EYEWALL NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON’S KINDLE

EYEWALL is now available in e-book format from Amazon, which my publisher’s PR person refers to as the “800-pound gorilla” in the business. Amazon accounts for about two-thirds of all e-book sales.

The company announced last week that it now sells more e-books than printed books. Since the first of April Amazon has sold 105 electronic editions, for its Kindle e-readers, for every 100 traditional books peddled. Amazon now sells about three times as many e-books as it did just a year ago.

For me and my publisher, BelleBooks, this is good. BelleBooks makes the vast majority of its profits from e-books. And I, as an author, make a much healthier royalty off the electronic versions of EYEWALL than I do the trade paperback edition.

Overall, according to the Association of American Publishers, e-books during the first three months of this year accounted for 22.5 percent of all trade sales. That number, according to the more optimistic projections, is expected to reach 50 percent within three or four years.

I trust EYEWALL will soon be available from Barnes & Noble in digital form, too, since I own a Nook, B & N’s e-reader, not a Kindle.

And finally, I’m pleased to learn that B & N is releasing an upgrade for the Nook that will allow authors to sign their e-book editions. Nook owners will be able to activate an autograph capability, hand a stylus to an author and get his or her signature just like with tried-and-true “dead-tree” books… as we in the business call them.

I suppose I’ll have to sign my own EYEWALL Nook book just so I can check this out.