SPA Girls Podcast – EP24 – All About Amazon

SPA GirlsIt’s the episode you’ve all been waiting for… This week, in lucky episode 24 (I love that number, it’s my date of birth), we talk all about the retail site Amazon. It’s the first of two episodes on Amazon, and this week we start by giving a bit of an overview of Amazon’s history, what they do, and how they came to be such a powerhouse retail site. Then we talk about Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) where indie authors load up their books, the pros and cons of KDP Select, talk about Kindle Unlimited (KU), and how to use Author Central. This is a long episode, and potentially involves me rambling on for too long about Amazon’s history (the others certainly think so… 🙂 ), but I think it’s another great episode. If you’ve ever wanted to know more about Amazon and how it works, listen in!

 

What Do These Terms Mean?

KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing

KDP Select (exclusive)

KU stands for Kindle unlimited

KOLL stands for Kindle Owners Lending Library

 

Kindle Unlimited is a subscription program for readers that allows them to read as many books as they want. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a collection of books that Amazon Prime members who own a Kindle can choose one book from each month with no due dates. When you enroll in KDP Select, your books are automatically included in both programs. Your books will still be available for anyone to buy in the Kindle Store, and you’ll continue to earn royalties from those sales like you do today.

What does it mean to publish exclusively on Kindle?

When you choose to enroll your book in KDP Select, (for a 90 day period) you’re committing to make the digital format of that book available exclusively through KDP. During the period of exclusivity, you cannot distribute your book digitally anywhere else, including on your website, blogs, etc. However, you can continue to distribute your book in physical format, or in any format other than digital.

Payment is paid per page read and depends on how much is in the KDP Select Global fund. For example, it was $12 mill in Feb so that means that money must be paid out to those authors enrolled in KDP

Kindle Unlimited is now available through Amazon U.S, U.K., Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Brazil, Mexico, Canada and India and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) in the U.S, U.K., Germany, France, and Japan.

Kindle MatchBook – gives customers who buy a print book from Amazon.com the option to purchase the Kindle version of the same title for $2.99 or less.

 

Pros & Cons for exclusively loading to Amazon

Pros

Convenient

Limited term – 90 days experiment

Largest bookseller in the world

Exposure

All Star bonuses – for pen names, individual titles

Visibility

 

Cons

Exclusivity

Unknown per page rate until 15th of the month following

Philosophy – putting all your eggs into one basket

Lack of control – once you’re in you’re stuck for 90 days and the rules can change

Final decision – depends on author, what they’re writing and their own experiences. There’s no one right answer. Can do some books in and some books out and try.

 

Information

Amazon makes up a higher percentage of the total US ebook market than the oft-cited 65% figure: when indie books without ISBNs are included in the statistics, Amazon accounts for 74%of all US ebook purchases and 71%of all US consumer dollars spent on ebooks.

Outside of Amazon.com, 4 other major online retailers comprise nearly the entirety of the remaining26% of the US ebook market: the Apple iBookstore, the Barnes & Noble Nook store, the Kobo US bookstore, and GooglePlay Books.

At those 4 other stores, self-published indie ebooksmake up 22% of all ebooks purchases and take in 32% of all author income generated by ebook sales.

Between 14%and 25% of all ebooks sold at Apple, Nook, and Kobo store lack Bowker-issued International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs).

In total, more than 33%of all ebooks sold in the US each year have no ISBN.

Across the entire US ebook market, ebooks without ISBNsnow command a greater share of consumer ebook purchases, reading time, and author earnings than all of the AAP’s 1,200 publishers put together, including the Big Five.

The true US ebook market, which includes non-ISBN sales, isat least 50% larger than ISBN-limited market statistics from Nielsen and Bowker are estimating.

 

Still, Amazon is not the entirety of the US ebook market.

We know that 35% of traditionally published ebook sales occur outside Amazon: at competing retailers like the Apple iBooks store, the Barnes & Noble Nook store, the Kobo Book store, and Google Play.

But what about indie ebook sales?

Some traditional industry spokespersons have speculated that more than 85% of indie ebook sales are wholly dependent upon Amazon. They presume that indies sell very poorly outside the Kindle store and make up an insignificant percentage of ebook sales elsewhere.

Among indie authors themselves, there is little consensus. Anecdotes about sales at other retailers run the gamut. Some indies are now going all-in with Kindle Unlimited, choosing to make their books Amazon-exclusive because the sales they saw at other ebook stores were so anemic in comparison.

 

Author Central

This is like your book shelf, the place you go to personalize what your readers will see about you on your Amazon Author page, i.e, you author bio, bibliographies, biographies, author photos, and even feeds to blog posts.

Each Amazon site i.e., UK, Canada, USA etc., has author central, so you should take the time to set up a different page on each one.

Here’s how to start:

  1. Set up your Author Central account if you haven’t already done so.
  2. In Author Central, click the Profile tab. You’ll see sections for adding or changing your biography, photos, videos, speaking or other events, and blog feeds.
  3. Click the add or edit link next to a section. Instructions appear, along with space to add information.

If you don’t add information to a section, that section does not appear on the Author Page. Sections are always available in Author Central so you can add or change the information later.

You can also check book, sales, and author rankings here.

 

Links

KDP Select

https://kdp.amazon.com/select

 

Pros & Cons

Hugh Howey http://www.hughhowey.com/kindle-unlimited-knockout/

HM Ward http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,231153.75.html

 

… Author Earnings Report, October 2015 (http://authorearnings.com/report/october-2015-apple-bn-kobo-and-google-a-look-at-the-rest-of-the-ebook-market/)

 

Book recommendation

The Everything Store, Brad Stone

http://www.amazon.com/The-Everything-Store-Bezos-Amazon-ebook/dp/B00BWQW73E

 

Author central

https://authorcentral.amazon.com/

Author: SPA Girls

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