“Self-Publishing is Super Easy… Kinda” Part 3 – The Best Tool for Self-Published Authors
March 30, 2024
By Guz Perezrios
When it comes to self-publishing, there are a lot of tools authors will utilize. Paying for editors and proofreaders can be expensive, so some people might use Grammarly or other software to help lighten the load of editing. Some might use people as tools to help them write their stories. When it comes to finally publishing the book though, there are of course websites where you can publish your book for free. Once you reach that step, you should be asking yourself “what next?” Well, for self-published authors, there is one tool they will use that is by far the biggest money maker. The greatest tool that authors have today to make a name for themselves is none other than everyone’s favorite multi-media global conglomerate, Amazon. Specifically, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.
Amazon
Amazon has a strong grasp on the literary market, as it controls around fifty to eighty percent of the distribution market. Most online book sales are made through Amazon. So, what makes Kindle Direct Publishing so appealing to authors? It’s the fact that you can publish your book for FREE. Just like with any other publishing site, Amazon will allow you to post your book on their platform, but with the added benefit of the potential to make money from it directly. Of course, there are some legal documents you need to go through, obtaining an ISBN from Amazon and all, but it’s a very straightforward process to get your book on Kindle, and Amazon offers not only comprehensive guides on how to obtain these things but also keeps them simple and easy to understand. With Kindle, you have two options. You can charge people money for your book, or you can opt to include your book with Kindle Unlimited.
Kindle Unlimited is a monthly subscription service that offers you access to millions of books. So, if you’re an author trying to make money, how do you make money from something free for others to read? Well, Amazon has you covered there as well.
An easy example to put this into perspective is short stories. Amazon Kindle Unlimited dictates an author’s earnings by pages read. Every page read is worth $0.0045. While that seems like a little, consider something. The more content you have, the more money you make. The romance genre (and its sub-genres), has several books well under one hundred pages. They’re short stories, and the more an author has, the more people can read, and the more people read, the more money you make. If you have ten short stories equating to one hundred pages each, and if those one hundred pages are all read one thousand times in one month, that’s $450 x 10 (books) = $4500/month. Now, I’m not the best at math, so this is just to help put this into perspective. Now this is most prevalent in the romance genre, but several genres do this. Fiction, Fantasy, Poems, Nonfiction, Horror, Mystery, the list goes on.
None of this is even considering Amazon paperbacks through Kindle Direct Publishing. Sometimes a Kindle isn’t for you. You just love to hold a book in your hands. Not only will Amazon allow you to publish for free, but they print all your paperbacks for free as well. Amazon just cuts off the sale to cover printing costs, cutting out the middleman. KDP gives you a 60% royalty rate on all paperbacks sold through the Amazon Marketplace (The traditional publishing royalty rate is around 10%). Self Publishing: (Royalty rate x list price) – printing costs = royalty. Printing costs usually equal the number of pages needed to print and are deducted from your royalties. Let’s say you wrote a fantasy book called “The Chicken of κοτόπο.” (I can’t pronounce that either). It’s 400 pages, and you’re selling it for $15. So, the printing cost is going to be $5.80. (0.60 x $15) – $5.80 = $3.20/sale. Again, it doesn’t seem like much until you look at the bigger picture. You sell 100 copies, you make $320. Sell 500 copies, and make $1600. Now let’s say you made four more books, “The Chicken of κοτόπο: Parts 2 – 5.” They each sell 500 copies. You’re now looking at $8000. That’s still small, but consider if you had taken advantage of the previous methods altogether. Suddenly, it all adds up to look like a pretty large payday. Your Patreon fans want a physical version of your book, so when it’s released you have guaranteed sales, and now for people who didn’t fancy reading a book online can see the popular book is now on paperback, thus prompting more people to buy it who previously wouldn’t have.
If you want to look more into the world of self-publishing, here are some links.
Amazon
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/royalty-calculator
Author Links