Wow, Amazon really wants Kindle books priced at under $10. If you self-publish, you either choose a 35% royalty rate and have few restrictsions, or you choose a 70% royalty rate and have to keep it under $10 price.
For someone with a $25+ book, it ends up making very little sense to list it on Amazon at all. You are probably making at least $20 on the downloadable copy, while the Kindle one would net you $8.75 at the 35% rate.
Yeah, pricing on the Kindle store is a bit of a nightmare. From what I've read the only folks making money on there are selling books for $0.99 and selling tens of thousands of copies (or more).
The royalty from the edition on the Kindle store is like 1/4 of the royalty from selling it on the website. I published it to the Kindle store more as an experiment than anything else to see if I could reach a wider audience there. I still make more sales on the book website than with Amazon.
Thanks for being open with your numbers.
Amazon incentivizes you to price between 2.99 and 9.99 (for 70% royalty). As a self-pubbed author (currently on Amazon KDP right now), my Amazon numbers are a lot better than yours. But your web sales dwarf me.
KDP has been an experiment for me. I get ok money from it. But I'm not sure it is the correct model for niche technical books. The idea of giving away my book during promotions (I've given it away probably 100x more than sales), makes me wonder if for technical niche books you aren't shooting yourself in the foot by flooding the market with freebies.
But I'm also wondering if I need to change my price. It seems a lot of technical self-pubs seem to be in the $20-$30 range when they sell them themselves. Care you elaborate on that decision?
"From what I've read the only folks making money on there are selling books for $0.99 and selling tens of thousands of copies (or more)"
Not necessarily true. There is a genre fiction writer named Michael Sullivan, who writes fantasy in a similar vein as "A Song of Fire and Ice" (Game of Thrones for fans of the TV show).
His sales from April 2010 to August 2011 was over 70,000 and since then, he's sold over 12,000 a month, never pricing below $4.95 on Amazon, which after their cut, he receives over $40,000 a month.
He recently did a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything)[1], where he disparages the 99-cent price and feels writers should have more dignity and respect for their work than that.
One option would be to split the material across multiple books. That wouldn't be very hard for a lot of technical topics, and isn't usually that hard to do for fiction (the cliffhanger ending has a long, long history).
A side benefit is that it might reduce "book bloat" - the tendency in recent years for programming books to weigh about 20 kg.
For someone with a $25+ book, it ends up making very little sense to list it on Amazon at all. You are probably making at least $20 on the downloadable copy, while the Kindle one would net you $8.75 at the 35% rate.