US Ebook Sales Up 188% ($39.9M) in Year

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"It's one thing when Amazon says ebooks outsell hardcovers, but when a publisher says the same thing for a given title, it's of real significance."

See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/97HKdq

Ebook Bestseller Lists Coming To The New York Times And Grisham Esales Go Through The Roof

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Publishers Lunch, the US daily news digest on all things publishing, has just confirmed that the New York Times will start publishing ebook Bestseller Lists early next year.

'They earnestly promise to compile data from independent booksellers along with publishers, chain bookstores, and online retailers "among other sources."'

This news comes in the same week that John Grisham voiced his amazement at the e-sales figures of his new novel The Confession. Initially opposed to ebook versions of his novels, Grisham changed his mind after he started receiving emails from readers unhappy about not being able to buy digital versions of his novels. The Confession ebook, launched at the same time as the hardback,  achieved sales of 70,000 in the first week, about one third of the hardback total over the same period.

"The ebook sales are astonishing,' he said. "Would anybody have thought that a year ago? The future has arrived, and we're looking at it."

Major US Economic Forecaster Says Publishers Must Make Ebooks the New Default for Publishing

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PaidContent.org have just published their 5 year forecast for ebooks in the US and predict that the book business may become the most digital of all media industries.

"2010 will end with $966 million in e-books sold to consumers. By 2015, the industry will have nearly tripled to almost $3 billion, a point at which the industry will be forever altered."

Ebook UK Royalties: Amazon Kindle and Smashwords Sales

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Now that UK and overseas authors can sell their Kindle ebooks via Amazon.co.uk as well as Amazon.com we've been checking up on royalty payments and the US tax situation.

Previously payments were made to all overseas authors via US$ cheques. This is still the case with ebooks sold on .com. You'll have to pay a UK bank charge for paying the cheque in. RBS, for example, charges £7.50 per transaction.  Amazon have recently changed their criteria on issuing royalty cheques and  now no payment is made until at least $100 is owed. On request (see Smashwords FAQ link below), Smashwords will withhold payments until your US tax number comes through.

Royalties due on ebooks sold on Amazon.co.uk are paid in UK £ cheques and mailed monthly. You have to accrue at least £75 worth of royalties before a cheque is issued. Most ebook sales (at Feb 2011) are still made to the US who are 12 - 18 months ahead of Europe in adopting ebook reading.

If you haven't registered for exemption, Amazon will withhold 30% of all sales made on .com for US tax. To stop this, first apply for a US IRS Individual Taxpaper Identification Number (ITIN) by filling out form W-7: Get here.

Embassy instructions for UK residents are here.   UPDATE: Before jumping through all the hoops, try asking for an EIN (Employer Identification Number) which they may issue you with over the 'phone.

When you have accrued at least $10 sales on Smashwords, you can apply for a signed covering letter from them to produce with your documents.  Details here.

You need to provide proof of identity. "Either a valid passport (original or a notarized or certified copy); or at least two or more identity documents that are current. One must include a recent photograph. In addition to a passport, examples of acceptable documentation include: national identification card (showing photo, name, current address, date of birth and expiration date); civil birth certificate; foreign driver's license; or visa." A complete list of acceptable documentation can be found in Form W-7 instructions. It's complicated.

The best blog on this subject is Angela Stone's Quick Guide to the W-7 US Tax Form.


Post to: The United States Embassy  
24/31 Grosvenor Square
London W1A 1AE
Tel 0207-894-0476

Or go along there.  They're open Tues - Thursday 9 - 4 but don't take your mobile phone as they're not allowed inside the Embassy.

THEN when you've got your number you fill out form W8-BEN: Certificate of Foreign Status of Beneficial Owner for United States Tax Withholding. Get here.

Smashwords has its own ebook store and offers free distribution to Barnes&Noble, Apple iBooks and more. How much income you get from each Smashwords ebook sale varies. It depends on whether the sale comes through from Smashwords' own sales site (85% of cover price), from an affiliate sale (via an e-reader, 70.5%) or from Premium Catalogue sales sites like Apple iBooks (60%) and Barnes & Noble.

For a $2.99 ebook you would earn:

$2.21 from each Smashwords sale
$1.84 from each affiliate sale
$1.27 from each Premium Catalogue sale.

The payments come through on PayPal.

For a detailed guide to publishing your own ebooks see:

How To Publish An Ebook On A Budget - An Author's Guide by Stephanie Zia


Buy in the UK here

In the US here

How A Top Agent Is Handling a Self-Published Kindle Hit

Another success story from the USA:

After the usual round of rejection after rejection, novelist Amanda Hocking decided to self-publish on Kindle. Within a few months she had sales of 20,000 and a request from a Hungarian publisher to buy her foreign rights. On the back of this she got "one of the top agents on the planet", Steven Axelrod. He started selling film and territorial rights but held back on the all-important domestic rights, preferring to keep her novel as an ebook and let the momentum grow... read the full story here. 

