For the last few years, I've felt that ebooks are the future of publishing. I was an early adopter of the first Amazon Kindle, and I've been working on and off for the last few years on a computer science textbook that I plan to publish only as an ebook. So when people started encouraging me to turn my healthcare diaries into a book, doing it for the Kindle was a no-brainer.
A year ago, bink wrote a diary that covers what a Kindle is and how to set up a KDP account; this diary will be about why I'm publishing on the Kindle and the process of getting the book ready for publication.
When choosing between publishing the book yourself using Amazon's Kindle, Apple's App Store or Reader, or similar services and going through a traditional publisher, there are several considerations:
1) Time. I started writing my book in May, with the goal of having it available before the Supreme Court ruled on the ACA. (My book doesn't deal with the ACA, except for an aside on ACOs - it's about electronic health records and the HITECH Act - but I figured having healthcare in the news might help it sell). Going the traditional route, it would have taken months to find a publisher, if I was lucky. As it is, I finished the book last weekend, finished editing and uploaded it to Amazon on Thursday, and now it's ready to go.
2) Length. I've always been a concise writer, and I don't believe in padding out a text to make it longer, which means that as a printed book mine would either be priced too high for the length, or too lower for booksellers to be interested. Selling it as a Kindle book lets me select an appropriate price point, without having to worry about printing costs.
3) Money. When selling a Kindle book, provided that you price it between $2.99 and $9.99, you get 70% of the cover price (minus a download fee of around 6 cents). This means I can sell the book for $2.99 and still make around $1.94 on each copy; the buyer pays less than he or she would for a dead tree version, and I get more. That makes me happy :-) Selling it exclusively through Amazon, at least to start, also lets me participate in the lending library for 90 days (with optional renewals); if someone borrows my book, I get paid for that as well.
Of course, traditional publishers do provide services that Amazon doesn't; in particular:
1) Promotion. These days, that's not as big of a factor, because unless you're a big name you're pretty much going to be doing your own promotion anyway.
2) Editing. So many books these days need more editing, regardless of how they were published. As it happens, I have professional experience as both a writer and an editor, and my work doesn't need a lot of editing. In this case, I wrote my book, read over it to find typos, and another Kos user with editing experience (I don't know if she wants to be named) gave it a read as well. No matter what you're doing, if you're writing for print you should always have a second person look at your work.
3) Art. People DO judge a book by its cover, so you need a good one. As many of you know, I happen to be married to a professional graphic designer, so this was an easy one :-)
4) Availability. Without being affiliated with a publisher I'd have a hard time getting into the major bookstores...but these days, just being available at Amazon is good enough. A few years ago, not having a dead tree edition would be a liability, but now Amazon sells a million Kindles a week, and you can also read Kindle books on your computer, tablet, or smartphone, so I'm not worried about this one. (Plus, as previously mentioned, having the ebook available exclusively at Amazon lets me make it available for Prime members to borrow).
So in my situation, going with an ebook was an easy choice. I wrote it using a program called Scrivener, which makes it easy to rearrange things as you go along; I then have it output to Word for proofreading, made the corrections, set it in HTML, and uploaded it to Amazon last night. This morning, it's available for download!
Shameless Plug
My book, Healthcare in the 21st Century, is about Electronic Health Records and the HITECH Act; it's similar in content to the healthcare series I've been posting. It's available to $2.99 or as a free download for Kindle owners with Prime. If you'd like to read the book but aren't able to borrow or buy it, PM me with your email address and I'll make sure you get a copy.
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