Posts Tagged ‘Kindle Store’
Updating Books on the Kindle – A Big No-Go?
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing on March 23rd, 2009
One of the attractive options about publishing through Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) to the Kindle Store was that books could be updated, and folks who had bought an earlier copy could re-download the revised one.
Now, I’ll be darned if I can find the documentation on that (although I very strongly recall that it wasn’t just urban legend), but a recent post on the DTP forums put a torpedo in that particular ship. One of the folks on the forum called Amazon support and was told that there currently is no way for readers to download an updated version of a title, unless they ask for a refund and then repurchase the book. And, of course, Amazon apparently won’t allow that as a general rule.
Hopefully they’ll add that as a feature, because it would be an extremely powerful advantage, particularly for “how-to” books that can be updated periodically with the latest information. Come on, Amazon, push the envelope a bit, would you?
Increase Your eBook Sales
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing on January 18th, 2009
My initial focus for publishing In Her Name was on the Amazon Kindle. And while the Kindle – in my opinion – is awesome (my wife and I each have one), and I definitely want In Her Name to be available to that growing market segment, I’ve discovered that an incredibly easy – and free! – way to expand your sales significantly is by publishing through Mobipocket.com.
Mobipocket is actually owned by Amazon (it was bought up a few years ago), and the Amazon Kindle’s file format is based on the Mobipocket eBook format. So, the beauty of it is that if you get your book ready for publication on the Kindle, you’ve done about 99% of the work to get it ready for Mobipocket, and vice versa.
But when you publish your book through Mobipocket, you open it up to a market that includes about two dozen on-line retailers, plus Mobipocket itself. It doesn’t cost you a thing, and you’ve already done almost all of the work. And you can actually do it all in one shot: if you publish on Mobipocket, they’ll also distribute to the Kindle store!
