Kindle Direct Publishing

Amazon offers amateur authors like me the ability to self-publish their work using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). This is a fully-automated service. Once the manuscript is done, you upload it into KDP, fill out a few simple forms, determine the price you wish to charge for your book, and push the big yellow button. All right, I don't know what color the button is, because I haven't gotten there yet, but the process is quite simple.

For works like Norton The Third, the author receives roughly 70 percent of the face value of the book every time someone downloads it. The author provides a bank account number, publishes the work on KDP, and presto, the money rolls in. Or, in my case, the money maybe will dribble in.

I have no expectations that N3 will make a lot of money, and everything I read on the internet about self-publishing leads me to believe that my expectations are likely to be fulfilled beyond my wildest dreams.

There are people out there who have made over a million dollars in income from KDP. Ryk Brown is rumored to be such a person -- I know of him through friends of friends. He has created a mythical science fiction universe, and is now in the process of populating it with stories. Copyright laws (and polite author practice, of course) provide him protection against other authors writing about his characters, and his world -- and he has built up such a following of readers, that as soon as he announces a new volume: ka-ching! I'm sure it's a full-time job thinking up and writing his material, so it's no easy life, but Mr. Brown is a success story that the rest of us amateurs can aspire to.

Norton The Third is technically the third volume of a four-volume series. I suppose you can imagine the titles of the prequels; once the book is published, it will be clear what their subject matter might be. If the sales of N3 surprises me (in a positive way; it cannot surprise me by being lower than I expect, unless Amazon charges me rent for keeping my dusty unsold book on its electronic shelf), I might be tempted to fill in these other three stories. But, becoming an industry on the order of Mr. Brown is not in the cards for me and my Nortons.

KDP is easy for a novelist to use. I wrote the N3 manuscript using Microsoft Word, and with some very basic "dos and don'ts" from Amazon, I was able to format the material so that KDP loved it the first time I uploaded it. It certainly seems like KDP's sweet spot is for novels -- paragraphs of text, with quotation marks. Ellipsis (...) and em-dashes are about as complex as my stuff gets, and Kindle loves it all. I have a friend who's published a non-fiction document about stress management, and he has had a lot more trouble getting KDP to accept his much-more-complex material. As they say, your mileage may vary.

Amazon recommended a very low price for N3, based on I'm not sure what. I gave it a few hints about the genre (including the deadly "alternative history" moniker), and some keywords (like "Clamper" and "Stanford"). It knows I've never published anything else on Amazon, so these factors alone probably account for the low price. I'll probably take its price suggestion.

All-in-all, I'm thankful that KDP and its ilk exist in the world. Without them, I and amateur authors like me would never have any expectation of getting published. And in such a world, N3 never would have been finished.