E-Book Reader Sales Now In The Millions

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) December 29, 2011 -- 2012 promises to be a banner year for e-book readers. That means huge potential growth for authors who publish e-books

And the market for e-book readers is exploding. Analysts are predicting that just one brand of reader, the Kindles from Amazon, will sell 5 million copies by the end of 2011. During the Christmas season of 2011 Kindles were reportedly selling at the rate of a million a week. Other e-book readers are reporting similar increases in sales. And Kindle is the number two in the market. The most popular e-book reader, analysts report, is Apple's iPad. In the third quarter of 2011, Apple sold over 11 million iPads.

That means there are a lot of happy e-book readers out there. And, according to Rick Cook, author, technical journalist and futurist, that means a lot of happy e-book authors.

“Just a couple of years ago availability of readers was a limiting factor on the sales of e-books,” Cook said. “Today that's no longer true and it's becoming less true with each passing month.”

Cook, who is the author of “Shift Happens: The New E-Publishing Paradigm And What It Means For Writers”, available for $2.99 from Amazon, says that e-books still represent a ground floor opportunity for authors looking to sell their work. “The market potential is huge,” he says, “and the barriers to entry are lower than they've ever been in publishing. Now is the ideal time to start e-publishing because everything is still so new.”

Which isn't to say that e-books are an easy way to get rich. Cook emphasizes that it takes a strong marketing effort by e-book authors to achieve reasonable sales. “On the other hand,” he says, “it can happen quickly. There have already been several cases of e-book authors selling more than 100,000 copies of their books in less than a year. Because the royalties on e-books are so high, this results in large paybacks to authors. “At a typical e-book price of $2.99, that translates into royalty payments of more than $200,000 for one book from one author. It's not automatic, but you can do well if you work at it.”

The key, Cook says, is information. “A successful e-book author has to know how the business works, how to price, how to promote, and most of all how to push. That's why I wrote 'Shift Happens', to show new e-book authors how the business works and where it is going.

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