Author Reveals Kindle Book Sales

People have been wondering about actual sales of e-books on the Kindle. JA Konrath was kind enough to do this in significant detail. A few things jump out:

• His publisher released a couple of novels. One was at $1.99 each and sold over 10,000 copies in a month. But publishers get 35% of the sale, which would be around $7000. So you can figure that the author's take would be between roughly $700 and $1000. Another title was listed for free. As Konrath is releasing some out-of-print books at very low prices to encourage more readers and is focusing on copies moved, not profit, it sounds as though the publisher did the same.


• The publisher actually promoted the books on Amazon, which means that the net for it is likely next to nothing, reinforcing the "get audience members" view.


• As previously mentioned, Konrath is selling some of his out-of-print titles, earning $2781.35 in just over two months.


• From the little price testing that he's done, at least on the low end there doesn't seem to be a lot of sensitivity, and I get the sense that charing a few dollars per title might work.


• With the way things work, for self-sold work, authors set the price and Amazon pays 35% of that, and then might further discount. So raising the price increases your take per copy, and even then Amazon might sell at a lower price to move more units. Effectively, you end up getting a bigger chunk of what the company actually takes in.


• Genre seems to trump the strength of the work's listed description, which to me makes sense. To specify genre is to effectively describe the size of the potential audience. Even a killer description of a book of poetry is going to be limited to attracting people who would buy poetry.


• Some authors who have never traditionally published are doing as well or better than Konrath, who has had seven book in print.


• Publisher releases "vastly" outsell author releases, because the publisher can get better placement from Amazon.


• Being active in the Kindle and Amazon social network features and in newsletters seems to be important to success.

If you're a book author, don't depend on this summary and do read his blog entry, becuase there are other things to learn from it.