I found the link to this story at Joe Wikert’s Kindle Blog. It is the first article I’ve seen which describes what the Kindle experience is like from the sending, not the receiving side. Here are some excerpts. You can read the whole thing here.
The first draft of THE HOLE has been available for purchase to Amazon Kindle users since August of this year. I did this as an experiment: would an unrevised draft (a “beta book,” so to speak) both sell if priced low enough and act as a good means for gathering feedback for revision? In short, the answer is “yes” for the first and “no” for the second. What follows is my general experience of the Kindle process, from both a technical standpoint (how easy was it to setup?) and an economic (just how many did I sell, anyway?). … My goal in making the draft edition available on the Kindle was two-fold. Yes, I wanted to earn some money, and I succeeded in doing that. But I was also hoping to turn the product’s Amazon page into a forum for reader feedback. This hasn’t happened. I’ve had four readers post reviews (three if you discount the one from my wife) and no one has started a thread in the book’s discussion area. I’m not too upset by this, as it’s wonderful enough that people are actually buying and reading the book. In the future, though, I’ll simply direct all feedback to my website. Publishing to the Kindle has been—and continues to be—worthwhile. I will certainly use it again the the future and I expect it to become a more viable income source as the number of folks out there with the device grows. Amazon has a neat product on their hands and it’s one aspiring authors should consider embracing.
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Hey Paul:
I’d agree with the author regarding his experience with trying to get feedback. For a few of our Kindle Books, we have included a link w/in the book to an online page (formatted to work w/in the Kindle experimental browser) asking for some basic feedback on the book and on the Kindle reading experience of the book. We’ve gotten nothing – and, Kindle did not make it easy to insert this kind of questionnaire into the Kindle process. Which is a shame, since interaction with readers, or between readers seems one of the more obvious possible benefits of a Kindle(or other e-reader)format book as opposed to your plain old p-books.
It’s early in the game, and hopefully we’ll soon see these kinds of reader feedback/interaction capabilities integrated into the publisher side of ebooks.
I’ve published two novels and a how-to reference book on self-publishing in both trade paperback and Kindle formats, though not as any sort of experiment or through any desire to get feedback on rough drafts.
I initially began with a deeply-discounted price on the my two Kindle novels, but through discussions with Kindle owners I learned that within reason, price point isn’t what sells the book—availability of a free excerpt and good reviews from other Kindle owners do. Nobody wants to pay more than about $9.99 for a Kindle book, and since I’m not a “name brand” author I’ve priced my novels at about half that. It took a great deal of work and time to get the heavily-illustrated how-to book published for the Kindle and therefore I feel OK about setting its price point higher.
Anyway, the process can seem daunting to someone who isn’t well-versed in HTML, but you don’t really have to know HTML to successfully publish for the Kindle. In fact, I’ve written a free, how-to guide to show other authors how to do it. The guide can be accessed at my website:
http://www.aprillhamilton.com/iaguides.html#IAGFree
And here’s a tip…Amazon seems to want most Kindle books priced no higher than $9.99, so even if you set the retail price of your book a few dollars higher, they will most likely discount it to $9.99. However, as the author/publisher, you’re entitled to a royalty of 35% of the book’s original retail price on each sale, regardless of what the book actually sold for. So I set the price on my how-to book at $12.99 and even though Amazon has kept the book ‘on sale’ for $9.99 since day one, I get 35% of $12.99 for each copy sold.
Finally, if you set your price a few dollars higher than the target price of $9.99 for the sake of the slightly higher royalty but Amazon does NOT discount it, and it seems your sales are suffering as a result, you can always change the price to $9.99 yourself. That means your royalty is 35% of $9.99 instead of 35% of some higher retail price, but the trade-off may be worthwhile if the lower price drives more sales.