Amazon’s Kindle sales may not necessarily compare to Apple’s iPad, but that’s not to say that the device hasn’t become a significant part of Amazon’s sales.

In fact, the Kindle has become such an important part of Amazon’s profit, that Mark Mahaney of Citigroup is estimating the device along with its ebooks will account for a whopping 10% of Amazon’s sales next year. That translates into $6.1 billion in a year.

These figures shouldn’t come as too big a surprise when you bear in mind that e-books sales on Amazon actually continue to surpass the sales of hardcover and paperback books. And with major publishers like Bloomsbury seeing a surge in e-books sales, it is obvious that this is a trend that is on the rise, while Amazon’s trend in price point is going in the opposite direction. The device is expected to retail for less than $100 as we near the Christmas shopping season.

Joseph Robert Lewis is a writer. He’s not your local Starbucks writer in hipster clothes, staring lovingly at his Macbook Pro and failing to break 100 words a day. He’s a professional.

His experience includes years of writing and editing in the book publishing industry and in online publishing. He’s capable of hammering out book after book without blinking. Right now, you can purchase five of Lewis’ fictions and his tome on presentations digitally. But it wasn’t always like that.

Under the rule of the traditional publishing companies, now slowly losing their grip on long-form content, Lewis hadn’t had any success cracking the market.

“I tried the traditional route for several years: write a book, pitch it to 50 agents and editors, get 5 actual rejections and a lot of silence, and repeat. It became a pretty depressing treadmill, despite some positive feedback and requests to read my books,” Lewis told me in an interview. “It was also difficult knowing that my chance for being published depended on the shifting moods and opinions of a handful of slush readers, agents, and editors who basically answer to a marketing department with a limited budget. That’s sort of silly to me.”

With independent digital publishing, Lewis makes the decisions around his book’s content and the way in which it is sold and marketed. It’s a model that makes sense: the work is the product of his business. Why give the power of CEO over to another party — not least one who will leave you with 8% or less of the revenue?

“I receive the lion’s share of the revenue — up to 70% compared to as little as 8% with a traditional publisher. The only people I have to impress are readers, and so far the reviews for my books (from complete strangers all over the world) have been pretty darn good,” he says.

One of the great business advantages that authors who publish digitally have over their traditional counterparts, according to Lewis, is the ability to move fast and frequently. Lewis can publish a book within mere hours of the final edit on a manuscript via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes and a variety of other online retailers, though it will take 24 to 48 hours for them to appear for sale.

Lewis can update the book several times a week, testing different covers and marketing copy, and including things like maps or a sample chapter from a sequel — the sort of rapid iteration that’s simply not achievable with print books. Once they’re off the press and in the reader’s hands, the text is static.

But running active promotions isn’t the key to success, says Lewis. With any business, you need some sort of way to spread the news: word of mouth from an army of friends and family, elaborate advertising campaigns, Branson-esque stunts. Once you have the momentum going, though, promotions don’t do much for sales: Lewis says you may see a brief spike, but there’s very little measurable long-term game to be had from the fire-sale approach.

What does work, he says, is churning out quality work. “The best marketing you can do is to write another book,” says Lewis.

There is a launch process that Lewis goes through each time he publishes a new book. He updates his website and blog with information about the book, which includes links to retailers. He creates book pages on LibraryThing and Goodreads, where Lewis says many of his reviews come from.

Finally, he sends out some announcements — an email release to his mailing list, and a few on various forums such as Mobilereads and Kindleboards for good measure.

The kicker? The entire process of launching a book from start to finish takes him a couple of hours. After that, he’s free to celebrate or get started on the next work. It’s a stark contrast compared with the slow, cumbersome plodding of traditional publishing — and before you ask, there’s no difference in quality between Lewis’ work and the best of bookstore fiction. It’s as good as it gets.

“I’ve avoided most of the online debates about independent publishing and focused on just doing my work and making new friends (writers and readers alike). I’m not here to wage a culture war, just to write stories and help other writers if I can,” says Lewis. “I’ve noticed that quite a few successful indie authors actually have very little online presence, often going without blogs or Facebook pages. Success really does depend on the quality of your books and not on your skills as a salesperson. Which is a huge relief to me!”

There’s still plenty of change that needs to happen in the digital publishing space to make it a sustainable industry. E-readers like the Kindle, which are essentially single-function devices, need to become cheaper. The act of reading on smartphones and tablets, though a long way from where it was just a short year ago, needs to continue its climb. The pricing model amongst digital publishers is a matter of much debate, and that’s one area where Lewis believes publishers need to come to collectively establish a model before consumers, en-masse, will have faith in the stability of the digital publishing industry.

