrowly-focused ebook that shows readers how to incorporate content outside of the Amazon system on your tablet. In other words, it's never going to be a general best seller. That day, my sales numbers jumped from modest into the high triple digits. I made no money of course, as each copy was given away for free, but the book's momentum carried it forward to very gratifying sales for the week that followed. In exchange for cultivating a cadre of exclusive-to-Amazon titles, their program is helping authors promote for very low fixed costs on Amazon's part. Amazon's Outlay Amazon has commited to $500,000 per month to share among KDP Select authors. This money is apportioned by loan popularity. A hot fiction title climbing the Amazon charts will do a lot better than a niche geek nonfiction title. One loan is one vote. Authors must compete against each other to gain a portion of the half-million pot of dollars. In addition to this basic fixed-outlay scheme, Amazon has some basic infrastructure costs with regard to loan management and title promotion. Apple's Response To date, Apple has not focused highly on independent authors. This is a shame as more and more self-published works are emerging outside the bounds of traditional publishing. As I'll explain in my next post, to publish on iBooks, you'll need a properly formatted and validated ePub file and a costly registered ISBN (International Standard Book Number). On Amazon, all you need is passion and a Microsoft Word doc file. Add KDP Select to the mix and many potential iBooks titles will never make it to the Apple bookshelf. They'll be limited exclusively to Amazon. Amazon's pre-emptive raid into the independent publisher's world is cutting off titles, both present and future, from iBooks, and other platforms. If Apple hopes to lure these authors to its store, it's going to have to react, and react strongly. Something has to draw them away from Amazon and from KDP Select. Apple needs to provide these authors with a reason to stay away from exclusive Amazon listings, and potentially to list exclusively with Apple. Right now, it does so by offering better terms than Amazon. With Apple, authors receive a full 70% of list price with no delivery fees, the bane of Amazon sales. On Amazon, delivery fees that are linked to file size can cut a chunk of profit out of any book listed for $2.99 or higher. (Items listed at 30% royalty rates, or sold for under $2.99 are exempted from delivery fees.) The problem is that, at least in our experience, Amazon sells better than iBooks, particularly for smaller titles. Items are more discoverable on Amazon and Apple does little to promote independents. If Apple were to provide some way for smaller authors to market more discoverably on the iBooks store, they could grow that indie community. Apple also needs to provide more and better author peer support. Authors, who regularly congregate on Amazon's forums, find little equivalent on Apple's sites. Apple could also hire iBooks evangelists, in parallel to their World Wide Developer Relations, to teach potential authors about iBook authoring tools, how to use iTunes Connect, and provide book publishing road shows -- but more about that in my next post. Will Apple offer its own exclusive agreements in response to KDP Select, as recent unsourced rumors seem to suggest? TUAW doesn't find these rumors credible, but if Apple does, it better make sure to provide the marketing push that's the true draw of the Select program. Posts in this series: KDP Select Better Author Tools Cross Platform Support
