Selling an ebook on Amazon
One great thing about ebooks is that you can
sell them in a lot of different ways. We currently sell our microbusiness ebook on
our own website and have
listed it on Google books for more free exposure. Time to see
whether it's worth our while to sell our ebook to an even wider
audience through Amazon's Kindle Store.
Uploading our ebook to Google was quite painless, but I can't same the
same for uploading the same ebook to Amazon. At the moment,
Amazon recommends that you upload your ebook in MS Word, HTML, or PRC
format. When I converted my OpenOffice file to a Word file then
uploaded it, the result was wonky. Next, I decided to give PDF a
shot since Amazon allows ebooks to be uploaded in PDF format (though
they warn of low conversion quality.) My conclusion? Amazon
was right --- their conversion of PDF files is even worse.
While fighting with file formats, I decided to poke around and see what
the finances of listing an ebook on Amazon look like. Google
makes their money by putting a bit of advertising on the side of
your book page, but Amazon's business model involves getting money
directly from the sale of your book. And Amazon's commission is
quite steep --- they take 65% of the retail price as
their own profit before giving you a 35% royalty.
For the moment, I've
decided to give up on listing our ebook on Amazon. It looks like
I'd need to manually reformat an html file to make our book look pretty
again, which just sounds like too much work if they're taking such a
big commission. I'd be curious to hear if other folks have
decided that selling ebooks through Amazon is worth their while.
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