Who's Producing the Goods - Apple iBooks or Amazon Digital?

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Apple iBooks has been going for six months now so who's winning? The iBookstore or Amazon Kindle Store?

Free Ebook - Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn With Original Illustrations

Edward Winsor Kemble (1861-1933) was working for the New York Daily Graphic and contributing to the newly-launched Life magazine when Mark Twain happened to see his drawing of a small boy being stung by a bee. He bore such a striking resemblance to the Huckleberry Finn in Twain's mind's eye that Kemble, at the age of just 23, was commissioned to illustrate the whole novel, a much-anticipated follow-up to Twain's already celebrated "Tom Sawyer".  

 

…………"Huckleberry Finn" was filmed a few years ago, and the director, the lamented William Desmond Taylor, who was mysteriously murdered in Hollywood soon after the picture was released, took a copy of the original edition and made his characters fit my drawings. I had not seen the book in years, and as my characters appeared on the screen, resembling my types so faithfully, even as to pose, my mind ran back to the lanky boy who posed for me and the pride I had felt in doing my first book." E W Kemble, The Colophon 1930

Read all of this touching memoir "Illustrating Huckleberry Finn" written by E W Kemble in February 1930.

To download this completely free beautifully illustrated ebook 

selected from the Gutenberg project go to
blackbirdebooks.com 

More on Digital Ebook Libraries and blackbirdebooks' First Number 1

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The New York Review of Books has just published a talk given at the opening of a conference at Harvard on October 1 to discuss the possibility of creating a US National Digital Library. The complexities are immense. Hats off then to The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea for getting their digital library up and running. How far behind is the rest of the UK?

Meantime, here at blackbirdebooks we've been celebrating our first chart success as Done & Dusted - The Organic Home on a Budget reached the Number 1 slot in the Amazon Kindle UK  Consumer Guides Chart.
 

Done & Dusted was featured on BBC Radio Ulster’s John Toal Show on Saturday.

You can hear the show for the next week here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00v2zq2#synopsis

William Boyd Launches Library Ebook Lending Service

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William Boyd launched Kensington & Chelsea Library's new online digital borrowing service yesterday by reading an extract from the ebook version of one of his many bestsellers, Restless.

A library representative then explained how the new free ebook lending service works. The system is run by Overdrive (which powers W H Smith ebooks). There's no downloading, instead you get your ebooks/audiofiles for 3 weeks and then they disappear. That could be annoying if you're half way through a novel and you miss the reminder email, but all stock is accessible 24/7 for ordering and re-ordering and there are no fines. The files are compatible with both Apple and Microsoft computers, iPads, iPods, mobile phones including iPhones and Blackberrys but sadly not UKebookblog's favourite ereader the Kindle. Authors' rights aren't forgotten in all of this. The library pays a lending right fee. The more digital subscribers the library gets the more goes to the authors.

The floor was then opened up for a Q&A session with William.




'Ask me anything, anything you like,' he said. UKebookblog kicked off, asking if he had an ereader himself. He doesn't. He prefers hardbacks but can see how useful ereaders are, for travellers (and literary agents) especially, and thinks the time will come when, as an Apple man through and through, he'll succumb to an iPad. He added that he didn't hold the Luddite view that ebooks would destroy 'real' books. That one will replace the other: "Velcro came in a long time ago but buttons still exist."

The inevitable how do you write question produced an interesting answer. Unlike most successful authors, he doesn't have any book deals for unwritten novels. Instead he'll spend as much time as is needed travelling and researching, creating scenes and characters and plotting everything out in his mind. Then, with no pressure on his time at all, he'll settle down and write a first draft in longhand.

This is the stage he's at now with his next novel. He wouldn't say much about it except that it's set in Vienna, 1913, just before WW1 when an extraordinary mixture of characters were living there including Hitler and Freud. He won't deliver to Bloomsbury until he's written and rewritten "50,000 times" and everything is as good as he can make it. Which of course in his case has proved to be, time and time again, nothing short of masterly.

William Boyd to Launch Kensington & Chelsea Digital Public Library

On Monday 27 September at 4pm, novelist William Boyd will launch Kensington & Chelsea's digital public library service.

That's UKebookblog's local, and favourite library of all time, so we'll be there, notepad & camera at the ready.

Still An Incredible Lack of Understanding About Ebooks

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An interesting interview with  James Bridle has just been released on You Tube. 'James Bridle is impossible to classify,' say his interviewers at Publishing Perspectives. 'And if he hands you a business card, you might be surprised that it merely states his name with the instruction to “search."... He has helped to developed a range of innovative literary projects, including the Enhanced Editions e-reader, the Golden Notebook online and Granta.com. He makes things with words, books and the internet, and writes about what he does at booktwo.org.'

