Is Kindle Publishing The New Adsense?

I normally consider myself to be at the bleeding edge of what works in IM and what the trends are but one trend has totally passed me by.

That trend is publishing books for the Kindle.

I first thought I might have missed something when I had a request last month to add a kindle and self publishing forum to WPGoldmine, I really didn't think that there would be that much interest' How wrong was I?

1 Month later there are over 1100 posts in that section.

When I saw the following post today by one of our Kindle and Self-Publishing pioneers Damian I knew i'd got it very wrong, He said:

Tomorrow it will be a month since CS Europe started. I've made £100 in extra sales just from the UK in 1 month and I even hiked the prices as a test. My Adsense income has reduced so much that the 5 minutes it took me to make all my CS books available in Europe has eclipsed 3 years of work on my sites now haha.

(CS is CreateSpace a self publishing site for Amazon)

The clues were under my own roof if I'd been paying attention, my wife has her own writing business and up to about 2 months ago she was almost exclusively writing 500-700 words articles for clients, now she spends her time almost exclusively researching and writing e-books for clients. It seems that this time I've been really slow to pick on on self publishing despite have several successful books on Clickbank.

The great thing about self publishing seems to be that you can publish in any genere that you want, The topics covered by the WPG members who are making money from kindle are varied from self help books, receipe books fiction books to children's stories, it seems you are really only held back by your imagination.

Publishing kindle books initially got a bad reputation when like with every new income generating method people decided that they could make money without doing much work, this resulted in people publishing the same PLR books as everyone else, Amazon clamped down on this last year and since then the medium has gone from strength to strength and is only set to get stronger.

Looking around researching this post, I noticed that the really interesting thing about kindle publishing and self publishing is that there are so many other markets that will open up to you in the coming months, I have a kindle reader on my iPad and my iPhone, my daughter has one on here smartphone, Apple have ibooks, Barnes and Noble have the Nook e-book reader which has recently had $300 million worth of backing from Microsoft, there is a vast market out there just waiting to be tapped.

The process for earning money from your e-books is on the face of it seems relatively simple, you publish your book on to kindle, then set it as a free book for a set period of time i.e 48 hours and publicize it, this helps get reviews and gets it ranking in the bestsellers lists. Once that happens you then charge for it, $1.99 or $2.99 seems to be the sweet spot at the moment.Just like Adsense sites, you don't have just one book, this is a process that is scaleable so you have several books (ever noticed that the most successful authors have series of books based around the same characters?) I am sure you all have heard about Amanda Hocking who has made multiple Millions of dollars as a result of self publishing on the kindle 99 cents at a time.

Last year things started to take a strange twist with amazon setting up their own publishing companies to sign authors and actively market books in stores and on kindles, For example Thomas and Mercer focus on publishing thrillers and mysteries, while other amazon publishing houses focus on romance and other genre's. You can be sure that other bricks and mortar publishers will be looking closely at the success of authors like Amanda Hocking and E.L.James and setting aside their prejudice about self published authors.

Below you can see an Infographic I got from Infographiclabs that shows the growth of the e-reader, one thing that stands out for me is that the demographic that buys e-readers is the very same demographic that most marketers want to target. If you'd like to know more or get started in publishing you could do worse that checking out the Kindle and Self Publishing Forum at WPgoldmine