After a bit of confusion whether or not self-publishers would be part of the Kindle Lending library, they now can be.  However, this isn’t a perfect deal for self-publishers for this reason:

When you choose KDP Select for a book, you’re committing to make the digital format of that book available exclusively through KDP. During the period of exclusivity, you cannot distribute your book digitally anywhere else, including on your website, blogs, etc. However, you can continue to distribute your book in physical format, or in any format other than digital.

On the heels of Amazon paying brick and mortar customers to not shop anywhere but Amazon, this has the whiff of Amazon trying to corner the entire ebook market. At the same time, it’s only for 90 days, not permanent inclusion.  Keep in mind that enrollment will renew unless you opt out.  Amazon is banking on authors making Amazon their single source ebook distributor, given that the bulk of sales for most people is on the Kindle.

A major advantage of the program is not necessarily the library lending process – because it’s not entirely clear how successful this will be for all writers – but it gives authors the flexibility to make their books free for 5 days.  Currently, the free process is fairly open ended and hard to control.  My novel just went free this week.  I’m not sure why exactly because it’s not free anywhere else – so Amazon isn’t price-matching another retailer.  Being able to have full control over this process is attractive.

As Writer Beware points out, the terms and conditions have some problematic language (bold added):

During this period of exclusivity, you cannot sell or distribute, or give anyone else the right to sell or distribute, your Digital Book (or content that is reasonably likely to compete commercially with your Digital Book, diminish its value, or be confused with it), in digital format in any territory where you have rights.

Couldn’t another book by the same author be considered competition?  You might think Amazon wouldn’t do that – but this is Amazon. For all the good they do for authors, they’re also trying to monopolize the ebook industry, so it is not out of the question that they might consider your other Smashwords-distributed book in competiton with the book on KDP Select. So just choosing to enable KDP Select for this book but not another does not necessarily offer protection.

Given that there have been pricing problems in the past with books being made free by accident, one could see there being a glitch where books were considered to be in competition, leading to lost revenue.  If you break the terms: “we will not owe you Royalties for that Digital Book earned through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library Program.”

In short, it’s an interesting program, and a good thing that Amazon is opening it up for all authors, but authors should also tread carefully.

The news from Engadget: Rakuten signs agreement to purchase Kobo

Gaughran writes:

Rakuten are a huge international internet services, online retail, and e-commerce company with 10,000 employees, a market capitalization of around US$10bn, and major operations in Brazil, Germany, Taiwan, China, Thailand, Indonesia, as well as, of course, their home country of Japan (where they are much stronger than Amazon’s local operation).

They also own Buy.com after purchasing them last year for $250m, bought the UK-based Play.com in September for $40m, bought the busiest e-commerce site in France last year for $270m, and have significant interests in developing markets such as Russia.

In short, they are strong where Amazon are weak. Many Asian countries, including Japan, can’t even purchase e-books from Amazon, although a Kindle Store has been rumored for both Japan and China recently.

He continues:

The international book trade is estimated at around $90bn, of which, the US is responsible for about 30%. However, exclusively measuring the trade by revenue generated can lead to analysts vastly underestimating the potential size of international e-book markets.

How much of the $90 billion international market is for English language books?  Only a percentage, but that percentage is growing yearly:

David Naggar, VP of Global Kindle Content, said Amazon has now sold millions of English-language e-books in foreign countries—twice as many it sold in 2010. And Kobo’s Michael Tamblyn, VP of content, sales and merchandising, said Kobo’s English language e-book sales to non-English-speaking countries are up 300 percent this year compared to last year.

The worldwide conversion to English is happening alongside the ebook boom – even in  Asian countries.  Still, it’s only a percentage of overall sales internationally. English self-publishers will likely to get the bulk of their sales in the UK, States, and Canada – and on Amazon. Some have had success on Kobo, but not nearly the success as the Kindle.

The Paid Content piece says that availability of ereaders and the price of ebooks from out of country outlets are the main things keeping the international ebook market from really booming.  This Kobo deal solves that.  Amazon is now in the position of playing catch-up, rather than driving the industry, as they do in the States.

This development really adds extra incentive to get a self-published book translated. And then upload that book (or books, depending on the # of languages) to Kobo, even before thinking about uploading to Amazon.  Kobo has announced its version of Amazon’s KDP, which is due to rollout in early 2012.  There’s some ambiguity whether or not this is possibly going to be their version of Amazon Encore – i.e. becoming a full-fledged publisher – but chances are Kobo KDP is somewhere in the mix, as they’re trying to take on Amazon. What could also happen is this move signals that Kobo might become to translation of indie writers what Amazon has been to scooping up successful English-language indies – that’s TBD.

