Amazon's Numbers Don't Lie, Ebooks are the Future
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos holds up a Kindle. Bezos recenlty told Amazon shareholders that sales for Kindle titles surpassed paperback sales.
Ebooks are selling at Amazon like hot cakes. In fact, they've surpassed dead-tree paperbacks to be in sales. That's according Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos. That's not to say print publishing is dead. But two things are for sure. Print books have less and less of future than ever and unless you have $5000-$10000, new authors should probably avoid this avenue all together.
This does not mean that print does not make money it just means that that their is a significant hard cost to publish dead tree editions against a very limited future. "If you're interested in the future of print," author Jessica Penn blogs, " you will need to inspire buyers with something more than they can get in an ebook i.e. it needs to be more than the content itself." Penn suggests creating highly artistic novelty editions.
As a self-publisher, the business is definitely changing and it certainly time for self-publishing to don your CEO hats and start examining the landscape. With e-Readers, fellow authors can now sell their titles for considerably less than a dead tree book and get profitable much quicker than when they print. I've personally found that when I print books, my overhead costs me $5 to $7 per book, before I'm able to make a profit. In a dead tree world, that's not bad. But this is fast becoming a ebook world. It's now next to nothing to produce and distribute content and it's going to get cheaper.
I may be wrong, but I believe that in the next few years, less and less competitive until it rarely makes sense to do so.
Personally, I'm readying for the transition and I'm all the more happier for it. The ease of downloading ebooks has made it easier or me to buy books I like and distribute my own titles. Now I have more time to do what authors do: write. Because of that I have two books and one novella coming out in 2011.
Many say that they love books too much to let them go. But the numbers don't lie. Amazon is proving that there is huge market for people willing to create and market their stories as ebooks.