Lewis says we need less DRM, more format flexibility, and few obstacles to international publishing. It’s often difficult for US authors to distribute internationally through the same retailers that sell their work at home. It’s even harder for international publishers to have their work appear in the Amazon Kindle store, for instance: even a solo, impoverished writer getting his bearings has to register a business entity in the US — an expensive and difficult task for a foreigner.

“And critically, we need readers to remain open-minded about independent books and authors in general. There is still some lingering stigma that self-published books are rubbish (and some are, but so are some traditionally published books). In the end, books are books and only readers can decide which ones they like,” says Lewis.

The big question is: will Lewis ever go with a traditional publisher? Right now he’s reaping rewards from his published works, works that couldn’t have been published without mediums that bypass traditional channels. But what happens when the growth of his business hits a critical mass that is simply too time-consuming and distracting from the work of writing?

“Second, there will probably always be authors who prefer to have a team of experts doing the publishing work for them so they can focus on writing. Amanda Hocking is a great example. She became so successful as an independent that it made sense for her to turn over the publishing work to St Martins to allow her to focus on writing. And assuming she has a good lawyer and signed a good contract, I think that’s a very reasonable business decision.”

Lewis isn’t done yet — not by a long shot. A few days ago, he released his newest book The Broken Sword, a sequel to The Burning Sky. The third book which will form the endpiece for Lewis’ Halcyon trilogy will be out later this year.

Lewis is publishing a series of short stories called The Tale of Asha, about two women solving paranormal medical mysteries in India, and working on a fairy tale for his daughter, a work inspired by The Last Unicorn but reminiscent in motive of Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

Most exciting — at least to me, a big fan of Lewis’ hard sci-fi novel Heirs of Mars — are hints of a sequel to come next winter.

Joseph Lewis hits the nail on the head when he sums up the advantages of the digital publishing game, which has the capacity to allow more players to profit sustainably from smaller niches.

“I may never be rich or famous, but I’m doing much better now on my own than I ever was trying to break into the industry. And I literally have the rest of my life to continue building on my successes. I’ll never be bumped off the virtual shelves to make room for another author. There’s room for everyone now.”

Amazon has today announced that it is to launch its own Kindle Lending Library service. The feature will allow Kindle customers to borrow Kindle books from over 11,000 libraries in the United States.

The company says that customers will be able to check out a Kindle book from their local library and start reading on any Kindle device or app free of charge. Amazon will work with OverDrive, a digital content solution provider for libraries in the US to offer what it promises will be a “seamless library borrowing experience” for Kindle users.

An interesting feature is that  any annotations and bookmarks left by a user when they borrow a book will be preserved if they subsequently borrow it again or purchase it at a later date.

Borrowing Kindle books is something that users have been keen to do for some time, leading to the establishment of a number of unofficial solutions such as LendInk and the Kindle Lending Club, which later evolved into BookLending.com. It appears that Amazon’s service will require users to physically visit a library, however.

The scheme will launch later in the year.

The Internet has made the marginal cost of data transmission zero for all intents and purposes. This change didn’t come overnight, of course, but in pieces over the past two decades.

There were two major limiting factors that held back the potential of the Internet for longer than was anticipated during the great bubble days of the 90s: the price of flexible, reliable hosting, and limited penetration of ample consumer bandwidth. The cost of data transmission is both a corporate and a consumer question.

If companies could send unlimited data for free, but consumers could only accept it at a rate of 28 baud, data transmission would, in fact, be quite expensive and slow, with the consumer acting as the restrictive party. However, over the past five years, both data hosting and transmission technologies have markedly improved. When viewed in conjunction with a rise in consumer broadband penetration, both sides of the equation have finally met in the middle. The marginal cost for companies to send and for consumers to accept any specific additional packet of data has finally reached a cost of nearly zero.

This incredibly low cost of data transfer has caused all sorts of pandemonium, chaos that has largely in the favor of the consumer. In the past, companies often benefited from expensive data transfer, as it naturally restricted consumer access to data sources, and therefore prevented users from blazing their own trails. Effective monopolies were kept in place at strong margins. As both sides of the marginally free data transfer equation came into being for average users on the Internet, power shifted to the consumer to select, curate, pirate, and sample data at their own will and pace.

The effects have been transformative. We have seen the decline and fall of Big Music as an institution, demoted from its throne to its current status as merely one way to reach the masses with new music. Cheap digital distribution broke the back of CD sales. As a result, new bands have begun to eschew record labels and odious contract terms in favor of going off on their own, selling their music through every online distribution channel and expanding their revenues in the bargain.

With the fall in bandwidth costs, we’ve also seen a commensurate fall among traditional print media sources. Cheaper data transmission rates mean that a profusion of online voices can take their place in public discourse. With the rise of the 24-hour news cycle, print media has also seen its role as a news source become greatly diminished in the face of an army of bloggers reporting on the news as it happens

The next act in this massive deconstruction of legacy industry due to free data transmission is already being written, and this time it is the world of books that is in turmoil.

