Kindle MatchBook

Amazon is offering writers the chance to make more money from their books with Kindle MatchBook. Kindle MatchBook offers buyers the opportunity to buy the Kindle version of a book at the same time that they purchase a printed book - something that should help writers increase their sales.

The new programme began in early September; since the launch more than 700,000 sellers have signed up.If a writer has their work published on Amazon, they can visit the site and see which of their books qualify for the MatchBook promotion.

In a press release, Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Kindle Content., said:

“It’s been great to see the positive response to MatchBook from both readers and publishers.”

“MatchBook enrollment has grown from 10,000 to 70,000 titles in just a few weeks and we expect it will keep expanding rapidly in the months ahead.”

As detailed in the press release, the features of Kindle MatchBook include:

• Kindle editions at a great price: Amazon customers who purchase or have purchased qualifying print books can get the Kindle edition for prices that are $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or free.
• For book purchases dating back to 1995: Print purchases all the way back to 1995—when Amazon first opened its online bookstore—will qualify once a publisher enrolls a title in Kindle MatchBook.
• Easy discovery: Readers can easily look up their entire print book order history to discover which of their past purchases are enrolled in Kindle MatchBook.
• Popular Kindle-only features: As with regular purchases, Kindle MatchBook titles have unique features such as Whispersync, Popular Highlights and X-Ray.
• Read anywhere capabilities: In addition to Amazon’s best-selling Kindle devices, customers can download a free Kindle reading app for iPhone, iPad, Android tablets and phones, PC or Mac and start building their Kindle library today.

Amazon's Kindle Singles

I received an email on Friday afternoon from Amazon about Kindle Singles. Kindle Singles has been running in the US for awhile now and was introduced to the UK last year.

Kindle Singles has taken over from Amazon Shorts and gives writers a platform to publish their short stories, essays, news articles etc.

Kindle Singles can be written by new or established writers; Stephen King has made the headlines recently for publishing his gun essay on the singles format. Amazon states that Singles have to be 5,000 - 30,000 words long.

Any writer who wants to contribute has to submit their Kindle book to kindle-singles@amazon.com. If the work is yet to be published, the writers have to send a manuscript or pitch to the same email address.

Kindle Singles will go through a submission process first before being published and writers can expect to hear from Amazon within four weeks.

Books will be made available via Kindle Direct Publishing and will need to be priced at £0.99 - £1.99. More information is available here.

Jennifer Crystal Johnson gives tips about publishing on Kindle

A few days ago I wrote about Jennifer-Crystal Johnson's new book  co-written with N. Jones called If you're human don't open the door which has recently been published on Amazon's Kindle.

With Amazon announcing that Kindle books are now outselling physical books, and given that Kindle is a free and assessable resource that can be used by anyone wishing to self-publish their own work, I thought that some advice on publishing on Kindle would be useful to readers of this blog, I emailed Jennifer and asked if she had any advice for people considering publishing on Kindle. Here are a few tips from Jennifer on formatting for Kindle:

 "As far as having advice on self-publishing for the Kindle, I would say that the most important aspects of having a professional eBook out are editing and formatting. Word can be tricky to do formatting with because it adds so much unnecessary html into the document that it gets to be pretty confusing for the Kindle to display quickly; for example, if you have something in bold and then take the bold formatting off, the html will keep the tags in front of the word or phrase but it won't show up bold. I get pretty OCD with that kind of stuff because I went to college for website design, so looking at html and having it appear messy is a "thing" for me."

"Since the Kindle only has one font face, if I want to make a title appear in a specific font style, I save it as an image and then put that into the document as a title. You can do this with opening paragraph letters, too, although you cannot wrap text around images in the Kindle yet."

"For now, I'll say this: one of the best investments for formatting eBooks that I have ever made is buying an eBook by Joshua Tallent entitled Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide. It outlines everything from reducing your file size to spacing, line indentation, inserting images, and the pixel aspect ratio of the Kindle screen so you can make the most of the images you include."

 And some tips from Jennifer on editing:

"Once you have the formatting down, the other aspect of self-publishing that is important is to have an editor; not just someone to proofread, but having someone who can help with technicalities as well as suggesting minor changes in sentence structure and word usage. You can often hire editors through freelance web sites like oDesk, a site that provides me with clients on a very regular basis. I write, edit, and work on other random projects in graphic design as well, so I work entirely from home and write fiction when I'm not preparing publications for authors signed under Broken Publications."