At the very least, opt-in for Kobo distribution at Smashwords if you haven’t already – though there is a serious backlog for distribution between SW and Kobo. Many books are in limbo.  It may just be the case that the Kobo KDP goes live before Smashwords distributes its entire backlog.  Many self-publishers are publishing to the Kindle directly, and Smashwords for everything else.  Now it might be the case to add Kobo to the list of direct self-publishing.

The news via eBookNewser:

Smashwords is well known for Meatgrinder, its automated conversion platform. Meatgrinder is the reason why Smashwords can sell ebooks in many formats, including everything from HTML, RTF, and DOC to Epub and Kindle.

But one problem with Meatgrinder is that it doesn’t offer output that satisfies ebook design pros, many of whom think that (compared to making an eBook from scratch) it’s not easy to control the quality of the output. A lot of the pickier eBook creators (like myself) don’t like it for just that reason.

Starting in 2012, Smashwords is going to allow everyone to submit other eBook files instead of the DOC file that is used as the source for Meatgrinder. This new service will be called Smashwords Direct, and it means that an author can make a beautiful Epub and offer that as the preferred format.

For some, this is good news – it means you can get your book set to free on Amazon if you want to do a free promotional blitz.  Just set to free on Smashwords – it’ll distribute as free to other outlets, and Amazon will match that price (I’ve done this).  Trouble with this is that it can be difficult to set your book to a price again once the free term is over.  I’ve also had this issue – I’ve reset the book to a price and it’s taken months for retailers to make the change.

However, if you don’t want your book to ever be free, this could cause real damage.  In the case of the writer above, he gave away 5000 books for free before he noticed the error.  In his case, he was only selling a handful of books a day, so you can’t really say that he necessarily lost a lot of money.  I’m of the opinion (as are many who’ve commented about this) that it’s better to have the exposure of 5000 new readers then to have sales trickle in.  This story itself has gone viral in a big way, which can only help an author.

If a bestselling self-publisher ran into this issue, it would be a bigger problem, as they would have lost thousands of dollars in revenue due to Amazon’s error – roughly $20,000. As a commenter writes on a subsequent post on James Crawford’s blog, there is no real legal recourse otherwise:

If your book had stayed on sale, not free, can you guarantee without the shadow of a doubt you would have still sold 5,000+ copies of the novel in that span of time? Because if not, then there’s no case–you haven’t lost anything because you wouldn’t have made the sales to begin with. You would be forced to prove that you would have made the sales for there to be a verifiable financial loss due to Amazon’s mistake (because they did, in fact, make a mistake). But there’s no way you can prove that unless you can show that your novel’s sales were trending significantly in that direction or you had a history of sales that high.

Regardless of a writer’s popularity, it’s wrong and Amazon made a mistake, and the problem is that writers are not really protected should this ever happen again.  Amazon replied:

We’re sorry, we’re unable to pay royalties for your sales when your title was listed at $0 on our website. As per our KDP Terms and Conditions, we retain discretion over the retail price of a Kindle book.

This is from Amazon’s terms and conditions:

THE PROGRAM IS PROVIDED “AS IS.” WE WILL IN NO EVENT BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OF DATA, LOSS OF PROFITS, COST OF COVER OR OTHER SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, INDIRECT, EXEMPLARY OR RELIANCE DAMAGES ARISING FROM OR IN RELATION TO THIS AGREEMENT, OR FOR ANY EQUITABLE REMEDY OF DISGORGEMENT OR OTHERWISE, HOWEVER CAUSED AND REGARDLESS OF THEORY OF LIABILITY.

That’s the main thing they write in ALL CAPS. So basically: be aware of this because if it happens to you, you’re out of luck.

Meanwhile, another writer has a method of gaming the system to be paid 70% royalties on a 99 cent book – normally reserved for $2.99 and up. I’m not advocating this strategy, just presenting it: How to make a 70% royalty on a 99-cent Kindle ebook. His process:

1. List your book for between $2.99 and $9.99 in the KDP2. Choose the 70% royalty option
3. List your book through Smashwords for 99 cents
4. Amazon will eventually “find out” the discrepancy and start discounting your book to the Smashwords price
5. All your readers are still paying 99 cents wherever they buy your book (Amazon, Smashwords, iBookstore, etc.) but you’re making twice as much in royalties on your Kindle sales

The problem with this is if a retailer offers their own discount below 99 cents – say Kobo offers it for 89 cents – then Amazon won’t set the book for free or offer it for 88 cents, they’ll remove the book entirely because pricing a book below what you’ve set in KDP is against their terms. But also: sometimes they won’t notice the issue, as is the case with this writer. It’s a gamble, and Amazon’s pricing bot is obviously not a perfect system.

