Guide to Publishing a Kindle Book

[vwl]

I found this story that might help writers interested in publishing their books through Amazon. The article is clear, and the process seems easy.

http://michaelhyatt.com/kindle-publishing-success.html

[Chris James]

Good article. Later on in the comments one of the authors suggests that a Kindle book is often around 10,000 words. I suggest this makes it more like a pamphlet since for most of us who write here 10,000 words is just a long chapter.

If the average reading time is 2 hours (as they suggest) I doubt if anything I write will adapt well to Kindle, unless it is very short story.

Does anyone see such a short published piece feasible? 10,000 words is just a taste and perhaps at $2.99 that is all the reader deserves.

But I will not offer a cheer for the demise of longer books in eBook format. After all you buy the digital copy and it remains yours forever (I hope). Books need to be more than you can read on a subway ride in your morning commute to work.

[vwl]

I see Kindle books of all sizes on sale -- up to hundreds of pages, so I'm not sure what the commenter is saying about 10,000 word books.

As I read it, the author can sell at whatever price he or she wants. True, there are some well-known authors that sell their short stories at $1.99 or $2.99 and their longer stories much higher, but nothing prevents the author from setting a lower price.

A final (optional) editor who charges obviously will have to charge more for a longer book because of the extra time for the extra pages. On the cost side, there is probably not a lot of difference between a short and a long book.

The problem for AD (an GA) authors is the revenue side, given perhaps the restricted set of potential buyers..

[Cole Parker]

I doubt any of my short stories are only 10,000 words. Chris is right: that's awfully short. By the time you've set place and mood and even started on history and plot, you've used up most of that, and we haven't even mentioned character development yet.

C

[The Pecman]

Yeah, I'm with Chris and Cole: my first novel was 120,000 words, my second was closer to 170,000, and I think the third was maybe 140,000. But I'd have no problem with the idea of selling eBooks of them for $3.95 on Amazon or iTunes.

[Nick Deverill]

Spotted this rather late.

10000 words in 2 hours is 83.333 words a minute. That is a figure that at school would have you net special attention from a school teacher since average reading speed is 250 to 300 for an adult.