Publishing a Kindle Book

I sent out my novel MetaGame out to a few publishers but it will be months before I hear from them, if ever. And so being impatient to get the book into reader hands, even if only a few, I decided to publish the book as a Kindle ebook.

The beauty of this is that it's free for the author, is relatively painless to do, and gets your book into the Kindle store for people to buy. Anyone can publish a kindle book. If you have text that you think is worth paying for, from a short story about your creepy uncle to a "how-to" article on collecting fat porcelain dolls, you can publish that puppy on Kindle! It will take you an hour or two to do it and you can get going here.

You decide how much to charge for your content. Anything from $0.99 to $200. I tried to give my book away for free but Amazon.com (who owns Kindle and the Kindle store) required a minimum charge of $0.99. This makes sense since Amazon take 65% of the proceeds and 65% of nothing is, of course, still nothing. Not to say that there aren't some free books in the Kindle Store but these seem to be largely coming from publishers who want to promote a series of books by giving one of them away for free. These publishers seem to be making some backdoor deal with Amazon to get the book up there free.

Anyway, I charged the lowest I could which was $0.99.

If you plan to publish on Kindle, a few notes from my experience:

• It takes days for your book to fully integrate into the Kindle store. You may get a message saying it will take an hour or two for your book to go live. Yes, it's true that it takes that long for it to be available to purchase but it takes days (up to a month in one case I heard of) to get everything up including your book description as well as your book being indexed into their search engine. Bottom line is that the Kindle ebook submission software is flaky so don't panic. It will work itself out eventually… Hopefully.
  
• Just because your book is up there doesn't mean anyone will find it. You are still on the hook for promoting your book. I tried to find my book by just browsing through the genre and could not find it. The only way I could find my book at all was to search on the exact title "MetaGame" or my full name, both of which are very improbable search terms. Despite this, I've been getting about a sale a day since I published it a few days back. I have no idea how this trickle of sales is happening.
  
• Test the crap out of your ebook before and after you publish. There is a Kindle simulator that you can use to test before you publish. I don't own a Kindle so after I published, I asked a friend who had an IPhone to buy the Kindle book so I could test it. In addition to the Kindle, you can read Kindle books on an IPhone once you've downloaded the Kindle Reader IPhone application.
  
• Search the Kindle publisher forums. They're actually pretty good and the community is quite active.