We’re still in the wild west with ebooks, so chances are issues like this will get ironed out as Amazon’s pricing bot gets more sophisticated.  The safest bet is to price books above the price you set at Amazon. Amazon won’t discount the eBook, but you also won’t run into any glitches.

There are also reports that the big six publishers are not participating – Hunger Games was released by Scholastic, and Water for Elephants by Algonquin, for example.  But what does this mean for Kindle KDP publishers?  As of now, this is up in the air.  PC Mag reports:

The company did not mention if the e-book lending program included participants from self-publishing platforms like Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) or Kindle Singles. Most e-books offered by major publishers in the Kindle store are generally priced much higher than books from self-publishers, who tend to offer their work for $0.99-$2.99 per book. Will the new program have an adverse effect on authors such as Amanda Hocking, who recently managed to sell 1 million e-books through self-publishing? And will Amazon’s move to generate interest in Amazon Prime ultimately kill the goose that laid the golden e-book egg? Only time, and consumer tastes, will tell.

The way payment works is described like this:

Amazon has worked out deals with publishers to include the book for a fixed fee while others will be paid each time it is borrowed.

If Kindle self-publishers are in the mix, it would likely be the latter arrangement.  Chances are Amazon would not want to flood the system with thousands of self-published titles because they want more people to sign up for Prime to get the service.  The selling point is that you can read Hunger Games for free, not unknown books.  One of the complaints about Netflix is that there aren’t a lot of “top flight” movies available for streaming. And Netflix has recently taken a huge hit. You could also make the argument that more titles means more selection, but it could also dilute the brand of a new and untested venture. Amazon is said to be swallowing the cost at first to prove to mainstream publishers that this is worthwhile.

It would be problematic if Amazon started releasing self-published titles for free without compensation.  If you think – well, that’s how a library works – that’s not really the case, as a library has to purchase a book before it’s lent out.

Overall, this is an inevitable development – why shouldn’t there be a Netflix for books? But if Amazon starts thinking that free publishing means free to do whatever they want, this could cause some serious problems.

Self-publishing these days is increasingly a tale of two cities.

There are established authors, like Nyree Belleville, who says she’s earned half a million dollars in the past 18 months selling direct rather than through a publisher..

Then there are new authors, like Eve Yohalem. More than a month after self-publishing, she has grossed about $100 in sales— after incurring costs of $3,400. She said she’s in no rush, though.

Mark Coker writes at Smashwords:

Last month I provided a brief update about the ScrollMotion relationship (September 19 Site Updates update below) where I linked to an interview I did at The Savvy Book Marketer. In that interview, I commented about the delays ScrollMotion faced in distributing Smashwords ebooks as apps. Despite the fact they completed thousands of apps, last week we ended the project. The app world has changed dramatically in the last few months and it no longer makes sense for either of us to continue pursuing it. They originally planned to distribute the apps to the HP TouchPad tablet (HP canceled its TouchPad tablet August 24), to the Apple app store (their partner couldn’t make this happen) and the Android store. We were holding out for Android, though they tell us there are so many devices powered by Android now that it’s really difficult (read: expensive) to make a single app look good across multiple devices. My thanks to ScrollMotion for taking a valiant stab at this interesting opportunity and investing many months of effort on our authors’ behalf, and my apologies to Smashwords authors who were looking forward to this interesting opportunity. In the next week expect to see mention of ScrollMotion removed from your Channel Manager. We and ScrollMotion have agreed to reengage discussions if they can surface a sensible opportunity in the future. Until then, I decided it’s best we make a clean break so we can focus resources on more immediate opportunities.

It was a strange partnership to begin with – because if you’re not adding a lot of extra app-like features to your book, an app won’t offer much that iBooks can’t – especially for fiction with no images.  If you’re interested in entering the app market, there are app tools available.

Interestingly, what separates comics from fiction is that you can tell on first glance if the book is worth buying. Looking at his cover (and his credits), you can clearly tell that he’s a good artist, which makes comics particularly conducive to self-publishing.

He’s written about the changes in the publishing industry in the past – The Continuing Internet Publishing Revolution:

The thinking behind publishing itself has to change. The old idea that just to have a book/comic/record etc. in print means the creator who’s name is on it does great work is no longer valid. Instead it’s the marketplace that will decide whether the content offered is worthwhile or not. The power to make the decision as to what is worth spending money on is being taken out of the hands of a third party agent/publisher and put directly into the hands of those who consume the work, i.e. the buying public.

Now he puts his new venture in these terms: Why Self-Publish?

1. A core audience to market to- I’ve been branding The MAD Blog for over five years now, and while it would hardly compare to some of the real heavyweights in comics-related sites I do get about 3500 page views a day here. That translates into a fair number of people who would probably buy a book like The Mad Art of Caricature! This is a principal part of how self-publishing works these days… cultivating an audience online and then producing a product for that audience that they would purchase.

