What I Know About Kindle Singles

I hoped to get my Demontorium short stories into the Amazon marketplace as Kindle Singles. The Kindle Singles store is smaller than the Kindle universe. I'd have a chance to be more prominent right off the bat. Finding no info on the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) pages, I Googled. I reached  the January 26 Amazon Kindle Singles press release, a first-hand Singles submissions experience on ZdNet, a Facebook post on the subject from Steve Lewis, self-publishing guru and author of the Taleist blog, and the Submissions Guidelines right on Amazon's Singles bookstore page. First a word on what a Kindle Single is, as described in the press release:

"... each Kindle Single is intended to allow a single killer idea -- well researched, well argued and well illustrated -- to be expressed at its natural length. Available to both Kindle device and app users, and priced between $0.99 and $4.99, the first set of Kindle Singles include original reporting, essays, memoirs and fiction."

Here's what else I learned:

• Amazon's editors review your manuscript submission, just like a traditional publisher would. It's not a direct publishing option.
• The permitted word count is 5,000 - 30,000 words. This leaves my short stories out. My longest, The Entrepreneur, is just over 3,000 words.
• If accepted, your Kindle Single royalty can earn you 70%, even at a price point below $2.99. This is different from the KDP experience, where a price point below $2.99 rates a 35% royalty.

This is a good opportunity for writers, especially journalists who long to expand a topic beyond the amount of space usually alotted for their work. I say this because I believe readers look specifically for fiction they can read in the pockets of downtime available -- on a train commute, for instance.  However, authors on the KDP Community forum have expressed some confusion and frustration with the Singles process regarding such things as 1) longer than expected wait times for news of acceptance/rejection and 2) the perceived quality of accepted and published Singles. It seems Amazon is working itself into a space previously monopolized by traditional print publishers and the receiving end feels pretty much the same to authors.

I hope you can take this info farther than I can. The 5,000 word minimum rules me out, so for now, as we say in the South (US), "I don't have a dog in the race".

New Paths and Unfamiliar Alleys

The blog Taleist had features yesterday that I found very useful. One was a podcast interview with Brian Lawrenson, a travel writer who self-publishes to e-readers. He talked about some of the perils he'd learned to avoid in Amazon's pricing structure, talked about the benefits in publishing to other e-readers through Smashwords, and told his figures for the last month from non-Kindle sales. It's nice to get a real sales figure because the Internet-wide cry, "There's gold in them thar hills!" can sometimes seem urban-legendish, rather than real. I want to say, "Yeah, but how much gold? How many nuggets?" Also, Taleist offered a 20+ page white paper called "Author Platform Health Check" for free (well, for the price of a tweet). You click to tweat about the paper and are then given the download link for it. I thumbed through the printout this morning and saw good advice. Taleist is at http://blog.taleist.com or scroll down and look left because the link to this particular post is currently available there.

I wrote last night for about two hours, getting more into the plan between Gilbert and Julian. Anika had an idea for the plan. What bothers me is that having characters hatch a plan for you is like committing to someone else's plan. Now readers expect them to do these things and I hadn't planned on writing any of that. It's like snapping a leash on a dog and finding yourself walked instead, pulled down unfamiliar alleys.

Success!

I have my first short story packaged and uploaded to http://kdp.amazon.com, ready to publish! Daniele Serra (www.multigrade.com) designed the cover art. The whole time I was complaining about the difficulty of packaging a story for Kindle, I just needed to follow the tutorial I'd bought to the very end. The tutorial is available at http://content.taleist.com and was created by Steven Lewis, a prolific and successful author/publisher of Kindle books. It is a peculiar habit of mine to think, "This task is instinctive. I can wing it." This usually leads to frustration; you would think I'd learn. The tutorial is very detailed and thorough, with downloadable exercises and demo videos. I used the html editing tool Steve uses for PC; a 30-day trial is available at http://www.e-texteditor.com/. It's better than the one I was using, because it opens the web preview in a pane next to your html pane and any changes you make to the html immediately show up in the web preview pane. The tutorial takes you from preparing your Word document for formatting, through packaging your e-book using Amazon's free mobi-creator software, to viewing it in your Kindle. Let me tell you, the moment I saw my story in my Kindle I did a happy dance in my computer chair! I even have the cover art in my Kindle! The one thing I want to do before publishing is find out how to put my short story in the Kindle Singles marketplace, so that shoppers looking for Singles can find it when browsing. I have two more short stories ready to format and publish after this. So I'm on my way!