Kindle only

[murraypaul]

And the last dozen or so posts probably explain why authors only bother to upload to Amazon. You can create one version, deal with one company, and reach the majority of the customer base. (And before the wolf jumps up and down, when you take into account Kindles, iThings, Androids and so on, you are reaching a majority of the customer base)
To reach the rest? Well you can convert your already-written html into a Word doc and hopes it comes out of a black box conversion process back to html looking ok, or you can submit to multiple different stores, all with a slightly different process, and handle money coming in from all different quarters, dealing with the tax hassles and so on.
Is it any wonder people who are more interested in actually just writing a book would choose to stick with the simple process?

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The problem is though that you cannot do some things that were done in the hand crafted version via the meatgrinder. Can you have different fonts via the meatgrinder like say serif, sans-serif, & monosapce? I think Sunborn lends itself to font changes very nicely.

The Meatgrinder allows serif, sans serif & monospace. I don't think it allows embedded fonts, but it allows other ones, which will only work right if the receiving machine has them.

It *doesn't* allow tables of any sort (presumably, because auto-conversion from Word would be nightmarish), nor drop-caps or other css-related functions that aren't supported in .pdb and .mobi formats. Hand-coded .epubs can be a lot more complicated (and elegant) than the Meatgrinder can produce--but the number of authors willing to learn to hand-code is much, much lower than the number willing to follow a style guide.

Following the style guide produces decent .epub files, equivalent in quality to pulp mass-market paperbacks. Nothing fancy, but nice readable text. *Kinda-sorta* following the style guide, or ignoring it, produces mediocre to lousy .epub files.

While I'd love to see SW upgrade the Meatgrinder to allow more versatility, and/or allow author-submitted ebook formats, I'd rather they spent their time fixing the search engine, allowing sorting by price, changing the personal library so it's not one long chronological list, and so on.

The Meatgrinder works acceptably well for the vast majority of readers; if you don't like it, you are, of course, free not to get books from Smashwords.

[murraypaul]

From Konrath's blog:

276,112

Two hundred and seventy-six thousand, one hundred and eleven.

That's how many self-pubbed books I've sold.

About 245k of these on Kindle.

20k on Smashwords,

5k on Createspace,

The rest divvied up among Nook, OverDrive, and my website.

Would you bother with anything but Kindle?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

Would you bother with anything but Kindle?

Depends on whether or not you believe going the extra mile is worth it or not. If you're just playing the numbers game... then yes, Amazon would probably be enough. Motivation and willingness to please tend to vary among humans, though.

[DMB]

It seems to be a business decision whether to offer an ebook in multiple formats or not. Deciding, for whatever reason, not to sell through Amazon will mean cutting oneself off from a large chunk of the market.And sometimes the effort involved in doing more than going with the major retailer may not be repaid.

An analogy: (and it is a totally different situation of course) In the 1970s I was working for a start-up company that expanded fairly rapidly. Anyone who has done that sort of thing will know that the early stages, when you don't even have well-defined departments, are among the most difficult. I was wearing several hats, and one of them was recruiter of graduate trainees. The first year I circulated all the then existing British universities in an attempt to recruit out first trainees. I got a large response, but the overall quality was poor and sifting through so many applications took up too much of my very limited time.

The next year, I sent a circular only to those universities with the best academic reputations. This cut down a great deal of the dross and the waste of my time -- and my time was money. It could be argued that it was unfair to graduates of the universities I didn't circulate, and I don't deny that there might have been some excellent people there. But from the POV of efficient use of resources (my time) it helped the business. I was able to recruit some excellent trainees.

A couple of years later, the company had grown quite a bit, we had defined departments for many things and I was wearing fewer hats. I was even officially head of a department. But I was still lumbered with graduate recruitment and I'm afraid at this stage I simplified the job even more by requiring a good degree from Oxford or Cambridge. Terribly unfair on all the other potential recruits who knew nothing about the vacancies, but from the POV of the company we were still getting excellent recruits and it wasn't taking up too much of my time.

[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

Would you bother with anything but Kindle?

But not everyone has the same figures. I've seen sales figures from O'Reilly and the like that show things very differently. Either do research to see if your particular book sells well with the one store and hope you're right, or try selling at multiple places and hedge your bets that way.

[OneandonlyDoc]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

From Konrath's blog:

Would you bother with anything but Kindle?

Point of fact, Konrath is smart enough to diversify into Epub beyond just Kindle's proprietary format. Even at a 70-80% cut of a 99-cent ebook, if he didn't branch out beyond Amazon, he'd be missing out on approximately $18711 (that's the math done at 70% of a 99 cent ebook).

I don't know about you, but I don't see that as pocket change. And I don't see the 27k copies he wouldn't have reached readers with (if he had only gone with Amazon) as small peanuts.

As a writer, I think of how to reach the broadest audience. As an entrepreneur, I have to think about how to minimize the amount of time I spend worrying about the business end of things while still maximizing my gains. As a consumer (one who often gets the short end of the stick given body type, ect), I'm more than sensitive to accessibility.

It's dumb not to maximize your ability to reach an audience. We don't write only to make money. We write because we want to do it and we want to share a story. That's why I think it's dumb to lock oneself only into Amazon when you've got other options that aren't mutually exclusive.