At Digital Book World there's a piece on the advantages independent publishers have over big publishers in the new emarketing world. Paolo Chikiamco from Rocket Kapre Books spoke on the subject at the Future of the Book Conference in Quezon City, Philippines on Monday.

"Publishing Industry Going Through Most Profound Revolution Since Gutenberg" - Back to Its Roots!

"Publishers are relevant," says head of Random House, Gail Rebuck, in today's Guardian. "We have practical expertise and, of course, money. We give our authors advances which enable them to concentrate on their work in hand … My idea of hell is a website with 80,000 self-published works on it – some of which might be jewels, but, frankly, who's got the time? What people want is selection and frankly that's what we do."

Selection is exactly what the new wave of specialist epublishers will be doing too. They'll:

Find the best new authors and then promote the best new authors. Authors who can already write. Who need editing, not ghosting. Who don't need to be famous in another field first. Whose careers won't rely on the whim of the big supermarket buyers. Who can be of any age and from any background.

Publishing is going back to its roots!

Forbes On Bright Future for Self-Published Authors

 

If Self-Published Authors Owned The Midlist

Forbes blogger Alan Rinzler reports on Author Solutions' marketing VP Keith Ogorek's prediction that the big publishing houses could one day find all their mid-list authors from amongst the self-published.

Ereaders will be adopted by majority of US readers by July 2013, predicts J A Konrath.

J A Konrath has just blogged his print to digital time-line.

He predicts that ereaders will be adopted by the majority of readers the US by July 2013, pointing out that between 2004 and 2006, sales of the iPod went from four million a year to forty million a year. "They are currently plateaued at over fifty million a year, and have been since 2007."

Amazon's New Kindle 3: SOLD OUT!

When it comes to reading ebooks, the new Kindle 3 is superior to the iPad, says The Guardian. 

It also connects well to most websites the tester tried including the BBC,  The Bookseller, the New York Times, Teleread and most WordPress blogs, Hotmail, Yahoo (classic mode) but not, as yet, Gmail.

See here for full internet connectivity report with screenshot images and place your orders for Christmas now.

Amazon's 70% Royalty For All

Amazon have announced that their 70% Royalty is now available for authors outside the US. To qualify the ebooks must be sold to US customers on Amazon.com. It's up to the author to change their royalty preference for each book on their master dashboard see here for details and FAQs.

Help With Ebook Promotion

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Whether authors and publishers like it or not, as ebooks take off, internet promotion is becoming increasingly important.  American author Bob Baker is a full-time author who has developed a successful niche writing and speaking about music marketing and self-promotion for songwriters, musicians, and bands.  See his range of books plus lots of free information and advice on self-publishing at Fulltimeauthor.com.

NEW UK KINDLE OUT ON FRIDAY

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Tonight's London Evening Standard gives the new Amazon Kindle Ebook reader a big thumbs up:
 "....the key to the Kindle is its price and ease of use. At £109 for a wifi version, and £149 for a 3G one, it has a real chance of becoming the first mass market ebook reader."

Ebook Royalties at Amazon UK

Amazon confim that the 70% ebook royalty is for US authors only. All authors selling on the new Amazon.co.uk Kindle Store will be paid 35%. Amazon do say "we're working on it".

Amazon Digital Comes to UK/Smashwords' Mark Coker on Future of Publishing/Another Author-turned-publisher

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Amazon Digital has now launched in the UK. Any ebooks currently selling on Amazon.com in the US have been automatically added to the store with the dollar price transferred to £s. How does this affect the royalty percentage for UK authors? We can't find any announcements yet so assuming UK authors are still only getting the "standard" 35% royalty to the US author's 70%.

Smashwords' CEO Mark Coker's presentation to a group of New York University publishing students on how indie ebooks will transform the future of publishing.


Another author turned publisher: Ray Connolly is 'doing a Dickens' and publishing his new novel, The Sandman, online chapter by chapter.

Murakami Cuts Out His Publisher in Favour of Self-Publishing Ebooks

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The Book Designer reports that Ryu Murakami is cutting his pretigious publisher (Kodansha) completely out of his next book. Instead he'll be publishing direct to Apple iPad.

EBOOK ROYALTIES - 25% or 50%?

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Interesting article on ebook royalties in yesterday's Guardian.   Speaking at the Romantic Novelists' Association annual conference, Tom Holland, the Chair of The Society of Authors, said that a 25% ebook royalty for the duration of the copyright (as currently offered by the big publishers) is unfair and could, in the long term, damage the publishing industry.

Print publishers found unknown authors, presented them to the world and turned a few of them into high earners. A good deal for all and the publisher deserved the payback. Ebook overheads and risks aren't remotely comparable. The best ebook publishers of the future, however, will allocate a good chunk of their resources and efforts into promoting their authors in new, innovative ways that haven't been thought of yet. Authors will compete for this service much in the same way that they have done in the past for high publishing advances.  Whatever the big publishers do, short term licensing and a larger cut for authors will become the norm.

