Tidbits for Authors

With the book reviews and the occasional self-promotion, I sometimes forget that my main blog page is called “My Writing Life”.  So, where’s the writing news?  Right here, of course.

First, the Kindle Scout Program is dead, a program where readers nominated the books they wanted to see.  I used it once and had plans to do so again.  Not that I felt I had a great chance of winning, with its $1500 advance, 5-year renewable Kindle Press publishing contract, 50% royalty rate, all supported by Amazon marketing.  But where else can you get several hundred page visits for a soon-to-be-released book at no charge.  Of course, ‘no charge’ is one of the reasons I didn’t expect to win.

If you haven’t tried Kindle Create yet, I’d suggest you do.  There is both a beta version of an app for formatting Kindle eBooks and a beta version of a plug-in for MS Word for paperbacks.  I’ve played around with both and have generally been impressed.  If they really work out (which seems extremely likely), there goes the whole formatting line of business unless of course, you don’t want to look like every other Kindle book.

I also saw that Amazon announced that there were 1,000 Kindle Direct Publishing authors who made $100,000 in royalties last year.  Hold on, let me look.  Nope, didn’t quite make that list….

Happy writing,

BmP

Picture by mpclemens from Pleasant Hill, United States (NaNoWriMo: the home front) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]