Book publishing has been fundamentally broken for as long as anyone can recall. To summarize for the uninitiated, this is the route that a normal new author would take if they wanted to publish a new work of fiction today:

The author would write a book. This can take several years. Then they would hunt for an agent. This could take a year, if it happened it all. Then the agent would have to shop the book. This again could take several years, if it worked at all. Finally, if a deal was struck, a new author could expect an advance of $5,000, which they would be unlikely to earn out, for their novel. Years and years of work, $5,000 reward.

Non-fiction has always been a different beast, but the process has a similar process.

In the same way as the rise of bands using self-published music selling services such as TuneCore on iTunes, and new blogs turning into major publications in the face of storied news groups, so too is the transition to marginal free data transport attacking old foundations in the book world.

Indie publishing, the act of an individual person publishing a book, is not a new concept. In fact, for the last several decades such activities have been panned as ‘self-publishing,’ and dealt with an attached stigma that labeled any self-published author as second-tier, and not quite good enough to find a ‘real publisher.’

This is changing. As we saw before, the methods that were used to source and develop talent in the world of big publishing were ineffective, and inefficient, requiring up to a half decade of work for a slim chance at a possible major reward. This has left many good authors on the outside looking in, and due to the commercial demands of keeping such massive corporate edifices in the black, allowed many poor authors into the fold due to their commercial potential.

But for those left out, either because their work was too niche to warrant a large print run or a contract from a NY publisher, or because the author simply didn’t have the luck of the draw, there was nothing but a poor option. Self-publishing, their refuge, was stuck in the world of analog data transfer: print. Thus the self-published author had to work in the world of physical books, an expensive operation at scale, and one that is suffocating in small batches. This left self-publishing with a sharp, negative social impact, and a poor bottom line.

For years, therefore, self-publishing was unattractive. This is no longer the case as the Kindle has changed everything.

Of course there are now a selection of quality e-readers the market: the Nook, the Kindle, and iBooks to start. In fact, the Nook platform has now managed to secure 25% of the digital market. But what they all share is the ability for an individual author to publish their work cheaply, quickly, and with a high profit margin.

If you reflect for a moment, each of those qualities was lacking from the old days of print-based self-publishing. As a result, authors are flocking to these services in droves, excited that the marketplace that was kept from them for so long is now open.

Books that have been stuck on hard drives for years, as their respective authors hunted down publishing deals, are now being set loose onto the market in droves. For the author, and for the adventurous reader, times are quite good indeed.

But what about the authors that have already ‘made it?’ Surely those authors who have broken into the rarefied circle of NY publishing are happy to stay put? Interestingly, this is increasingly not the case. Why? Money.

Remember that the bane of the self-publishing author, and big the advantage of the publishing house, is print. Small runs for self-publishers were so expensive that profit even on complete sell-through was always doomed to be small. Meanwhile the big publishing houses could take advantage of economies of scale to cheaply print off thousands of profitable copies.

But as sales have switched from print copies to electronic ones, as demonstrated by rapidly expanding e-book sales according to industry sources, print is rapidly losing its sheen. And as it loses its glow, so do the big publishing houses. After all, print was their area of expertise, their raison d’etre, their advantage over the individual.

To prove that this is the case, we must show a popular, traditionally-published author turning down a new print deal for a massive dollar amount. Do you think that there is such a case? Indeed, here is an example. You can read the full story of Barry Eisler saying no to a $500,000, two book deal here if you are so inclined, but let’s merely take the point and move on.

Authors, big and small, print experience or not, previously self-published or not, are now moving to independently publishing their work on electronic platforms, without the need of a publisher.

We’ll ask the quality question in a minute, but let’s go back to the cash question first. What percent of the sale of an ebook does an author receive under current publishing contracts? Around 17%. If that author self-published, the author could earn 70% of the sale, and set their own price. That is the crux of the difference between the two models. In the words of J.A. Konrath:

No, they’re not. Editing and good covers are essential, and these can be procured for set costs. They aren’t worth the 52.5% a publisher takes, forever.

Surely it must be argued that if digital platforms have been opened to everyone, the crap will start to flow, right? Think back to our discussion of what books were allowed to go to print, and that many were let in not for quality, but for their commercial potential. This meant that poor-quality works were often published, in the place of what could have been more quality works on the grounds that these books had a higher potential profit. Even more, as the sales of print books have suffered due to the shuttering of bookstores and the rising consumer preference for digital books, budgets for new books at major publishing houses have slipped, lowering the quality of the art and editorial inputs that are offered to upcoming works.

