The Associated Press has one on Amazon. With its limitless shelf space, Amazon has helped countless authors and small publishers earn bragging rights in the past decade, giving readers throughout the world instant access to books they might never have found.
“Book publishing at one time was clubby, and that really has changed,” Al Greco, senior researcher at the Institute for Publishing Research in Bergenfield, N.J., says
It’s still clubby…
except the club belongs to Amazon, B&N and Borders.
Amazon not clubby
The big New York publishers are clubby because it is so difficult to get a book published by them. And this may be rightly so. They can’t publish every book that comes along. But Amazon is not clubby because anyone can sell books on Amazon. Here is the process
In 8 easy steps, here is how to get your book, CD, or DVD listed on the long tail of Amazon:
1 Get an ISBN (for a book), or a UPC (for a CD or DVD). For one book it costs $125, for one CD, $55, for one DVD, $89.
2 Get a bar code based on the ISBN or UPC. Costs $10, or may be included in UPC.
3 Sign up with Amazon, $30 per year.
4 Duplicate your stuff; include the bar code on the outside.
5 Ship two copies to Amazon
6 Send cover scan
7 Track sales
8 Resgister it (optional)
I found this list of how to sell on Amazon at: http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000668.php
What You Won’t Hear From Amazon/Too Many Books
The “eight easy steps” is like the first inch of the mile you must walk to get the book into a readers hands.
OK, so anyone can write and presumably sell a book on Amazon. That much is true.
But there are several important questions to consider: 1) has the content of that ‘book’ been done before/ or done better, 2)is anybody (besides the authors friends and family) going to buy/read the book, and most importantly,3) how are you going to get people to buy the book without a major and expensive campaign to promote it? Most self-published authors don’t begin to cover their costs. It’s not enough to have Uncle Jed write a review and try to skew the Amazon rankings list in your favor.
There are too many books out there, and many good ones don’t get the attention they deserve. If you (must)write one and publish it, don’t think you’re going to sell it in adequate volume to cover your expenses. It’s a real needle in a haystack kind of thing.