Sci-Fi, fantasy and speculative Indie Authors Review discussion
Book market
>
New Kindle Scout Program
date
newest »
newest »
Only open to US residents, it appears. And they only take new books. I imagine this will be pretty controversial; they only provide a 50% royalty, down from their usual 70%. And they are going head-to-head with trad. pub. in calling themselves a publisher. Interesting to note that they take ebook and audiobook rights, but authors retain the print rights. I suppose my biggest concern is that it further degrades the reputation of self-published books. Up to now, Amazon have seemed to be on our side, in some sense.
Richard, why do you think is degrades self-published books? I don't necessarily disagree, I'm just curious. Amazon has their yearly contest for books where they give an advance and sell them. This seems like an off-shoot or replacement for that as the format is very similar.
Mod
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_P...
Mod
Hi Jamie, Christina. I wasn't aware of that, no. It's a complicated scene, isn't it?
I've submitted a book to Kindle Scout. You may need a large number of people to vote, which I don't have. If Amazon doesn't want it, I'll self publish early in 2015. I don't see that it has made much difference to my current books.
You can read the first two chapters at https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/1PP0...
Stan wrote: "Kindle has a new program called Kindle Scout --Science fiction is one of the genres they accept. You can submit a book. After Kindle evaluates the content, cover, etc. they place it up on the Kindl..."I voted for your book.
You can look at mine - more scifi with fantasy.https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/1PP0...
I looked into it, but I feel that if your book is good enough, you could probably do better on your own. Assuming you put your book on sale for $3.99, you'd have to sell 538 books to make the $1500 advance money--which isn't a huge number to sell. Maybe if you believe you're not going to make it past that number on your own? It might be good to try for single titles, perhaps, where you don't get that compounding effect each time you release a new book in a series.I have no idea the number I'm going to sell, but I put a lot of work into the cover, the editing, etc. I'd like to reap the full benefits of that.
Best of luck to you, Aurora and Stan!
I understand the trade-offs when it comes to royalties, but if you tried marketing your own self-published books, you understand the need for reach. Sure, you CAN do better, but I wasn't looking at the $1500 but at the potential eyes that would be exposed to the book.
Stan wrote: "I understand the trade-offs when it comes to royalties, but if you tried marketing your own self-published books, you understand the need for reach. Sure, you CAN do better, but I wasn't looking at..."I agree. The publicity would be good. I've also published a short side story in the hope of generating interest in advance.
I should mention that the author retains the right to a print edition. So, if the ebook does well, there's a chance to recoup some money by self-publishing the print edition.
Lots of luck with that Stan. I sell negligible print copies - the price differential is too high, I guess.
I just found out that Kindle uses votes as ONE criteria. In effect, they look at leading vote getters but then read the books and evaluate them. So, probably being one of the top 3 or 4 is just a starting point. Readers can nominate up to three books.
while interesting, i tend to write series... will shelf for later tho...
http://goo.gl/E0I8Dz