SELF-PUBLISHING EBOOK SUCCESS STORIES

When Boyd Morrison’s thriller The Ark received 25 rejections of the heartbreaking type known as the ‘rave rejection’, he decided to publish as an ebook. He tells the Huffington Post what happened next.

After hearing about thriller writer J A Konrath’s ongoing ebook success story, comes the news that Karen McQuestion’s novel A Scattered Life has become the first self-published ebook to be optioned for a Hollywood film.  To date, Karen has sold 36,000 ebooks on Amazon Kindle.

Whilst we wait for the UK online stores to catch up, UK authors can sell their ebooks for $$ on Amazon Digital. We can confirm the system works very well – this morning blackbirdebooks received its first cheque for digital sales, sorry, check, from the Wells Fargo Bank, Seattle! However, sadly the new 70% royalty is only for US authors, the rest of the world has to make do with 35%. The UK self-publishing site Lulu now does ebooks and pays 80%, so worth  getting onto as well. Both platforms are free.

Top UK Ebook Sites

Ebook sales are rocketing in the US where 12% of all book sales are now digital, but here in the UK ebooks have yet to enter the mainstream. Some purchasers of blackbirdebooks’ first publication, Done & Dusted, are saying they’ve printed it off and are looking forward to reading it, not realising that the integrated links are all part of the non-fiction ebook reading experience. That ereading software, including Amazon Kindle, is free to download to mobile phones, iPodtouches, PCs and Macs.

This will change. How quickly nobody knows, but we at blackbird thought we’d start a UK ebook blog to keep track of events as they happen. To kick off, here are the top UK ebook blogs and websites we’ll be keeping our beady blackbirdy eye on:

The Literary Platform: A showcase for experiments with literature and technology. As well as being a platform for the latest innovative ideas, there’s mainstream ebook news, like the You Tube demo of the moving graphics for the iBookstore’s version of Alice in Wonderland, and critical commentary, like this analysis of the future of the vook (ebooks with video).  Richard Nash’s piece on a new business model for publishing, suggesting that authors of the future will be licensed for a 3 year contract rather than life-of-the-copyright contracts is a must-read for every author and publisher.

Guardian Ebooks: The ebook newspaper. Latest piece: Will the Apple iPad lead to a reading revolution?

FUTUReBOOK: The Ebook arm of the UK Trade paper The Bookseller. Latest piece:  Amazon as Publisher.

eBookMagazine: For the latest on ebook hardware.

EBOOK SUCCESS STORIES

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Following thriller writer J A Konrath's ongoing ebook success story, comes the news that Karen McQuestion's novel A Scattered Life has become the first self-published ebook to be optioned for a Hollywood film.  To date, Karen has sold 36,000 ebooks on Amazon Kindle.

Whilst we wait for the UK online stores to catch up, UK authors can sell their ebooks for $$ on Amazon Digital. We can confirm the system works very well - this morning blackbirdebooks received its first cheque for digital sales, sorry, check, from the Wells Fargo Bank, Seattle!

Could it be your book next? Read this Wall Street Journal report on how ebooks are taking off in the US then get over to Amazon Digital Text Platform and start publishing.

The Best UK Ebook Journals

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Ebook sales are rocketing in the US where 12% of all book sales are now digital, but here in the UK ebooks have yet to enter the mainstream. Some purchasers of blackbirdebooks' first publication, Done & Dusted, are saying they've printed it off and are looking forward to reading it, not realising that the integrated links are all part of the non-fiction ebook reading experience. That ereading software, including Amazon Kindle, is free to download to mobile phones, iPodtouches, PCs and Macs.

This will change. How quickly nobody knows, but we at blackbird thought we'd start a UK ebook blog to keep track of events as they happen. To kick off, here are the top UK ebook blogs and websites we'll be keeping our beady blackbirdy eye on:    

The Literary Platform: A showcase for experiments with literature and technology. As well as being a platform for the latest innovative ideas, there's mainstream ebook news, like the You Tube demo of the moving graphics for the iBookstore's version of Alice in Wonderland, and critical commentary, like this analysis of the future of the vook (ebooks with video).  Richard Nash's piece on a new business model for publishing, suggesting that authors of the future will be licensed for a 3 year contract rather than life-of-the-copyright contracts is a must-read for every author and publisher.

Guardian Ebooks:The ebook newspaper. Latest piece: Will the Apple iPad lead to a reading revolution? 

FUTUReBOOK: The Ebook arm of the UK Trade paper The Bookseller. Latest piece:  First thoughts on iPad - Believe the Hype.
 
eBookMagazine: For the latest on ebook hardware.