But all we have shown thus far is that the old world of print was not completely effective at keeping out poor texts. The real question is how will indie published books avoid descending into the muck, with everyone publishing half-baked, poorly edited schlock? In short, many weak books will be published, but a different gatekeeper will seperate the wheat from the chaff: the reader. Instead of appealing to a publisher for a print deal, in hopes of reaching a reader, the modern author can write whatever they see fit, publish it when they wish, and then the potential end reader will vet the work and only purchase what they deem worthy. Readers have always done this, of course, at the bookstore looking down aisles of books, but in the digital world shelf space is infinite, so the work might be slightly more taxing.

Couldn’t the major publishers offer better terms to their current authors and keep them from going out on their own for future books? Not with their current overhead structure. A single author can hire an editor, hire an artist, hire a formatting genius, and prepare their book for publishing for only a few thousand dollars. Then from that moment on all revenue and profit is theirs. What NY publisher could ever offer such terms?

In fact, in light of indie publishing phenom Amanda Hocking taking a $1 million dollar deal for her next few books, many indie publishing firebrands have boldly proclaimed that “Amanda Hocking is Probably Making a Mistake.” Three years ago no one would have ever scoffed at a seven figure deal.

Some defenders of conventional model publishing assert that publishing houses provide other services, such as marketing. Surely that will keep some authors in the fold? Some, yes, but not all. Again, as total revenues from print books have declined, so have advertising and promotional budgets. This is even more painfully true for new authors. Often there is no budget at all, only some advice for the new writer to use social media to push their book and to ‘work it.’

A short aside before we conclude: it is no longer as difficult for an author striking out on their own to sell print copies of their books. There are a variety of print-on-demand services that are quite capable. However, most indies are seeing much more success with digital books, as they can be priced very competitively. Still, the indie author has all options open to them.

This is the bottom line: the economics of publishing were always weak, but there was no way around the necessity of print, and that meant that publishers ran the show. With digital books now a one billion dollar market (2011 forecast based on current monthly sales rates), there is enough space for anyone with enough pluck to go out on their own and take a chance at self-publishing. The best will bring their fans from print to digital, leaving their old legacy publishers, and their low royalties behind, and the young, new authors can reach readers without the need to ask for perrmission.

It is a brave new world, one that the Internet in all its glory has brought to us.

Was there a Kindle or iPad under your Christmas tree? Statistics point to yes!

Publisher’s Weekly is reporting preliminary estimates from the Association of American Publishers that e-book sales from 16 reporting companies jumped 115.8% this January, totaling $69.9 million in the U.S.

And it’s bad news for paperback book publishers. Paperbacks were down 30.9% from the reporting companies, falling to $39.0 million, $30 million below the sales of e-books. Hardcover sales fell 11.3% in January.

At the end of January, we reported that Kindle e-books sales had overtaken paperback books on Amazon.com. We’ve been tracking the rise of e-books over the past few years, and so while we’re not altogether surprised by this announcement, it’s a massive milestone.

What’s happening? The way we devour content is changing. We no longer want to commute or travel with big, paper bound books when we can simply tote along a Kindle. Reading isn’t dying though, far from. Think of all the different kinds of information you consume, reading while waiting for the subway train, in line at the grocery store, on your computer at work and curled up at night in bed on the iPad. The iPad, the Kindle, these are devices of leisure. They’re large enough to consume Tolstoy but small enough to slip into our purse.

If you’re interested in getting involved in the eBook scene, be sure to read up on EBookling, the disruptive darling of indie online book publishing.

At first it was just an experiment. Blake Crouch, a mystery and suspense novelist, was not lacking for a traditional book publisher. His last few novels were put out by St. Martin’s Press and he has a literary agent dedicated to selling the rights to his work. But early last year, intrigued by success stories with Amazon’s Kindle store, he decided to release a collection of his short stories as an ebook without the aid of a publisher.

Though sales started off slow — maybe a few hundred a month — within the last two months he’s been averaging 5,000 purchases a month. With his 70% cut from Amazon, that means a $2.99 ebook has generated upwards of $10,000 a month, money that bypasses a traditional publisher completely and goes straight to his pocket. Five thousand sales a month, he told me in a phone interview, “is far more than I’ve sold traditionally.”

Crouch is among a growing list of authors who are forgoing the traditional publisher route to sell their work directly to consumers. Though self-publishing is nothing new — it has long been referred to as “vanity publishing,” typically a disparaging term — the rise of the ebook market has allowed authors to eliminate the high infrastructure costs of a print product. A typical print run of a few thousand books can cost a vanity publisher a hefty five figures, whereas the actual publishing of an ebook (not including the production costs) amounts to virtually nothing.

