Kindle tagged posts

So its been a month since I managed to blog about something. Back then I wanted to do a post about how Amazon should finally open their Kindle store to the rest of the world … or at least to my neck of the woods, which happens to be Germany. There had been rumors for weeks that the opening was imminent.

And now, just before the Easter weekend, Amazon finally did it. They opened the Kindle Store to German users. 650,000 titles are now available to download, including 25,000 German titles … which is a number bound to increase. The majority of German book titles is not yet available in ebook format, but that will change if and when publishers convert their massive backlists.

Until now the German ebook market is just a footnote in the overall publishing industry...

Wow … what a week so far. Let’s recap the 2 major news I want to a adress in this post.

1) Barry Eisler, an NYT bestselling author turns down a $500,000 deal from St. Martin’s Press in order to self publish his next novel.

2) Amanda Hocking, the ebook-self-publishing shooting star of the past few month signs a $2,000,000 deal with … wait for it … St. Martin’s Press.

So basically St. Martin’s went “We don’t care about you leaving Barry … we’ll just give your money and way more to Amanda Hocking. Take that!”

Until a couple of weeks ago, when he announced on JA Konrath’ blog that he’d be publishing a short story on Kindle, I never heard of Barry Eisler, let alone that he was an NYT bestselling author...