How clever. The title of this blog posting has a double meaning. For one, I’m announcing the Amazon Kindle edition of our new Outskirts Press book The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors. And two, the Kindle Edition IS a highly effective tool for book marketing, and I’ll discuss why and how in the next post.
But first thing’s first. Within 72 hours of ordering our own Amazon Kindle Edition option from our Outskirts Press website, my Kindle edition was up on Amazon and available for purchase on all the Amazon Kindle devices worldwide. Not bad for $99. And I had the option of earning either 30% of the retail price, or 70% of the retail price, as defined by Amazon.
The benefit of ordering this service through Outskirts Press rather than… say… any other publisher… is that Outskirts Press does not take ANY of the split. Amazon pays you directly, so you are getting whatever Amazon sends to your bank without any skimming from us. You see (and this is one of the secrets to our publishing success) we pay 100% author royalties, and in the case of e-books, there isn’t a production cost. So Amazon takes their share and the author takes the rest. No wonder so many authors, regardless of where they published, are using our new a la carte Amazon Kindle Edition service from the new Outskirts Press store. Click here for more details.
Since I wanted as many readers as possible to read this latest book, I set my Kindle retail price at the minimum of $0.99 and as a result, the 30% royalty option was selected for me. You see, Amazon requires a retail price between $2.99 – $9.99 to receive a 70% royalty. In most cases, I would encourage authors to set their Kindle price at $2.99 and receive 70% (roughly $2 for every sale). At 30% of $0.99 I’m receiving a whopping thirty-five cents with every sale, but in my opinion, Kindle sales are currently just icing on the cake. The real motivation is to drive Paperback sales, and I’ll talk about that in a future post.
Heck, for a limited time, for my blog readers, I’ll GIVE the e-book of The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors away. Click here to read the e-book for free (and in a way cooler method than on the Kindle, too!). Or if you prefer the Kindle edition, click here to get it from Amazon for $0.99. In return, just do me a small favor and compose a positive review for it on Amazon. See, soliciting reviews is an important component of any book marketing strategies and often times you may find that you have to “give the book away” to get reviews. That’s the beauty of e-books – they’re inexpensive to give away and yet they still (hopefully) prompt participation in the review department.
There is more to discuss about the Highly Effective Kindle edition, and I’ll cover more next time…
President of Outskirts Press 