The ebook also allows authors to skip over other hurdles, including the very cold reality that most offline retailers won’t stock a self-published book on their shelves. Though online retailers like the Kindle and Nook stores can still give preferential treatment for major publishers, they’re able to provide a wide swath of inventory from the long tail.

Sales

Recent figures released by Amazon indicate that its ebooks are now outselling their print counterparts. Most the top sellers in the Kindle store also have print editions, but there are dozens of “indie” authors who are selling thousands of ebooks a month without a print version. Most the authors I spoke to for this article noticed a drastic increase in sales in the last few months, but none of them knew exactly why. “Something happened after the new year,” Crouch said. “I don’t know if it’s because more people purchased ereaders or what. But in January sales almost doubled what they were in December, and it was just a huge upswing.”

A paranormal and erotic romance author named Tina Folsom had tried for years to land a literary agent and traditional publisher to no avail. Almost on a whim she decided early last year to begin uploading some of her novels to various ebook platforms. Sales, at first, were slow — perhaps only a few hundred a month. But then suddenly in October she sold over a thousand titles. In December it jumped up to 11,000, and in January she sold 27,000 ebooks (February, a shorter month, clocked in around 22,000).

But why did sales increase so drastically?

“I’m not 100% sure,” Folsom told me in a phone interview. “There were certainly different levels [of sales] at the beginning. I started making better covers for my books, so that made a big difference. My blurbs describing my books had a really good hook, and that certainly helped. I went around a lot of blogs as well, approaching paranormal romance blogs or vampire blogs to try to get my books reviewed, because obviously there are very few sites that will actually review self published books.

“So it took awhile to get some people interested. It started rolling a little more in October or so when I started seeing a little more of an increase. By December I already had people emailing me asking when I had the next book coming out in the series. It sounded like people were already waiting for the third book and when the third book came out, the next day my sales doubled, which was surprising. I hadn’t thought it would go that fast.”

The work involved

Just because the cost of distribution has been eliminated doesn’t mean that there isn’t real work involved in creating a finished ebook product. Most print publishers spend months producing a book, a process that includes revision, copy editing, formatting, jacket copy, and cover design. Eliminating the publisher from the equation means the author has to take on all these burdens.

“With ebooks you’re there from the ground level, and it is very taxing,” Crouch explained. “You have to have it formatted. I work with a wonderful cover artist who does all the cover art for my ebooks, and he’s worked on developing a brand with me over the last year. It was a no brainer for him to do this. And then there’s a lot of metadata in terms of loading all these to the various platforms; it’s not just Kindle, it’s Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Sony, and the Apple iBooks store. There are the library lending programs, which I’m just starting to explore. It is a lot of work and there is definitely a place for someone to come along in the ebook revolution and step in and assist writers.”

Some of these indie authors are successful enough to “farm out” a lot of the production work to other people. Folsom pays a person to illustrate her covers, and not only has she hired a copy editor to line edit her upcoming books, but the editor is also going back and editing her already-published titles for errors. Up until recently she had split her time between writing, editing, and her day job, but she quit the day job and the production assistance she farms out allows her to spend most of her time writing.

Pricing

One point of contention for many indie authors is pricing. Amazon allows authors to choose their own prices, giving them a 70% royalty on all ebooks sold over $2.99 and taking a much steeper cut for books sold for less than that. This has created two factions: those who price their books above $2.99 and those who set the marker extremely low at, say, 99 cents. Both Crouch and Folsom think the 99 cent authors are not only devaluing their own work, but other ebooks as well.

“I hate that,” Crouch said. “I think you can sell a lot of books at 99 cents, but I don’t necessarily think you’ll make new fans. I think a lot of people buy this new technology and just cruise the top 100 [sellers], and at 99 cents that’s total impulse; you might just pick up 30 titles. Whether or not they actually read those is a real question. I price most my longer work, like novels or short story collections, at $2.99 or higher. I will price my individual short stories at 99 cents because that’s a fair price and it’s a gateway to the rest of my work. I can’t justify selling my novels for 99 cents.”

Folsom takes a similar approach, pricing her short stories at 99 cents and her novels much higher. In fact she goes above the $2.99 threshold, charging between $4.99 and $5.99. But whatever the price, there’s little doubt that the author’s cut will be much higher than what he or she would receive with a traditional publisher; in most cases a writer will only see 10-20% of the cover price. At 70%, Folsom will take home upwards of $4.20 for ever copy sold.

What about the publishing houses?

So where does this leave the traditional publishers? Will companies like HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster be able to lure these indie authors under their wings? Crouch seemed ambivalent on this question, saying his agent is still shopping around his proposals to the New York houses.

