With content writing rates stagnant and eBooks so in-demand, just about everyone is getting into the eBook game. And now, selling books for the Kindle is no longer the only way to use the Kindle program to sell your works. If you’ve ever written a Kindle eBook, you may know how daunting the process can be. Writing a full-length eBook can take weeks if not months. Then there’s the problem of putting an enormous amount of time into one eBook that may or may not sell well.
My Kindle eBook has been on the site for about five months, and I don’t want to brag, but it sells a copy or two every week. At the 35 percent commission that I get for a .99 ebook, it’s earned about enough for a fast food meal for the fam. It’s a little under 20 pages, so it’s a short one, but it still took quite a while to put together. If that kind of time risk isn’t your bag, there’s now another option that can have you up on Kindle in little time and with little risk of your extremely important time that would ordinarily be spent reading to blind orphans.
Publishing with Kindle Singles
With Kindle Singles, you don’t have to write a full-length eBook, or even a short eBook, to get published and make sales. The program publishes short stories and even articles that customers buy for their Kindles. If you have a fantastic article that didn’t find a comfortable home with loving parents, you can put it on Kindle and make every reader pay to read it.
Perhaps more interesting for many writers, it also publishes essays. The essay market is one that has suffered a lot as magazines and newspapers have increasingly gone out of business. I have a half-finished essay that I’d been working on for submission to the My Turn essay section of Newsweek when I learned that Newsweek ceased publication. That essay sat languishing in Word purgatory as I searched for a good place to put it. I quickly found that many websites and publications want good essays, but they don’t always want to pay much for them. With Kindle Singles, you can get paid for it over and over again.
How much pay? With the regular Kindle program, any ebook under $2.99 pays only a 35 percent commission. With the Kindle Singles program, every work earns a flat 70 percent commission no matter what the price. I may just be able to buy a few more fast food meals pretty soon. Or, and I dare to dream, a trip to the Sizzler.
Lizz S is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments.