Just my two cents.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by OneandonlyDoc

Point of fact, Konrath is smart enough to diversify into Epub beyond just Kindle's proprietary format. Even at a 70-80% cut of a 99-cent ebook, if he didn't branch out beyond Amazon, he'd be missing out on approximately $18711 (that's the math done at 70% of a 99 cent ebook).

I don't know about you, but I don't see that as pocket change. And I don't see the 27k copies he wouldn't have reached readers with (if he had only gone with Amazon) as small peanuts.

At the volume he is selling at, yes it probably is worth adding the lower volume channels. But now you are a much lesser known author, selling only 1% of the volume that he is.

You get 90% of your sales through Amazon. How much of your time and effort is it worth spending on the other 10% of the market? For which, on your calculations, you would receive $187. (Before taxes and administration costs)

How about if you sell 5% as many books as him. Is it worth the time and effort for $935?

[OneandonlyDoc]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

At the volume he is selling at, yes it probably is worth adding the lower volume channels. But now you are a much lesser known author, selling only 1% of the volume that he is.

You get 90% of your sales through Amazon. How much of your time and effort is it worth spending on the other 10% of the market? For which, on your calculations, you would receive $187. (Before taxes and administration costs)

How about if you sell 5% as many books as him. Is it worth the time and effort for $935?

Without a doubt. It's as much about audience as it is about money. That's the point I've been trying to make throughout the thread.

[DreamWriter]

It's not that authors/publishers don't provide ePub (and other formats) because they want to exclude readers. It just isn't as simple as offering an e-book in Kindle format. Amazon makes the process very easy. Some of the other distributors certainly don't!

I started a separate thread asking where ePub users purchase their books. The answers so far:

• Barnes & Noble
• Kobo
• Baen
• Feedbooks
• Fictionwise
• Smashwords

Nobody's mentioned the Sony store yet. So then, the question becomes, which outlet do I choose? Someone's going to feel left out because I won't be including all outlets.

For my husband's Kindle book, I created a .prc file from HTML and submitted that to Amazon for the DRM-free Kindle version. It turned out great. But I'm going to have to tweak the HTML for ePub. For me, there will be a learning curve, as I've never created an ePub before. And I don't have a device to test it on. Smashwords only accepts MS Word files. Well, my MS Word file is not "clean," so I would have to completely re-do that according to their guidelines. That would be very time-consuming. Most authors report very few sales from Smashwords directly. It may be worth it just to get into some of the other outlets from there (such as Apple), but that is a very small share of the market. PubIt, at Barnes & Noble, seems author-friendly. Kobo, not so much.

Whether you like the company or not, Amazon is the Big One. They will be coming out with new Kindle(s) and a tablet soon. They already have a large e-book market share, and I think their share is going to increase tremendously in the months to come. You don't even need a Kindle device to read their e-books. There are free Kindle apps for PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, and Android, as well at the new web browser-based Kindle Cloud Reader.

I realize that not everyone is familiar with Calibre or wants to bother with it, but it is quite easy to convert between formats, especially if the file is DRM-free. I don't hate on ePub, but the choices really aren't as straightforward as some think.

[ProfCrash]

If BN is easy to use, why not sell it at Amazon and BN?

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

If BN is easy to use, why not sell it at Amazon and BN?

Do B&N allow non-DRM sales for self-pub authors?
If not then you aren't adding much of market, as not many devices can read B&N DRM'd files.

[DreamWriter]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

If BN is easy to use, why not sell it at Amazon and BN?

That is the direction that I am leaning at this point. I do hesitate because it seems that BN is very Nook-centric, so users of other ePub devices may not shop there for their e-books. And I've been told that it isn't obvious that a particular book is DRM-free. The author can mention that in the book description, but I don't think there's any way to narrow that down via search. I may consider using Smashwords for distribution to the other outlets (Apple, Sony, Kobo, and a few others).

In the case of Barnes & Noble, I'll have to re-work a lot of the HTML before submitting to PubIt, as I changed the code (and order of some sections) specifically for Kindle. The Kindle e-book "Look Inside" feature at Amazon has some quirks that I had to work around, and I also formatted the e-book in such a way that the reader gets as much of the actual text in the sample as possible. So that's going to take some work. And for Smashwords, I'm going to have to nuke the MS Word file and re-do according to their guidelines in order to get into their Premium Catalog, which will also be time-consuming.

Can anyone confirm that Barnes & Noble sells ePubs internationally?

Originally Posted by murraypaul

Do B&N allow non-DRM sales for self-pub authors?
If not then you aren't adding much of market, as not many devices can read B&N DRM'd files.

From the PubIt (BN) support page:

What is DRM?

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, which is technology that is intended to prevent unauthorized access to, distribution of, or copying of your eBook. If you choose to have DRM applied to your eBook, we will use this technology. This choice can only be made once per title and cannot be changed once selected.

That's how it works at Amazon too. Once the DRM choice is made for Kindle, you can't change your mind (without unpublishing/republishing).

[Ron.]

I think B & N is limited to the US

[DreamWriter]

Originally Posted by Ron.

I think B & N is limited to the US

Authors must have a valid U.S. Bank Account, U.S. Credit Card, and U.S. Tax ID in order to upload their e-book to Barnes & Noble's PubIt. But I noticed this in their author guidelines, which leads me to believe that e-books can be sold internationally:

Publishers who distribute their eBooks through PubIt! must have the right to do so. Select Worldwide Rights if you have the right to make your content available in all countries. If not, click United States Only or United States and Canada Only, as appropriate.

I'm confused.