“The royalty rate right now for ebooks that publishers are offering is 25% and that’s horrendously in favor of the publisher, because ebooks are pretty much becoming the preferred format of reading,” he said. “That’s a huge downgrade in royalty rate. I really can’t see a scenario where I’d be involved with a traditional publisher unless the terms were pretty stellar, honestly. They’d have to be really fair.”

I asked whether a publisher would allow the author to keep the e-rights so that it could produce a print product, but Crouch was highly doubtful. “I’d love to do that, but up until this point no publisher has even considered giving any author the e-rights. There are authors walking away from book deals right now under that very deal point. They want to keep the e-rights and the publisher doesn’t want to give them. And of course they don’t want to give them; e-rights are the most valuable subset of a book property right now.”

Folsom was more blunt in responding to how she’d deal with the very same publishers who had rejected her work in the past. “They would have to pay me a very high amount,” she said. “We’re not even talking a low six figure income. If they wanted my three-book vampire series, a quarter of a million dollars wouldn’t even do it, because I can make more than that in a year on those three books. ”

This is not to say steering clear of the big publishers doesn’t cause complications. So far, Folsom has not been able to sell the foreign rights to her work, meaning right now she can only market her books to an English-speaking audience. “We cannot get anyone to buy our foreign rights. I’ve emailed agents, tons of them. The response I get is, ‘Well, if you’re not also interested in selling your US e-rights, then I can’t represent you.’ I’ve even contacted foreign rights agents directly who don’t deal with domestic issues and even those are rejecting us. They say if they can’t go to a publisher abroad and say that you’ve been published with Random House, or Penguin, or wherever, then they’re not going to be interested.”

Without the collective bargaining power of a major publisher, an indie author may also have less clout with those companies distributing their books. Folsom told me that Barnes & Noble’s Nook store unexpectedly ceased offering free sample chapters for self-published erotica novels last week. This means that a potential reader could no longer read a few pages of the author’s work before deciding whether to purchase it. The effect on sales, Folsom said, was devastating; she saw a 35% drop overnight. So far, Barnes & Noble has not explained why this option has been removed for indie authors, but erotica published by traditional publishers has remained untouched.

Most the indie authors I’ve come across sell the overwhelming majority of their ebooks on the Amazon Kindle, but for some reason romance writers have found success on the Nook. Folsom sees the majority of her sales coming from there. According to a recent CNET article, the Nook has captured 25% of the US ebook market, a fairly sizable chunk in a niche with a growing list of competitors. Despite predictions that the iPad would wipe out Kindle sales, the authors I interviewed said they weren’t seeing significant revenue from the Apple device.

***

Whenever an article appears touting the success of a few self-published authors, there’s a certain amount of pushback from critics who seek to ground us in reality, pointing out that the overwhelming majority of writers who self-publish don’t see significant sales. Perhaps this is where the big publishers can still fit in by separating the wheat from the chaff. And a lower barrier of entry for the ebook market means a lot more chaff than ever before.

“Amazon’s Kindle store is overloaded right now with a bunch of folks who think they can publish their high school diary and make a lot of money,” said Crouch. “And that stuff flops down. My concern is it’s going to be harder to find the good stuff, and I think there’s going to have to be some kind of push, whether it’s a writers collective or whether this is spearheaded by agents or distributors who can group known quantities together and brand them with some logo that denotes quality. Just to give the reader help in sorting through all of the millions of books that are infiltrating the Kindle system.”

But those who have found the sweet spot in sales are not looking back. In a widely circulated blog post, author Joe Konrath meticulously detailed his history with traditional publishing, listing the painstaking efforts he made to sell as many print copies of his books as possible. He traveled thousands of miles, gave up sleep, hounded booksellers, and threw himself at every person who would potentially buy his book. The account is exhausting just to read. All that changed, however, with the rise of the ebook. What used to take eight weeks to sell 5,000 books took him only a few days on the Kindle store. With this success, he has vowed to put all the promotional sweat work behind him. He’ll no longer attend conventions, book signings, or even grant interviews to journalists.

Sure enough, when I contacted Konrath for this article, his response was polite but firm; “I’ve stopped doing interviews,” he wrote. Most book authors would jump at the chance for free publicity, but true to his word, Konrath would not bite. With the huge market the Kindle store had created, he no longer needed people like me. He now has one job and one job only: to write fiction.

Just days after Amazon launched the ability to “lend” Kindle e-books to other users, the first “Kindle Lending Club” is already developing a strong userbase of people looking to swap e-books with others.

The club, set up as a Facebook page, has been “Liked” by 770 people at the time of writing and the page’s Discussions tab is busy with people requesting books offering up lists of the books they have available to lend to others. All that’s required for a user to lend a book to someone else is that person’s email address. Amazon’s lending period lasts 14 days, and during that period the lender will be unable to access the book, with rights restored to the purchaser once the two weeks are up.

