Archive for the ‘About Publishing’ Category
Rising Transfer Fees For Emailing Files To Your Amazon Kindle
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing on July 25th, 2009
If you want to send a file to your Kindle, particularly if you’re an author or publisher who wants to check it for formatting or proofreading, Amazon offers a great service where you can just email a file in a generous range of formats – HTML, Word documents, etc. – to your Kindle. The file is run through their conversion process, and then magically appears on your Kindle via Whispernet.
For a long time, Amazon claimed that there would be a $0.10 fee, but it was in fact free. A couple of months ago, I transferred a file, and got a receipt from Amazon, charging me a whopping $0.15. Okay, sure, not a big deal.
Then last night, I transferred another file (I don’t do this very often): the charge was $0.30. Hmmm.
Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “What are you whining about, you dork? It’s only thirty cents!”
Well, my concern isn’t with the price itself – $0.30 isn’t a big deal for me, as I don’t transfer files very often. The issue is that, so far as I am aware, Amazon hasn’t announced this price increase (I could be wrong, but I don’t recall seeing anything), plus it’s a 100% increase over the last one.
And that gets us back to Amazon’s very lackluster customer service performance regarding Kindle publishing (at least if you’re not a major publisher), which is far below the customers service experiences we’ve had for the Kindle reader itself (Amazon ranks A+ in my book for that). I don’t mind Amazon charging me for services rendered – as long as the price is relatively reasonable – but I do mind them not telling me about pricing changes that can have an effect on me. And there may be folks out there who transfer files a lot, and that thirty cents can add up pretty quick.
So, Amazon, please just let us know what’s coming down the pike, okay?
Amazon Kindle Books: Is The Pricing Honeymoon Over?
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing on July 24th, 2009
When the Kindle first came out, one of the great selling points was that even first-release “big name” titles were only $9.99 (you know, the ones you’d probably be paying upwards of $20 for in print), and many were appreciably less. On top of that, Amazon generally had a nice discount – usually 20%.
In the last several weeks, as I mentioned in an earlier post, there have been a lot of changes, particularly for independent publishers and authors.
But the latest change that I noticed (and I don’t claim to be the most observant person in the world!) were the prices listed in an ad that Amazon sent around (Amazon Kindle: Best Books of 2009…So Far). Folks, the times – they are a-changin’.
For example, of the eight novels they listed in the fiction category in the flyer, three were $9.99, while the others ranged from $11.99 to $14.82. The interesting thing is how they’re listing all the prices once you go to the catalog page: the actual sale prices are touted as being major discounts – 40% to at least 60% – off of both the print price and digital list price (which for the titles I spot-checked, were the same).
In the non-fiction category, the flyer listed another eight books: one was $9.99, the others ranged from $11.99 to $17.88 – the sale price.
Taking a look at the Kindle Store home page, Amazon tells us that “New York Times® Best Sellers and New Releases are $9.99, unless marked otherwise.” All the books they list as of today are $9.99, “discounted” from the digital/print list price of $22.99 to $27.99.
Previously, the digital list price was usually the publisher’s MSRP (which typically topped out at $9.99), and Amazon discounted from that down to, say $7.99; and they generally didn’t list the print price (and when it was, it was – as you would probably expect – significantly higher than the digital list or actual sale prices).
Now, the $9.99 – or quite a bit higher – is the discounted price.
So what does all this hocus-pocus mean? It tells me that Amazon feels they have a large enough Kindle user base that they can start pushing up the prices closer to what you’d typically pay for print books. I’m not going to sit here and complain that this is “evil Amazon” at work. Let’s be honest: as a general rule, the books are still cheaper than what you’d pay for print copies. But, on the other hand, you’re going to have to start paying quite a bit more than we’ve become accustomed to.
The bright side is that, if you don’t want to pay premium prices, there are still tons of books to read, both in and out of the Kindle Store. My personal recommendation – and yes, this is a bit of a sales pitch (just glance to the left)! – is that you give some of the small press and independent publishers a try. Most of their books are a lot less expensive (despite the current discount and pricing bugaboos), and some of them are every bit as good (and, I daresay, in some cases better) than what the major publishers are putting out.
Amazon Kindle Store Prices: Some Big Changes
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing on July 18th, 2009
You may have noticed some pretty major changes in Amazon’s Kindle Store over the last several weeks in terms of pricing. Specifically, the removal of discounts from many of the books – particularly those published by independent authors and publishers – while some books from major publishers have been receiving larger than normal discounts (including discounts to $0.00!).
For independent authors and publishers, this is a huge deal, because Amazon shoppers have become accustomed to seeing a discount on the titles they buy, and are much less likely to buy those that don’t have a discount. In some cases, Amazon has even raised the prices for books over what the publisher recommends for the title (in some cases, by a lot).
Now, I don’t begrudge Amazon making a profit, and the terms and conditions of publishing through their services allows them to price titles at whatever they like.
But for some folks this has had a huge negative impact on sales. In my case, for example, sales have slowed down since the discounts were removed from my books, and other authors have seen far more drastic changes in their sales. And I wanted to run a discount for the rest of this month, reducing the prices on In Her Name (Omnibus Edition) and In Her Name: Empire by quite a bit, but Amazon isn’t passing that on to the customers – at least not yet. The net result so far is that customers are still being asked to pay the previous full price for the books, but I’ll get less for any sales because I’m only going to make 35% of the reduced MSRP.
