Omar Johnson
The Fine Art Of Writing The Next Best Seller On Kindle
Introduction
Amazon and its tiny little gadget the Kindle has totally galvanized and revolutionized the entire publishing industry. No longer do authors have to be at the mercy of the big publishing houses like Simon and Schuster, Random House, Harper Collins etc. to get their books out to the masses. The Kindle and Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program a platform that enables authors to self publish their books and make them available to a worldwide audience has totally disrupted an entire industry that needed to be disrupted like the music industry was when Apple introduced the IPod and the ITunes music store.
Traditionally, the only way to publish and get a book into the bookstores was to seek out a well connected literary agent who for a 10 %-15 % cut of the proceeds would shop a book around to the aforementioned publishers with the hopes of landing a book deal. For most authors flat-out rejection was normally the end result of this process. Those who weren’t fortunate enough to be selected by the big name publishers were left out in the cold and their dreams of publishing and sharing their book with the world quickly became a distant faded fantasy.
Then Amazon came along and changed the game. Authors were now able to publish their books in an e-book format and have it distributed digitally throughout the world. Of course e-books have been around even before Amazon decided to get into the e-book market. However, never before have e-books had access to a platform like Amazon with a customer base of 300 million buyers who have their credit cards on file and are ready to instantly make a purchase with one click of the mouse.
The opportunities are tremendous for you as an author and Amazon doesn’t mind sharing with you a big chunk of the pie. Never in the history of publishing until now have authors had a chance to get paid a 70 % royalty rate for every book that they sell while maintaining full ownership of their published work.
The bottom line is, Amazon has set the stage for you as an author to make a boatload of cash by publishing your book on the Kindle and the only thing that you have to do is know how to effectively write a book that will catapult you to Kindle book stardom.
So how do you exactly write a book like that? What are the secrets? This is what this book in detail will show you, The Fine Art of Writing the Next Best Seller on Kindle. So without further ado let’s dive in. Shall we?
Chapter I: Most Popular Content in EBooks/ Personal Branding
Utilizing Kindle it is possible to write a book about anything, however, to increase the chances of success as a writer, the first thing I might want to ask myself is what has been selling? Are there ways I could take my idea for a book and incorporate the winning ideas which have been selling on the market into my work? Does a book have to be purely one category or style in order to sell? Or can it utilize different elements which make up multiple parts of a book?
The answer is very simple, it is best to write what has been successful, and pick up different elements. The most popular books borrow from different books and create themselves as a hybrid mix of popular categories incorporating the best elements from each category.
What are the most popular categories currently for eBooks on Kindle? The categories are as different as the authors who wrote them. In the list of the top 100 e books that were published in 2012 three of them were made into movies in 2012. Books such as Beautiful Creatures and The Silver Linings Playbook have been on the list of the top 100 e-books for more than 52 weeks.
Hollywood is also looking now among the ranks of the top 10 lists on Kindle to find their next most popular screenplays and movies. To Hollywood these books are a shoe in since they have already at that point established their audiences. Hollywood much like traditional publishers utilizes the same formula to decide what it is that they are going to produce and many classic stories which have always turned a profit are being rereleased with a new twist simply for their profitability.
Many of these titles include a retelling of fairy tales, or a complete remake of a classic film. New e-books such as The Silver Linings Playbook allow for authors to change the face of Hollywood one book at a time with suggesting to them through book sales that it is possible to in fact remake the list of selling formulas through book sales.
Paranormal Romance, books such as Beautiful Creatures and the Vampire Diaries have taken off in ways that it is hard to imagine their authors could think of at the time. For example, the Vampire Diaries when it was first published in 1993 was popular in teen circles and talked about among friends. However, L. J. Smith could not have imagined back then that it would in fact be turned into a full-fledged television show at that time.
Beautiful Creatures is the first of 4 books and is being hailed as the New Twilight, as the movie is in production now. Beautiful Creatures alone has sold over one million copies on Kindle. When a contract for a movie is signed the average production time is only a year and a half.
Many new authors are out there right now trying their hands at penning the next best paranormal romance. The category has showed its universal appeal as it frees the reader from the constraints of everyday reality by removing the elements of time, space, reality, and the physical universe. In this respect the reader is able to find themselves swept away into a world of fantasy and romance. This category is the ultimate first class ticket to a world of imagination where bills, screaming bosses, and other issues have no hold on the reader.
Erotica still thought of by some traditional publishers as taboo it is quickly becoming one of the most popular categories on Kindle. Many readers who would have been embarrassed to climb into the First Class seat on an airplane reading an erotica book are now able to sit down and read the book electronically without having to worry what the person who is sitting next to them is going to think about the topic.
E. L. James has easily proven the chops of this category with 50 Shades of Grey which started off as fan fiction for Twilight readers. Now E. L. James is projected with the first book in her series alone, and the upcoming movie to have outsold J. K. Rowling and be well on her way to surpassing the Harry Potter franchise. There is a book on Kindle for any desire and any taste.
Business Books. Have you ever thought of a concept for a business book from an organization you worked for, ever thought of how it should have been employed and things should have been executed? This may be the perfect time to get it down on paper. Right now more than ever many business books are taking off in new ways with new and simpler concepts.
Figurative books as well such as Who Moved My Cheese, have also taken hold on Kindle, as it is very easy for organizations to pass smaller books to their workers who can utilize the metaphors and easily consume the content.
These days a lot of business people talk about it but there is not a lot of detail about what it is exactly. You as an author need to have a brand, a set of concepts and objectives which you believe in and represent yourself to be. When you are writing you are building that brand for your audience, it is as consumable for them as your books. If you are a romance writer for example your audience is actively building an image in their heads of who you are and how you live.
In the past the image of the author was controlled by the publisher, this is a huge part of your brand. These days it is a relationship which is owned by the author in the world of self-publishing, and the readers get to directly connect to you without any third party interference or any barriers. As a self-published author there are many things you need to take into consideration. What are you willing to share with your readers? What parts of yourself are you willing to share?