Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing

It was only a matter of time before Amazon entered the digital publishing marketplace, first with the manufacture of their Kindle ebook reader and then later with their own online publishing and ebook distribution system.

While the Kindle ebook reader and their Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) system has received a lot of good press, the publishing system is not without its problems.

KDP is a reasonably easy to use system, and the publishing process itself is relatively quick and painless. There are, however, issues with manuscript formatting and manuscript display on the Kindle that make it a cumbersome process to format and publish the best looking ebook possible.

While most of these online publishing systems are at their root based on HTML, most people are not used to editing book manuscripts in HTML.

Attempting to import and convert a beautifully laid out Microsoft Word document will not necessarily produce an equally well formatted Kindle ebook file. In fact, the Kindle dislikes common Word formatting such as headers and footers, and the auto-generated table of contents will not work either. More so, Kindle ebooks do not have page breaks or page numbers -- the manuscript is merely streamed one screen at a time. No doubt, for most authors, this will be an iterative process.

I advise you to download the Kindle Previewer utility so you test your document and view it within the Kindle interface.

Assuming you can get past the complexities of formatting your ebook's manuscript for the Kindle platform, you will then need to create a free account and upload your cover image and formatted ebook file. That's the easy part.

There are only two screens of information that need to be filled out; however, it is easy to miss an important field. No worries, the KDP system will not let you save or exit the process without reminding you what's missing.

You will need to consider two important questions: how much do you want to sell your ebook for and how much of a royalty do you want to earn on a sale.

There are two schools of thought -- first, sell low and make it up on volume like iPhone apps, and second, sell it high so you can become a best selling multi-millionaire dollar author. Both are unrealistic. It is far more realistic to price similar print books and then price yours somewhat lower. No doubt, subject matter and demand play a large role in pricing, and you may need to lower your price several times as part of your test marketing.

Amazon also offers you participation in the KDP Select Fund. Essentially, you allow your ebook to be downloaded and borrowed freely with no due dates. In return, you earn a small percentage of a fund. Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me either.

The KDP system offers online reporting so you can see how many copies of your ebook have been sold and how much money you have earned. You'll also see they allow refunds of your ebooks. Yeah, that means someone can buy your ebook, read it, and then request a refund.

If you are looking for speed to market, you may also be dissatisfied to learn that the your ebook does not get published immediately. While the upload process is automated, apparently real people review everything before a title is allowed to go live. Mine was delayed by a few days.

It is real important to remember that ebooks and print books do not sell themselves and you must promote yourself as the author and promote your ebooks agressively if you have hopes of earning a living. With millions of ebooks available for the Kindle platform, you are a needle in a haystack full of needles.

You also need to be on guard about potential copyright infringement and intellectual property theft. When I tried to publish one ebook, I was denied by Amazon on the grounds that it duplicated a title already available on Amazon. Apparently, someone was reselling my ebook already. I had to prove ownership and jump through hurdles before they corrected the situation -- without any renumeration I might add.

So, in my opinion, Amazon has a long way to go, and you should approach their KDP system carefully and realistically. Click here for more information.