On Kindling

As almost any writer will tell you, Amazon have spent the last two decades upending the way the world does books. If you were not an author that was lucky enough to be published by the trade houses of yesteryear, you might regard those publishers as cobweb-laced, fusty and dusty people in tweed holding the line against the barbarians at the gate. If you were lucky enough to have been signed by one of these publishers as Amazon imposed egregious, faintly abusive commercial terms on the industry, you probably have a different view, even though the book chains were just as tough on publishing in terms of demanding discounts in exchange for promotional spots on the tables at the front of the store.

Hidden from the view of anyone not directly involved in publishing were two markets, not one. As well as the standard arrangement of selling books to readers, retailers have also been in the business of selling positioning of those same books back to the publishers. There were even suggestions that some retailers sold slots on their best seller charts, because people buy what’s popular and if that wasn't true at the start of a book’s publication then it quickly became a self-fulfilling prophecy a few weeks later.

It all looks a bit like real estate when the most successful business done is based on location, location, location.

Tied in with this was the level of your advance. If you happened to enjoy celebrity in another field, publishers would pay frankly absurd amounts to you and then be faced with the challenge of recouping as much of it as possible during the first few months of publication. Earning out your advance, in many cases, was a sign that your agent wasn't enough of a Rottweiler to extract a juicy chunk of publisher flesh for you.

For the vast majority of authors, earning out an advance is not so much a worry, but a pipe dream. A lot of those authors – mostly mid-list authors – got dropped, ghosted or otherwise ignored in the various financial meltdowns that have marked the last two decades of economics. I'm one of those authors and so I come back from a few years of copywriting to find Amazon, if not the only game in town, then an even more important player than it was in 2012. I had to assimilate.

I have stepped into the world of KDP, the Kindle direct publishing wing of bookstore insolvency catalysts, Amazon. Yes, it has come to this - after catching the nth iteration of Amazon hustle-porn on YouTube, I gave up fighting the hulking behemoth and decided to bring it down from the inside.

This is what happened when I set myself a challenge to be a consummate professional, give it a go and not just sneer at all those hustle guru videos and Medium stories that are the modern equivalent of 1980s local newspaper small ads for double glazing canvassers promising a six-figure income and an Aston Martin.

The hustlers make it sound easy and, up to a point, making a Kindle ebook – especially a text-heavy number like a novel – is relatively straightforward. In my case, the rights for my first book, Britain: What a State, reverted to me and, because it never became an e-book, I wanted to air it in the Kindleverse, but Britain… is a book that has more in common with a picture book than a novel. I made Britain… as a series of design jokes, and its layout is as much part of the humour as the text itself.

Ironically, the Kindle version of the book has not been a problem because of a Kindle setting that allows you to use a PDF of your manuscript. The main problem I am currently having is wrangling a press-ready PDF into the Kindle publish-on-demand template. Even when I have achieved that, I suspect the paperback might be expensive as it should be full colour throughout.

I'll let you know how I get on, but until then, here is the link to the Kindle ebook. It’s available for £7 or, if you are a member of Kindle Unlimited, you can read it for free.

I’ll just put this here and see if it catches fire.