Earlier today a friend of mine asked how self-publishing works with Kindle.  Again, because the community provided the training and information to me freely, my goal is (and was) to simply reproduce the “trustless” meme in the widest, freest ways possible (hence an open Creative Commons license plus epub, PDF, Scribd, HTML); and the Kindle platform is the largest ebook retailer around so it would make sense to put it on there too.

The lowest price an author can price a book at is $0.99, though if you use the “Select” program you can temporarily reduce it to as low as $0 for like a once-a-month weekend gimmick.  But to be part of the “Select” program you have to opt-in to their exclusive system that allows them to kick you off the entire bookstore if they find you placed the ebook on another platform (like iTunes or Scribd).

In addition, the current platform for Kindle-only publications limits authors to placing a book in just 2 categories. So what are the broadest categories something like GCON could be placed in?

I chose ecommerce/online trading for one and the other was… computer & technology/algorithms primarily because of the amount of technical language used throughout.

I am not sure what the other sales volume for the other 8 listed below are, but I am curious to know if Amazon uses a weighted metric to temporarily boost a new release up to the top spot easier than say, a book that has been published for 2-3 months.

Here’s an image that shows a reason why I think that may be the case:

I’m flattered and thankful but which of these is not like the other…

[Note: I hope that others can take the manuscript, purge its weaknesses and improve on it over the coming months and years.]