Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%
This is confusing. Here is someone with a <i>FANTASTIC</i> first outing of a book and he's whinging about it?<p>The author raises $8K on Kickstarter, sells his book for $10, and is complaining that the 'gorilla' is taking a bigger percentage of the take?<p>Using his numbers: of 73%/11%/12%/1% his money was $1117/$231/$333/$20 respectively. So he made three times as much money selling through Amazon as he did on the next closest service (PDF).<p>So what is his complaint? That he didn't read the contract completely? Would he have forgone selling his book on Amazon if he had? Assuming he was trying to get $7/book out of them would he have raised his book price to $15 to pump that price up? And what would that have done to his volume?<p>Its all well and good to posit that you could store your book on an FTP server at Hurricane electric but how would people find it? How would they read it?<p>And then why all this angst over the first few months? The kickerstarter [1] only funded in April, here it is June he has his book out, most travel magazines have like a 3 month lead time on their content, plus folks need to review it etc. What was he expecting? And more importantly since this reads like he is hugely disillusioned by the experience exactly why was he expecting what he was expecting? Didn't he 'get' that he could not have published this book at this level of success <i>at all</i> prior to Amazon?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewhyde/this-book-is-about-travel?ref=live" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewhyde/this-book-is-...</a>