My point here is simply to help you, as a reader, understand that the authors and publishers aren’t trying to gouge you with some of the prices you may be seeing, but in many cases want to offer you a discounted price: we’re totally at the mercy of Amazon’s pricing policies. So please keep that in mind when looking at a book you think you might enjoy, and feel free to add your voice to those of us who have been complaining about this by contacting Amazon’s customer service department.
Interview With The Book Smugglers
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing, My Books on May 22nd, 2009
I wanted to tip you off to an interview series at Temple Library Reviews about The Book Smugglers, Ana Grilo and Thea James.
The interview was cool because of a couple of things. First, Ana and Thea have a really great book review site, and they get into all kinds of things. And they also happen to be very nice people, which always helps!
The other reason I wanted to point out this interview is what they say in their answer to question 19 about the growing self-publishing movement. I’ll give you a hint: they mention In Her Name, and it’s good!
So check it out and enjoy!
For Mac Users: Preparing Documents for Amazon’s DTP
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing on April 19th, 2009
While Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP), which is Amazon’s interface for self-publishers and small presses to get their books into the Kindle Store, has been gradually improving, one thing that remains a major pain in the you-know-where is uploading documents created on a Mac.
As with many systems, Amazon’s DTP is designed for input from Microsoft Windows applications, and doesn’t like the way Mac apps typically encode text characters: DTP won’t accept documents encoded with Unicode, although it does now seem to take (or at least produce) documents with UTF-8. Without getting into a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo, those encodings map out character sets beyond the Windows-standard Latin-1 (Western) encoding and English/western European character sets (Unicode provides support for a wide range of international characters).
Where Mac users run into problems is that 1) DTP won’t accept the more typical Mac documents natively produced by Pages or TextEdit, and 2) if you’re preparing the print version of your document in Pages, you can’t output directly to HTML (which is a really silly oversight, methinks).
There are other programs, particularly InDesign, that many Mac users use to format their print versions; I can’t help you with those, because I only have Pages and TextEdit, but hopefully what I go over here will help.
So, let’s say that you have your book set up in Pages and it’s ready to go. Here’s what I did that seemed to work:
Step 1: Save it as an RTF file.
Step 2: Open the RTF file in TextEdit.
Step 3: In TextEdit do Save As -> HTML
You can then edit the HTML file as (or if) necessary in an editor like Taco. Once that’s done, take the HTML file and any image files it needs, zip them together – you must use a program that has a “Windows-friendly” zip option (like YemuZip) or DTP won’t accept it! – and then upload it to DTP.
I wish I could say that I could guarantee you that this will work for your document, but with the vagaries of DTP, I can’t. I know this worked for my novel In Her Name: Empire, and as long as you use an English or western European character set you should – I hope – be fine.
However, if you’re using another character set – let’s just take Chinese as one of many examples – it will not work. The Kindle is still very limited in what it can do compared to web applications. It looks like DTP has moved up from accepting only Latin-1 (Western) encoded documents to at least accepting UTF-8 encodings, but you may still run into trouble: if you try to upload your HTML and DTP comes back with a long unintelligible error that has “unicode” buried in it, chances are this is the problem.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any immediate solutions to that: my first recommendation would be for you to go back and make sure your HTML is Latin-1 (Windows) or UTF-8, not Unicode (these are all separate options for encoding, depending on your app).
The Big Break For Indie Authors – Is It Coming?
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing on March 30th, 2009
In a discussion on KindleBoards.com, one of the folks mentioned that the publishing scene was often depressing nowadays. But why?
The situation with publishing is often seen as depressing mainly because the traditional business model used by the big publishers is from the cretaceous era, and would-be authors repeatedly fling themselves like lemmings into the moats around the publishing castles in vain hopes of getting published. The big houses are still the mighty predators and the indies are still just little mammals darting past their feet, but – particularly with the takeoff of reading technology like the Kindle that gives readers unprecedented choices, literally at their fingertips – the asteroid’s getting closer every minute.
As I noted before, though, the biggest block right now is simply getting the top-notch indie books that are truly competitive with mainstream books pushed through into mainstream review channels to get the exposure they deserve. Having forums like Kindleboards has been a boon for folks like myself, but it’s still a tiny microcosm of the overall readership out there (electronic and print) that the big boys can market to (helped along by reviewers who help promote their books).
The measure of true “success” for many indies also remains this: that one or more of their books gets picked up by a mainstream publisher on contract. This means they’ve “made it,” even if the book is a commercial failure (which most, sadly, are). I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, I’m just saying that I think there’s going to come a tipping point, a day when somebody like Oprah is somehow going to come across a book she loves that happens to have been written or published by an indie (note: it doesn’t matter if you love Oprah or hate her – whatever she says she likes on her show sells like hotcakes. Love ya, Oprah!), and that person is going to really make it. And part of the story that Oprah or one of the other “big names” in reviews, whose words sell (or kill) lots of books, is going to be that, “Hey, this person published this book by themselves – how’d they do that?”
The floodgates won’t open right away (although there’ll be a stampede of eager indies trampling over themselves), but if we can just somehow get a couple indie books injected into the mainstream as concrete proof that not all self-published or small-press stuff is crap, that would be the break that could help change the tide – and that would be a great thing not just for indies, but for readers, as well.