2. Willingness to store and ship the books myself- this is a lot of organization and work, but by doing it we cut out another middleman: the distributor… at least for direct sales. That means more of the cover price ends up as profit. There are several “fulfillment” companies cropping up that service self-publishers willing to let them to this work for a percentage of the sale price, but I decided to go it on my own.

3. Amazon and other on-line retailers- One drawback to self-publishing is that your ability to market the book is limited to direct marketing to specifically targeted audiences (via forums, etc) and that takes a lot of time and work. Through retailers like Amazon you can open up your publication to the entire world, and it is only an Amazon search for “how to draw caricatures” away from a potential sale. The bad part is that Amazon buys the book from the self-publisher for 40% of cover price and I have to pay to bulk-ship to Amazon for distribution, but what’s left over is still higher than the royalties you can expect from a publisher. BTW I have not yet listed The Mad Art of Caricature! on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, but will eventually do so when direct sales have dried up.

4. Secondary/reprint publishing rights- Many publishers are recognizing that some self-published books, which generally have a very low number of copies in their initial print runs, have a value with respect to a second printing. One of the big drawbacks of self-publishing is that it is next-to-impossible to market your book to libraries, schools or brick-and-mortar stores. Publishers have been known to buy the reprint publishing rights to a self-published book to take the book into that market, which has great potential. Often the advance for reprint rights is as high or higher than the initial advance would have been, as the self-publisher is delivering a complete book with all design and production done.

About Tom Richmond

Tom did some MAD-like work for longtime MAD clone Cracked Magazine, as well as for bigger better clients like AOL Digital, the Minnesota Twins, National Geographic for Kids and many others. In 2000 Tom finally broke into MAD…In 2011 Tom became president of the National Cartoonists Society.

This story is pretty amazing.  A “publishing consultant” in Atlanta, GA ripped people off by taking their money and offering nothing in return.  At the risk of blaming the victim, I am not 100% sympathetic.  When you’re shelling out $10,000 to someone with 30 prior fraud complaints, perhaps you didn’t do your homework.  Many of the complaints leveled against self-publishing companies often fall into this category.  Of course, screw the scammers, and this guy should be arrested.

The Washington Post reports on the story in these terms: A Lesson in Self-Publishing

Self-publishing is fraught with terrors — first, you have to convince yourself you really have something worth saying; then, you have to get it down on the page, or in the computer; next, you have to cough up hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars to get the book designed and printed; and finally, you have to figure out some way to sell all those copies, or give them away, just to clear off the kitchen table so you can sit down and have a bowl of noodles.

Certainly, this is a cautionary tale and people should be careful of scam artists. But to suggest this represents self-publishing in any way seems, I don’t know, desperate to criticize self-publishing again now that it’s become legitimate. In the past, this kind of story wasn’t the anomaly – vanity presses were too expensive and often corrupt. Now that ebook publishing is free, this criticism seems ten years old.

So the steps are:

1. Email two or more links to reviews you’ve done in the past. If you don’t have a site, cut & paste reviews into your email or attach a Word document. Samples should be at least 400-500 words.

2. List the genres you’re most interested in reviewing:

Fiction: literary fiction, commercial fiction, paranormal, romance, science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, short stories, humor, young adult, kids, or fill in the blank.

Non-fiction: self-help, biography/memoir, history, politics, true crime, sports, travel, health, cookbooks, inspirational, or fill in the blank.

3. Add your preference: eBook, hardcopy, or either.

Review Criteria

1. Reviews need to be at least 500 words.

2. Please review the book in one month, and no longer than three months. After three months, the money will be returned.

3. Rate the book 1-5 stars – for distribution at sites that use star ratings.

4. Register for the site and fill in info in your About section to promote your author page or review site.

5. Provide a Paypal address (preferred) or home address for payment by check.  Payment is made once the review is submitted.

6. If you receive a query for a book you’ve already received, this is fine, but: only if you haven’t read it, and don’t submit a review you’ve already posted (this will be checked).  Reviews need to be new and original.

7. It’s encouraged that you cross-post a new review to your own site, and spread the word however possible. Please don’t cross-post to Amazon, Barnes & Noble.com, or Smashwords, as the site will be doing this (under the name SPR). Don’t cross-post to Goodreads or Library Thing because it is against their guidelines.

Note: Writers can choose for a review not to be posted & distributed after the review is completed – but you’ll still be paid.

You’re also welcome to cross-post older reviews of self-published books from your review blog (these are unpaid). Reviewers may request certain reviewers if you review a particular genre.  Submission info is here.

See here for complete instructions on submitting a review.

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