Again me with a question I know about Lulu.com and CafePress for self-publishing ebooks, as well as PayLoadz for selling this and any other kind of digital content, but I just found that you can also self-publish at Amazon's website. Check it out: amazon.com/gp/seller-account/mm-summary-page.html/102-9259225-3219330?ie=UTF8&topic=200260520 Question, has anyone tried this? If so, I would like to hear from your experience using this service, if you please
As far as I know (this was true in February) you need an ISBN number to publish through Amazon. We submitted our e-book to Amazon but there have been no results. We have not sold anything through that channel, though we never promoted the link to buy it that way after the first few days. Also, these editions require the Kindle reader, which is about 360 dollars. Unless the customer has Kindle, they can't read it. My biggest complaint is that you have to submit it in a proprietary format...and although they have a converter, you can't see the results without buying it. I don't have a Kindle and don't expect to buy one, so I have no idea what the digital edition looks like or if all the pages are there.
Oh, that sounds like pretty annoying if compared with other self-publishing websites, plus those extra costs resulting from the registration of the ISBN number and the purchase of that reader, probably affordable for a wealthy writer, but no for a starter Thanks a lot for your input
I was certainly disappointed. However, the ISBN # also allows submission to Google Books, which also hasn't brought much return. ISBN is $50 and the main benefit is these two channels.
Only those two channels? Considering the size of the World Wide Web, it's not only disappointing but also frustrating!
ISBN is intended for physical book sales and brick-and-mortar distribution. I'm sure there are other programs which require an ISBN, but I haven't run across them.
Putting your book on Amazon adds another way for people to purchase your book (or the only way if you prefer). It's not a method for getting sales, because no one is actually looking for your book. When you release a book, you should do a PR campaign (or press release at least) and the normal marketing actions you would if you were selling the book at any other virtual location. Also, BookSurge, is part of Amazon, so you don't need to go outside of the system to get your book on Amazon. I haven't used the service yet, just read over it some. Before self-publishing, ask yourself why you're doing it.
After your comments I believe that, overtime, it might worth at some point of a writing career when a physical book could be a reality, but not suitable for eBook publishing at all. Curiously, after exchanging today some comments on this topic with my offline friends, one of them told me that his brother has a website that Amazon indexed as a writing resource and Amazon assigned it an ISBN number on its own since nobody paid for it, but the website is certinaly displayed with its ISBN. I know that such website is based on a real life experience mixing real and historic facts with fiction and , the guy has been writing the story for years, sort of plotting building the website backstage. Sadly my friend's brother, thanks to his sponsorship most of us around him are living in this country, has a clause that prevent us from posting the name or URL of his website after a personal issue he faced with someone past year. Here the question would be, if Amazon ignores the fact so, how were they able to figure out that site is going to be one day a book and how or why it assigned it an ISBN just because