Thanks for the extra $$$ Amazon!
Two weeks ago, Barnes and Noble announced their new PubIt! Platform that allows anyone to publish their eBook and sell it through the Barnes and Noble digital distribution channel. As I said before, I think it’s a great idea.
Today, Amazon officially announced a major change to their own digital publishing service that should leave Barnes and Noble a bit worried. Authors and publishers can now use the DTP (Kindle Digital Text Platform) to earn a whopping 70% in royalties for every book they sell through the Kindle platform.
Folks, this is an increase from 35% to 70% for anyone who wants to use Amazon’s service to self-publish their writings in eBook format. Nearly double the profit. Frankly, that’s a major difference here. It’s the difference between earning $3.15 and $$6.25 on an eBook you sell for $8.99.
However, delivery costs are still an additional $0.15/MB. And with the median file size being 368KB, these additional fees should come out to somewhere around $0.06 per unit. Oh no… 6 cents!
And according to Amazon, this 70% royalty option is just one of the two options. The good citizens over at Amazon want you to know that there’s still the original 35% option, so you can choose to earn less money anytime you want. That’s right folks, you can choose to earn less money! Aren’t the guys at Amazon swell?
Aside from that, a few other details were mentioned regarding this new program. The 70 percent royalty option is only available if the following criteria are all met:
• List price must be between $2.99 and $9.99.
• List price must be at least 20% below the lowest list price for the physical book.
• The title is made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights.
• The title will be included in a broad set of features in the Kindle Store, such as text-to-speech. This list of features will grow over time as Amazon continues to add more functionality to Kindle and the Kindle Store.
• Books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices.
• In-copyright works only and not available if published before 1923 (public domain works)
• Books sold toUS customers only
This is definitely going to create some excitement for independent publishers and authors. The model seems very reasonable and I don’t see Barnes and Noble being able to match this royalty option. In fact, it’s kind of unfortunate because Barnes and Noble had just recently announced their PubIt! platform and no later than 2 weeks, Amazon drops this bomb on them.
It really is turning into a bloodbath here between these two book selling giants.