Whether Amazon anticipated users organising themselves into a lending club or not, we’re not sure but it’s likely to result in many lost sales. After all, most books can be comfortably read in 14 days. If all you need to do to get hold of Kindle books is to request a loan from a stranger online, how many will you actually bother to buy?

At present, Kindle book lending is only available in the US and the number of people offering to lend books compared to the total number of books available is low. However, can Amazon really do anything to stop this growing?

Offering a lending feature is a DRM-controlled goodwill gesture to paper books, where lending is impossible to restrict. Lending is currently only possible for titles where rightsholders have allowed it. If organised lending continues to increase, will those publishers that have taken a chance on letting their titles be borrowed get cold feet, killing the feature off entirely?

The many users currently happily sharing their favourite books with others will no doubt be praying that’s a negative.

Word reaches us that Amazon has now activated a feature it first announced back in October, letting you “lend” Kindle books to others for a 14 day trial period.

The feature is available to registered users of the retailer’s Kindle devices and apps in the USA. Simply visit the Manage Account page, scroll to your ‘Orders’ list, click ‘Loan This Book’, enter the “borrower”‘s name, email address and an optional message… and you’re done.

Of course, this isn’t “lending” in its true sense, it’s just opening up a title to a free trial for another user. Still, as a viral way of spreading word about the Kindle ecosystem, now covering multiple mobile platforms as well as Windows and OSX, it’s a great idea. It’s not an original one though, Barnes & Noble offers a similar feature in the US already for its Nook e-reader although that platform simply can’t match the reach and accessibility of Kindle.

Not all Kindle titles are lendable, it’s down to individual rights holders to decide whether they want their publications to be included in the scheme.

There’s no word as to when the feature might be enabled outside of the United States.

Remember when asking “what are you reading?” or “read any good books lately?” wasn’t a strange thing? The funny thing is, come to think of it, now that lots of us have eReaders it should be a lot easier to ask that. Heck we should be able to share the books we’ve been reading, buying, even sharing quotes as we go. So, why aren’t we?

I guess because all the eReader makers forgot the social aspect of reading. That is until now…

This morning Kobo updated their iPad app to add some pretty nifty new sharing features. I read about all the coolness on Macgasm this morning, but it wasn’t until this evening that I could actually play with it. It’s actually cooler than it appears at first blush. Maybe not because of the features that it has now but the features that it could have in the future. For the time being, the new features are just in the iPad version, Kobo is plans to roll out the features to the other platforms later. Before I get into the meaning of these changes, here are the highlighted new features from the Kobo press release:

Sharing Books and Passages:  Users can tell their friends what they are reading or highlight favorite passages in books they are reading.  This is a great way to get a book club started, or update your bookclub friends as you read.

Statistics:  Users can track their reading life with interesting statistics, including how many books they’ve read, pages turned, how fast they read, and times of day they read.  Statistics help users track their progress, earn awards, as well as discover and learn about their own reading styles and preferences.

Activity:  An activity panel shows the timeline of a user’s reading life, highlighting important events and milestones.   Users have an at-a-glance view of their reading life, including new books opened, read and finished, passages shared, awards earned and more.

Check-Ins:  Another ground-breaking feature called Check-Ins, enables readers to check-in with characters and locations inside books, enabling them to mark important milestones and win awards.   For example, readers reading Alice in Wonderland can check in with or meet Alice for the first time, or check-in to the Rabbit Hole and tell their friends on Facebook.

Awards and Rewards:  Readers can unlock fun and surprising awards that celebrate achievements in their reading life.  Awards like ‘The Papillion’ which is earned by the power social sharers, ‘The Twain’ earned by those that read daily, and ‘The Witching Hour’ for readers who read into the wee hours of the night – once an achievement has been earned the reader can than publish and share with friends on Facebook.   Award winners can also be rewarded with special offers from Kobo or its partners, just by reading!

Personal Book Cover:  As your personal Reading Life evolves Kobo creates and automatically updates your own personal book cover – a mosaic of your reading life that you can easily share with your friends on Facebook.

Awards! Just like in school when you got stickers for reading books! Hey don’t laugh I think the idea is great. The one feature that I haven’t played with much yet is the “check-ins” that connect with characters and places within your books. I saw one in Dracula … and okay I found Budapest … not much there in the information. For now. There is a lot of potential here for being able to pull in a lot of additional information about the books your are reading. Instead of going whole hog at first, I think Kobo has done the smart thing and started with incremental changes that might tantalize readers.

The characters and places connections are just one of the innovations Kobo is shooting for. Now that Kobo connects with Facebook, I don’t see why creating virtual book clubs wouldn’t be next. If you can connect what you’re reading, you can share quotes with each other, I’m sure Kobo might even be into creating badges and awards for larger groups. If you’ve built the software connections to get to Facebook and share things, what would be the difficulty in being able to work with groups? Maybe it’s just an API issue…and those can often just be resolved with time.

