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Two new Amazon initiatives and a chance to 'double your money'

10 April 2017

Two new initiatives from Amazon are worth checking out, one which may help get your books out there and one which seems largely to benefit Amazon's drive to grow its Amazon Prime business. Plus there's also an author outlining how you can get your own ebooks out to an international audience.

Amazon has launched Kindle Create in beta mode, and it's designed to help authors convert a Word document to a publishable ebook in easier steps. It's a tool that aims to make that process a little easier and is useful to anyone wanting to convert a Word document to a publishable ebook in easier steps.

Authors who work in both paperback and ebook by going through the CreateSpace platform may not need this step unless their books are rejected for formatting issues, but this will certainly help those who go straight to ebook with their off the page writing. There are options for helping create your table of contents, preview panes that let you see it as it would appear on a device, and even attractive themes for your pages.

Prime Reading, an "all-you-can-eat" service for Amazon's US Prime members, provides unlimited reading from a "curated, rotating" selection of Kindle books, magazines and comics, chosen by Amazon Books' editorial team, at no additional cost to members' Prime subscriptions. It's only available in the US at the moment, but will presumably be spun out to other markets if it's a success.

Prime Reading launched in October 2016, but apparently, the company has recently begun approaching authors with an offer of $5,000 in exchange for helping it to fill a "limited number" of spots available on the programme. The internet giant's aim is of course to grow the Amazon Prime membership.

Meanwhile author Cory Doctcorow argues that his new site offers authors the chance to double their income by using the site to sell ebooks directly internationally, especially to book-buyers in those countries where English is not the native language, which are being poorly served by publishers at the moment. The author expounds the advantage to the author of doing this, not least in terms of earnings on ebook sales of their books. It's worth considering whether this might be an option for you, but if you're with a traditional publisher they're likely to have something to say on the subject.

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