How to publish Your Blog on Amazon Kindle?

Amazon Kindle is best known as an electronic book and newspaper reader, however,  the device also has the ability to read blogs. Amazon has a list of blogs available on their site that you can subscribe to. And then you can read those blogs. Earlier Amazon only all0wed bloggers of repute to enlist their blogs and made them available for subscription, but sine mid 2009 Amazon has allowed everyone to enjoy the fun of posting their blogs and earn some money. The money you earn is not much, and beside that there are other issues. I will come back to them later.

Starting it Up!

So the next obvious question would be, how to get your blogs listed? For that Amazon has started a program which is called the Kindle Publishing For Blogs program.  Your first step would be to sign up and create an account. But before you create and then start publishing your blog you should be aware of the following things which are very important:

1. Your current Amazon or Kindle account is not enough. You have to create a new separate account for this publishing program
2. You need to reveal some private information like your financial information such as tax ID number and bank account information
3. Even if you are not from US you can sign up for the program, but then there are issues for international bloggers (i.e. bloggers not from US). Issues like, international publishers can only receive their funds via a U.S. check, which can come with significant fees to cash.

What about the money honey?

If you are looking at Kindle with the hope to make lot of money then think again. And you don’t get any option, Amazon will price it according to its judgement. And then there is no way to distribute your blog for free either.

Another important thing is the revenue sharing. The revenue is shared 70:30, with 70% of the subscription revenue going to Amazon. Yes you heard it right, 70% of the revenue obtained from subscription would go to Amazon. So for example your blog is priced at $0.99 per month and there are 1000 subscriptions to it. Then you won’t get $990 dollars, rather only 30% of it which amounts to $297. So as you can see it falls way behind in terms of providing major source of income, but then its better than getting not paid at all.

Distribution Issue!

Another factor that bothers me a bit here is the way your blog is going to get distributed and the way your earning depends on that. Kindle sure is an new innovative way of reading blogs, but somehow I feel it is difficult to get the kind of subscription that can help bloggers earn the kind of money we are looking at. Although I don’t have the data with me of the number of people who subscribe to it, but the proposition doesn’t seem to be exciting and worth enough to turn many heads. Hope Kindle has better and more attractive way to distribute the blogs and thus help publishers get a handsome share.