As for starting to use Reading Life on the iPad, the first time you launch Kobo on your iPad your settings and such will be updated and then there is a nice, slick introduction to the new features. Oh for people who like to jump ahead, you can swipe up and down with two fingers to get to the end or beginning of a chapter and left-right to skip between chapters.

I know that Google eBooks are garnering a lot of our attention, and Amazon certainly rules the eReader roost, but looking at Kindle, iBooks, and Kobo (sorry I can’t get a Nook up here) I think Kobo are the only folks who are truly innovating in eReaders. I think they see that the physical eReader is just one facet of the whole ebooks picture, the desktop, mobile apps, and (maybe) a web app…this is where you can do really cool and interesting things.

Kobo put together a short video on the features of this new version … take a gander. Then maybe give Kobo a shot. It is free and it can read all the book formats out there (yes, except Kindle and iBooks)…I think you’ll like it:

Hi, I’m Tris and I write books.

And I’m pretty excited about the coming age of ebooks and the potential of Google Editions. According to the WSJ, Google Editions could be coming to the U.S. soon and other countries soon after. TNW is right on top of the news about this, but I wanted to take the author’s privilege and wax poetic about what this might mean for writers and authors.

First, you need to know that I don’t write fiction, I write for Pearson Technology Group (Que, Sam’s, and many others). I write books on blogging, WordPress, and social media. My publisher is betting big on ebooks and how ebooks will make the books I write more interactive, in depth, and up to date than ever before. I gather from another WSJ article on ebooks that fiction writers are none-to-pleased with ebooks and how they are making less money since the dawn of “e”. Myself, well, let’s say Pearson is more forward thinking about how ebooks and authors and publishers are good for each other. In the world of tech writing, being able to be lighter and faster is much, much better than waiting.

Case in point, my latest book Using WordPress. There are three entire chapters (not to mention additional audio and video commentary) that we were able to keep electronically, though they couldn’t make it into the paper book. If it wasn’t for the electronic versions, you wouldn’t have that. Unfortunately, my publisher isn’t perfect. If you buy the book electronically, you still have to go to the publishers site to get the additional chapters.

But I digress.

Google Editions.

Several things excite me about Google getting into publishing. First is that they aren’t going to be tied to a physical ereader. They are starting off from the perspective of distributing content. Which is how it should be. But that independence might come at a price: adoption. I have an iPad, as you know, and I buy and read most of my books through Toronto-based Kobo. I’ve liked the Kobo reader from the start, it had a better reading experience from the get go (not to mention pulling the DRM from the books I bought so I could load them into iBooks wasn’t fun). However Kobo is affiliated with a couple of existing bookstores (up here it’s Chapters-Indigo), will I be able to read Google ebooks that I buy with the Kobo reader that has the rest of my books? Will I be able to read them in iBooks? Big question there about whether or not Google Editions will take off. I might be able to add another reader to my iPad, but Kindle, Nook, and Kobo Reader owners can’t.

According to reports, I sounds like I’ll be able to offer affiliate links for readers to buy my (and other) books through Google Editions, just like Amazon. This could be something that will help Google gain traction early on. We know that Adsense is a pretty successful venture for Google. We know it works and can be pretty good for earning money on a site. I don’t see any reason why Google Editions will be any different.

So, we have a potentially more independent book seller, not tied to a physical reader, who will also let me earn money by recommending books. I’m good with this so far.

But will Google Editions help independent publishers and authors? Will it help niche writers expand their audiences? I’m going to work off a couple ideas here to say: yes on both. First, if a publisher wants to push more electronic books, the production costs are certainly less with digital editions than “dead-tree” versions. So being able to take more risks on authors who they might otherwise pass on, is a win for us scriveners. On the distribution front, until now, Amazon ruled the roost for self-published ebooks. While details aren’t available right now, I would suspect that Google would love to poke Amazon with a sharp stick and offer ebook publishing services as well. That gives publishers and authors another outlet, that means competition. That sounds good to me.

Here is the bottom line. I’ve always seen ebooks as a boon for authors and publishers who can adapt to them. I’m not saying paper books are going anywhere (though for me they keep going in drawers), I’m saying that ebooks allow authors to offer books to a large audience while keeping costs low with lower print runs. If the ebook sells better than the paper one, well don’t print as many of the paper ones.

Yes, not everyone will be able to take advantage of this and Google Editions might wind up like Google Wave and Buzz, but I think that in the last few months we’ve seen more interest in epublishing not less and I think this interest is going to turn into success for Google.

If they don’t blow it.

But hey, what do I know. I’m just Tris, and I just write books.