Amazon's Terms Not Such a Great Deal for Self Pubbers

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Authors shouldn't have to pay for 3G delivery; Amazon should. After all, they charge an extra $50 for 3G models.

Well really it's the readers who pay it because it's all built into the price you charge for them. But it would need to be a very large ebook to come anywhere near the 15% royalty you would get from letting someone else upload it.

[heySkippy]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

What kind of decently formatted book could possibly take 120MB?

One with 230 pictures & maps at 2048x1536 resolution.

It's an iPad-only offering at this time, but I've been looking for a way to port it to KF8. Maybe it's not worth the bother given this info.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by heySkippy

My book is 120 MB, and that's as small as it gets. Selling for $2.99 at the Apple store, what would that cost me if I made a version for Amazon?

Sell = $2.99
70% Royalty = $2.09
Delivery Charge = 120MB @ $0.15/MB = $18.00

You'll owe Amazon $15.91 for every book sold. Go for it.

[MikeB1972]

Originally Posted by heySkippy

One with 230 pictures & maps at 2048x1536 resolution.

It's an iPad-only offering at this time, but I've been looking for a way to port it to KF8. Maybe it's not worth the bother given this info.

Scale the images to 800x600 for a kindle version, that'll cut down the filesize a lot and it will give you max res on a kindle/max width on a fire, so there shouldn't be any noticable difference for the end user.

Karl Pilkington's An Idiot Abroad has about the same number of pics and weighs in at about 15mb for an ePub 13.5mb for a kindle book.

Still won't be making you any money though

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

Scale the images to 800x600 for a kindle version, that'll cut down the filesize a lot and it will give you max res on a kindle/max width on a fire, so there shouldn't be any noticable difference for the end user.

Karl Pilkington's An Idiot Abroad has about the same number of pics and weighs in at about 15mb for an ePub 13.5mb for a kindle book.

Still won't be making you any money though

800 x 600 is full screen, something you won't get for anything other than the cover image (which most people will never see anyway). So really you could drop down to a max of 500 pixels width and nobody would know any different. You could also make them greyscale for a standard Kindle, and maybe have a separate colour version at a higher price?

[wannabee]

Originally Posted by heySkippy

One with 230 pictures & maps at 2048x1536 resolution.

It's an iPad-only offering at this time, but I've been looking for a way to port it to KF8. Maybe it's not worth the bother given this info.

A suggestion: Use thumbnails that link to your own website that gives them a choice of jpeg or PDF hi res images. 230 images is a hell of a lot. Maybe you can have two versions like when you rent movies. The HD version is 50 cents more on iTunes.

[terminalveracity]

After looking into putting my own little book on Amazon, it's clear that this newbie author simply didn't bother to read the instructions. Amazon has 2 basic royalty tiers: 35% and 70%. The 35% rate includes delivery while the 70% doesn't. Amazon even has a handy calculator that the author must have seen before he signed on with Amazon.

Here's an example

[J. Strnad]

The percentages only add up to 97%, so there are rounding errors involved, but the bottom line is:

Nook: $19.50 income
iBooks: $23.10
PDF: $333.00
Amazon: $1116.90

Delivery costs, schmelivery costs. Obviously Amazon's shopping experience is delivering a lot more service than anybody else's, and they're putting more than 3x the $$ in his pocket as the next closest competitor (his own website). Amazon vs the other retailers...it isn't even close.

So if he would follow the suggestions above for shrinking his file size, he'd find himself doing quite well indeed at Amazon.

[Top100EbooksRank]

Originally Posted by J. Strnad

The percentages only add up to 97%, so there are rounding errors involved, but the bottom line is:

Nook: $19.50 income
iBooks: $23.10
PDF: $333.00
Amazon: $1116.90

Delivery costs, schmelivery costs. Obviously Amazon's shopping experience is delivering a lot more service than anybody else's, and they're putting more than 3x the $$ in his pocket as the next closest competitor (his own website). Amazon vs the other retailers...it isn't even close.

So if he would follow the suggestions above for shrinking his file size, he'd find himself doing quite well indeed at Amazon.

He wised up and shrink it down to

2612 KB

So the new delivery fee is 2.6 MB x $0.15 = $0.39 instead of $2.58

So he get 70% royalties minus the delivery charge of $0.39.