Excerpted from an article by Sig Ueland
Ebook sales will be $9.7 billion in 2016, more than three times this year’s $3.2 billion in sales, according to a recent report by Juniper Research. Online publishers and ebook distributors offer a growing opportunity to authors and small publishers, as well as affiliate marketers.
Here is a list of ebook publishing resources.
Ebook Stores
Amazon Kindle Store. The Amazon Kindle Store lists over one million digital titles. It supports Portable Document Format (PDF), Amazon’s Kindle Format (AZW), and Mobipocket (MOBI). To publish books in the Kindle Store, access the Kindle Direct Publishing site. Royalty rates are 70 percent for titles priced between $2.99 and $9.99 that are at least 20 percent lower than the lowest list price for the title’s print version. For other prices, the royalty rate is 35 percent. Affiliates earn up to 15 percent commissions.
Barnes & Noble Nook Books. Nook Books offers over 2.5 million titles. It supports Epub Format (EPUB) and PDF. To publish in the Barnes & Noble store, access its PubIt! site. Royalty rates are 65 percent for titles priced between $2.99 and $9.99. For other prices, the royalty rate is 40 percent. Affiliates earn 6 percent commissions.
Apple iBookstore. The Apple iBookstore lists over 700,000 titles. It supports all formats. To publish in the iBookstore, access the requirements and application. The royalty rate is 70 percent. Apple does not pay publishers until they meet payment requirements and earning thresholds, which vary by territory. Small publishers may get paid faster using an ebook aggregator.
Sony Reader Store. The Sony Reader Store lists over 1.2 million titles. It supports the ePub and PDF formats. The Reader Store does not allow independent authors to publish directly. Authors and small publishers must go through an aggregator such as Smashwords. If you publish to Sony using Smashwords, your royalty will be 60 percent.
Kobo. Kobo lists over 2.3 million titles and focuses on mobile devices including cell phones. It supports the ePub format. To publish on Kobo, authors and small publishers must use Smashwords or eBookIt. In addition to royalty rates, Kobo charges a conversion fee that starts at $29. Kobo affiliates earn up to 25 percent commissions.
Diesel eBook Store. Diesel eBook Store lists over 2.4 milliion titles. To publish on Diesel, authors and small publishers must go through Smashwords. Diesel affiliates earn 10 percent commissions.
Google eBookstore. Google eBookstore lists over 3 million titles. It has an affiliate program based on Google Affiliate Network (GAN) and Google AdSense. Authors and small publishers can submit their books by joining the Google Books Partner Program. Google will upload a PDF and add books to search results for free.
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