Second Income

Amazon.com and its Kindle program just gave all authors a big fat raise. Traditional publishers pay royalties to authors in the range of 5% to 15%, but Amazon recently bumped the Kindle “royalty” rate to a whopping 70%!  All authors are eligible to publish their works straight to Kindle, so Baby Boomer’s in the know have taken to this program like the youth have taken to Youtube; it is a great platform with an amazing built-in delivery system. Kindle has dominated the market since its release in 2008.  By Christmas 2009, Kindle sales surpassed the physical books sold through Amazon.com. “That’s something we knew was coming, but we didn’t expect it to happen as quickly as it did,” says publisher EJ Thornton of Books To Believe In. “We have about 20% of our titles on Kindle now and they’re outpacing our physical books by a greater margin every month.”

By far the biggest winners in this are those people who have topic-centric non-fiction books that Thornton has dubbed “Micro-Biographies.”  These are books that address a small period of time in someone’s life – such as their war experiences, their battle with an illness, triumph over a life condition or some other very specific topic. Since these aren’t people’s birth to death type of biographies (which usually only appeal to family and friends), these smaller books find audiences down the niche they address. They do that easily because of Amazon.com’s ability to categorize and classify books.  As soon as the author learns how to work the Amazon.com system, Amazon.com ends up suggestively selling their book directly to the author’s customers. Best of all, with no middle-men business people involved there are no publishing or printing expenses. The 70% return is pure profit to the author.

Just like with publication, authors absolutely should have a professional edit their book  and they need to get a book cover (or a ‘front book graphic’) that helps sell it. There are many online classes and service providers readily available to help them do just that. “We put together a 20 minute free video course to help give more direction to authors looking for information on how to prepare Kindle books,” Thornton explains.

Amazon originally came out with their very successful Kindle e-Reader device in 2007, but in recent times they’ve made Kindle e-Books more accessible to more people by creating free reading programs for the iPads, iPods, and Android smart phones. Even better, Kindle is now also available for the PC, so you don’t need to read them on the small screen anymore. “Kindle has created a market, dominated it and already expanded it establishing itself as new the industry standard in e-Book publishing,” Thornton says, “and that is why it is a boom for anyone who has a message and wants to promote it. Kindle makes it accessible for practically everyone now.” For more information, take the free class on “Getting-Published.com” – click on the “Kindle”  link.

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Tags: biographies, E Books, publishing, writing