Kindle Fire tablets are Android devices, with glowing LED color touchscreens. You can run any Android app on a Kindle Fire, but they don’t have the Google Play Store, so you have to submit your Android apps to the Amazon AppStore for Android.
E-Ink Kindles are usually monochrome screens that don’t support animations. E-Ink only uses battery when changing the screen contents. Many E-Ink Kindles have no touch screen at all, but just page-turn physical buttons. E-Ink Kindles briefly supported an app store, but they closed it down in 2012.
Actually you can publish through Amazon without being in Kindle Select (meaning you are able to sell the book elsewhere), and still get the 70% royalties! If you’re in Kindle Select, you get paid per page read of your book (and the amount varies per month, I think? I don’t know the details of KS at all).
To everyone: If you want to get detailed info about a huge range of static fiction publishing/writing scenarios happening right now (writing full-time, part-time, working with publishers, all genres, fiction and non-fiction, publishing on Amazon, having other jobs, making writing pay for everything, how publishers work, a prolific model, a non-prolific model) I tell you – listen to the Write Now With Scrivener podcast.
They have one writer per episode who usually tells you a ton about their particular scenario. The writers are from all areas and levels. I have not learned more about real publishing stuff from any other source.
It’s 20-30 minutes per episode. Depending on the author, either the second half or last third of the podcast is about their experience with the Scrivener app itself. Even if you don’t use Scrivener or never plan to, the rest is gold, and also very interesting for craft.
Have a look at this roster of 34 episodes to date:
If this is possible, I would love to know how to do it.
You’re speaking of Kindle Unlimited, where readers pay a monthly fee for buffet-style book reading. (Think Netflix for books.) If there’s a way to enroll a book in KU without enrolling in KS, I’m unaware of it. However, a KS book does not have to enroll in KU. (More details on KU here.)
With KU, Amazon allocates a pot of money each month that’s divvied up to authors based on page reads. High-performing authors are awarded a bonus. The pot is regularly in the $45M+ range, and the bonus pot reaches well over $1M.
Scrivener is an excellent and versatile writing tool. It reminds of an app called Wordbook from back in the 90s. Scrivener is well worth the one time purchase cost. IMHO
I wasn’t aware of their Write Now episodes. Thanks for the tip.
Basic Amazon publishing is called Kindle Direct Publishing and doesn’t require Kindle Select enrollment. From their page:
Am I able to use KDP for content currently published elsewhere?
Yes, if you own the rights to your book you can publish using KDP if it has previously been published elsewhere.
…
The only circumstance in which your book cannot be sold on other platforms is if you enroll your eBook in KDP Select, which makes it exclusive to Amazon. For more information on this, visit our KDP Select page.
An author I follow that publishes on Kindle Unlimited once indicated on her blog that she makes several cents per page read. ??? If so, that wouldn’t be a bad income for a 2-300 page book read by a number of regular readers.
It’s a popularity contest. If you write popular, pulp books, be it romance or adventure, then you can make a good income. If you, like me, write niche subjects, such as Fun Games with Your Japanese Abacus, then it’ll be less. So, as long as you can pay attention to the market, you’ll be fine.
Another thing you want to check out is Kindle Vella program. This is good for serial based stories. You post a few pages every day, or a chapter a week. My experience reading them is they’re low quality. I do follow some serialized stories, but on the web, not on Kindle.
OMG, I’m horribly embarrassed. You’re right. I’m wrong. It’s been so long since I’ve messed with those KDP switches and dials, I mixed up what was connected to what.
Yes, you can get 70% royalties without joining Kindle Select. The trick is that the book must be priced at $2.99 or higher for that option to be available.
Kindle Select enables joining Kindle Unlimited, among other perks, in exchange for exclusivity.
Yeah, KDP is a very easy way to get ebooks onto Amazon. That’s how I’ve done things there in the past. You can sell on KDP and still make versions (even free versions) available elsewhere (such as your website); it just would bar you from also signing up that book to the KDP Select side of the service.
(Was certainly much easier than doing stuff on the Kindle than the equivalent Apple side of things. Mind you, I went through so many self-publishing hoops in the past; such as bulk buying ISBNs, phoning up the US tax office from overseas, etc. that I forget how more difficult things were a decade or so ago.)
Does KDP have something to do with CreateSpace POD? Does anybody have any experience using it? Last time I checked, there was an issue how a POD listing was listed at 0 copies available. For POD!?
That’s when I went Espresso Lite, and do it myself!
Yes, Amazon bought CreateSpace and merged it into what is now KDP. I’ve used KDP and also Lulu for print on demand. But the increased costs since the pandemic, last time I checked, have stopped a lot of my original projects being viable.