Author April Henry has started making her out-of-print books available on the Kindle and has some great short-cuts for authors who haven't made the leap yet. Here's an excerpt from her blog:
What you need
-An Amazon account, which you already have if you have bought something from Amazon.
-The words. With luck, you still have the Word file that you submitted to your publisher. And again, with luck, they had you make changes on the file and re-send, rather than someone at the publisher someplace making changes. I’ve been proofing my old Word files before I post them on the Kindle. Nothing like not looking at something for five plus years to see typos.
And if you don’t have the words? You can scan in the book or manuscript […]For one book, I used blueleaf-book-scanning.com and because I didn’t ask for anything fancy and didn’t ask for my book back, it only cost $12.15, plus $4.75 to mail them the book. Then they emailed me a word file.A cover image. My husband made me some new ones, using photos from istock.com. The photos were inexpensive, and my husband worked for free.
Her covers look really good, her books are priced right, and she got an established reputation as a mystery/thriller writer. I think her Kindle editions will do real well.
Last month was my most successful yet on the Kindle...THE WALK led the pack of my out-of-print titles, selling 515 copies. As of today, I've sold 116 copies of THE WALK, and the other titles are selling briskly too, so it looks like January could be pretty good month. It's not a pot of gold, but it's found money. Since May, I've earned a little over $3000 in royalties from the Kindle on out-of-print titles that were earning me nothing, so I can't complain.
I’m still making $1700 a month, and January has started with a bang. 🙂
Lee – have you put any of your titles on other platforms, specifically the Sony E-reader?
I sure hope I do as well as you do. It would be like found money. Right now I’m just happy to get new readers.
April,
Yes, I have, and I haven’t had much success with it. In fact, I’ve probably sold less than dozen copies on other platforms since May (even though Smashwords makes my books available on Barnes & Noble and, presumably, for the Nook).
Lee
They are available for the Nook. I’ve purchased “Three Ways to Die” and “Mr. Monk in Trouble” for that platform, so I’ve added something to the bottom line.