Finally, for any out there writing short stories or poetry, here is a chance to submit your work for two anthologies:

"Broken Publications is open for submissions for two anthologies: Soul Vomit, focusing on domestic violence, and the Apocalypse Project, featuring end-of-the-world stories of all kinds (zombies, disease, natural disasters, planetary collisions, you name it!). I'd like to invite people to submit their work for one or both of these projects =)."

You can find out more about Jennifer's work by visiting: http://www.jennifercrystaljohnson.com/index.html

Is Knoxville the most romantic city?

According to Internet giant Amazon it is.  Amazon used sales data from romance novels and relationship books, romantic comedy movies and Barry White albums, which can always be relied upon to get people in a romantic mood.

Amazon counted both Kindle books and print books, digital movies and DVDs and CD and MP3 sales to work out the winner.

Amazon used figures dating back to January 1 this year and counted sales on a per capita basis in cities with over 100,000 residents.

Last year's most romantic city, Alexandria, came second this year and Springfield came third.  Las Vegas is way down the list at 18. 

There wasn't a lot of romance going on in New York City if the list from Amazon is anything to by with the Big Apple coming out as the least romantic according to the purchasing habits of Amazon customers.  Also flailing in the romantic states were Patterson, New Jersey and El Monte, California.

Amazon announce Kindle now outsells printed books

In a recent press release Amazon.com announced that Kindle books are now outselling printed books.

Hardcover and paperback books were first introduced to Amazon in 1995; in 2007 the Kindle was introduced.

It was in July last year that Kindle started to outsell hardback books. Six months on and Kindle is outselling paperback books as well and has become the sites most popular format for buying books. For every 100 printed books sold, 105 books are sold in the Kindle format.

Priced from around $114, or from £111 in the UK, the Kindle allows people to store up to 3,500 books.

Commenting in a press release, Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO, Amazon.com, said:

"Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books. We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly - we've been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years.”

"In addition, we're excited by the response to Kindle with Special Offers for only $114, which has quickly become the bestselling member of the Kindle family. We continue to receive positive comments from customers on the low $114 price and the money-saving special offers. We're grateful to our customers for continuing to make Kindle the bestselling e-reader in the world and the Kindle Store the most popular e-bookstore in the world."

950,000 books are now available via Kindle and the books are often cheaper too.

The popularity of Kindle looks set to grow and it has proved popular in the UK as well with Kindle now outselling hardback books.

Self Publishing Ideas

If you've come to the end of your book and you're thinking it's time to start finding out more about self-publishing then you've probably done a Google search by now and found some of the different options available. I'll go into more detail about the publishers that I've found another time but here I'll detail some of the options for publishing your book, and how to make it affordable both to you and your buyer.

I've noticed some of the Print on Demand publisher's fees aren't too high but then you'll only get a commission per sale. This can amount to just a few dollars. If you were to list this on somewhere like eBay or Amazon you could easily end up losing money on every copy you sell or just making a few cents which I'm sure for most of us isn't the idea.

While I want more than anything to get my book out in a proper hard copy format the difficulty of finding affordable publishers will mean it won't prove too easy but if I just want to get my book out there and start selling it myself until I can find a suitable publisher then I've found a few other options.

I know of one person who sells his book on eBay just by making it available on two discs to his buyers. In my opinion, it's not the idea format for selling it but people don't seem to mind it that way and that is all that matters. He sells it for around £8-£10 each time and and as far as I know the only outlay he has is the cost for the discs,which is hardly expensive, and the postage. If he ends up with £5-6 profit or maybe a little more per sale that's still better than you'd get from most publishers whether your work is self-published or not.

The other idea is to sell it as an e book. There are plenty of sites out there where you can sell an e book. There are plenty more sites where you can format your e book and design covers. Some sites don't require an ISBN either which means you can get started straight away.

I've also been looking at Lulu as an option for publishing my book in paperback format and from the estimated prices I've obtained it could just be feasible and affordable to publish it that way. I just need to finish the first manuscript so I can work out the exact page numbers and the precise costs.

The last option I've found and perhaps the most promising is Kindle on Amazon. They have recently said that their sales of Kindle have overtaken sales of books in other formats which came as a surprise to me because I'm not too keen on reading off the screen but plenty of other people seem to like it. Publishing in this format couldn't be much easier. If you already have an Amazon account then all you need to do is go to the Publish on Kindle option. Click the Kindle page and you'll find a link which takes you to a 73 page PDF guide which tells you how to start selling in that format. The Kindle service does not cost anything to publish your work. Follow this link for more information:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=gw_br_dtp?ie=UTF8&docId=1000234621&pf_rd_p=74672262&pf_rd_s=left-nav-3&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=507846&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0BA0C16Y7P9CAFKETN4Y