I just created entries for and uploaded two of my ebooks How to Kiss and Creatures of the Night to Amazon’s new Digital Text Platform store — and their Kindle Reader catalog. It’s a very easy-to-use interface. I mean, provided you already have content, it’s formatted, you’ve purchased your own ISBN numbers, your description text and cover art is ready, etc. Luckily I do, because I never sleep, and when I do it’s on a pile of smutty books and well-oiled Hacker Boys. Basically, you sign in and fill out the fields, upload an image and text file and then hit “publish”. The info fields are exactly what I expected from staring at Amazon book product pages, and the formats it accepts are HTML, unencrypted .mobi eBook files, Microsoft Word (.doc), plain text (.txt) and Adobe PDF. The whole process is a *lot* like YouTube — you could easily call it YouTube for ebooks. After you upload, it takes a swift minute to convert it to a Kindle Reader file, which you can then preview, and it totally interprets your formatting. Like YouTube, it doesn’t seem to be a very high-quality, quick file conversion. But my books looked decent; now I just wait 12 hours, supposedly for Amazon to be “integrating your content into the Amazon.com global catalog, i.e. creating a product detail page, addition of content Amazon’s search index and the Amazon Kindle categories, etc.”
I wonder if it’s also to screen for content, but I guess I’ll find out. Or not; I didn’t upload anything out-of-control racy. But it’s a total rip for publishers — you only get 35% of the sale price, and in the fine print Amazon reserves the right to determine the final sale price. I guess it’s a trade-off if writers and publishers get enough exposure and increased sales to make up for being on the fuzzy end of the lollipop, royalty-wise. And it’s good if people want the content just for the Kindle platform. But to me it’s all an experiment. I figure if people want to ensure their dollars go directly to me and the authors I work with, they’ll buy the books directly from my DRM-free ebook/audiobook site.
We’ll see what happens! I’ll update this post if and when the Amazon listings go live so you can see what it all ends up looking like.
Update: All systems are go and the books are live in Kindle editions! They still haven’t added my product description, but it looks good so far and they are using the prices I set. Check out the product pages for How to Kiss and Creatures of the Night.
