After two years of global roaming, Andrew Hyde funded his self-published travel book This Book Is About Travel through the website Kickstarter.
His funders indicated their overwhelming preference that his book be available on a Kindle, a sentiment understood and welcomed by the author himself, who is a self-identified Kindle reader. With the Kindle garnering the majority of his sales, he focused on advertising through Amazon, only to discover that the website yielded the least amount of money for the author than any other book format. Hyde was required to pay 30% of his sales for the right to sell on Amazon, with the additional cost of being charged for delivery fees. For every $9.99 book he sold on the site, Hyde took away only $5.10 – a discrepancy in price that left him with the adamant conclusion that he ought to do his business elsewhere. Since then Hyde has been on a campaign to get his readership to shift their book format of choice, and publicize Amazon’s incompatibility with independent publishers like himself. To read more about this story, you can read Andrew Hyde’s take on it here (includes helpful graphics on the breakdown of book formats), and the Daily Beast’s follow-up article here.
