Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing

[Ace Corona]

I just read an article about some lady who makes $20,000 a month selling her romance novels on Amazon, I was wondering if it's possible to publish a graphic novel or comic book through them, and if anyone here has any experience with them.

[Exoravant]

... I haven't but I did look into it and you can... It requires you to put their merchant publishing software on your computer and format each item you upload to them... They take a cut of each sale but it is lower than itunes which does the same but only for Mac. The difference between them and Comixology is the approval process and Comix will do the formatting for you for a bigger cut... Altho Amazon owns Comixology anyway.

[Symson]

I have two books on there, one geared towards artists and another towards women. I did everything by hand (html and Adobe InDesign) and only used the Kindle Previewer to be sure it was done correctly before I uploaded. I have a friend who created hers in Microsoft Word and uploaded hers directly.

I’m preparing a third, which will be a graphic novel.

So no, you are not required to download any software.

If you think you are going to make $20,000 a month with a graphic novel, don’t hold your breath. The audience for romance novels and it’s different sub-genres dwarves the graphic novel audience.

There is a woman who lost her job and took a year to write 6 novels. They did very well, because she promoted the hell out of it. Just like Kickstarter or anything else you put on the web you have to be prepared to promote like a day job and put the time in. This may or may not be the woman you are referring to.

I find a spike in sales after I spend some time in promotion, but I haven’t gone all out yet, because I do have freelance work coming in. So my time is limited.

You decide what the sale price is going to be and Amazon clearly shows what their cut is based on the price you choose, which is less than the iTunes store.

[Ed Quinby]

It's like Symson says, the romance book market and comics & graphic novels on Amazon Kindle are very different. I have the same comic on both Kindle and Comixology. Before Amazon's purchase of Comixology, it sold about the same at both places which in my case is a few downloads per month. I certainly need to promote more and in the right ways. It's kind of beguiling though since Amazon basically offers a worldwide customer potential. You sign up to sell in Britain and Europe, Japan, ect and think, 'oh, I'll kill in Brazil!' Then the quarterly statements come out and, well, some guy in Sweden bought the book and that's pretty cool, but so far it's just pocket change. I think the potential is definitely there for a high concept book well-promoted and with good word-of-mouth to bring in those huge numbers. I really can't think of a reason not to give them a try though.