- Are you publishing on KDP
and thinking about selling public domain books on Kindle?
Today we're going to discuss that.
So make sure you stay tuned.
Hey am Dale L. Roberts, best selling author
as well as a self publishing advocate
who wants to show you, how to publish books that sell.
If you want that too, make sure of course,
that you subscribe to this channel,
and join me on Twitch every Monday at 12pm.
Also, if you have Amazon Prime,
you can subscribe to me for free @twitch.tv/self publish
and get a few freebies in the process.
Stick around to the very end because I'm going to give you
a full public domain resource list
that's going to give you all of the resource
that you could possibly need for public domain books.
First of all, what are public domain books?
This is content that is belonging
or available to the public.
In other words, there's no copyright essentially,
in other words, no one specifically owns the content.
It's available to the public.
How can you tell if a book
is available in the public domain?
Well, here's what's interesting when it comes
to actually producing and writing content.
A copyright begins the moment that you put pen to paper,
or type the very first key
and create some type of copyright by doing that.
And it's essentially a fixed medium
that can last upwards of about 70 years
after the author's death.
So for instance, the day I die,
another 70 years beyond that
my works become public domain.
And this means even if it's never published,
it is officially public domain.
Now, there's new works that enter
the public domain every January 1.
And currently works from about 1924
are starting to roll out into the market.
But there's this common public domain stigma
that kind of remains.
It's kind of a cloud over top of things,
especially if you're the traditional-style author,
that you're the person that wants to go ahead
and do it all yourself.
And I gotta admit to you that if it wasn't until I spoke
with my ever faithful assistant Eva Fails about it,
I really felt that way too.
I thought, why would you want to take somebody else's work
and profit from it?
Just a little bit of history.
Amazon themselves actually used
thousands of public domain books
to fill their Kindle store
when they had first launched back in 2008.
So Amazon's not going to be trying
to be doing anything scammy or skeezy,
or anything that's going to,
you know, put a black eye on their business.
So they obviously got into this at a very early stage.
And it should be noted, this is not a get rich quick scheme.
So don't think that you're going to start
to publish public domain books
and profit hand in fist because the fact of the matter is,
most public domain work is really old.
And a lot of it's scanned
and sometimes the scanning of the specific documents
are somewhat illegible or kind of just beat up and tattered.
So you're going to have to take it from the
not the best format in the world and format it yourself.
And when you're publishing public domain books,
it's the same and normal publishing process
that you would do through KDP.
With the exception of say,
you're not really writing and editing.
All you're gonna have to do
is just making sure that you get the content
into the best format possible.
So you're gonna be responsible
for formatting the manuscript,
getting the book cover done,
as well as getting any type of metadata
and price points put in place.
So how do you publish public domain books on Kindle?
There has to be differentiation.
Because let's just face it,
there are a lot of people out there
that are just flooding the market
with a ton of public domain books
with no real deviation or differentiation.
So that means,
there's a ton of the same products over and again.
We only need "Think and Grow Rich" so many times
before it's just a little bit too much.
So that's why Amazon wants to make sure
that you have some differentiation.
And they actually say these three things
are what they're looking for.
You have to do one or all of them.
Translation.
Okay so before you even go
and take a manuscript
and try to pop it over to Google Translate
and get it to put together
some really ruggedy looking translation.
Let you know right now, Amazon does not like that.
They do not want you to be putting any kind of
machine generated translations because it's garbage.
In due time, maybe that machine learned
translation might end up doing something better.
But for now, they don't want that.
And also, if you're going to do a language,
it needs to be a new language.
So they don't want to have 50 iterations
of "Think and Grow Rich" in Spanish.
Quite frankly, they need to have some differentiation.
The next one's annotation.
So think like study guides, literary criticism,
detailed bios or historical context.
Something that you can put into this work
that puts a little bit more of who you are,
or some insights that you have beyond the book.
This is something that's commonly used
when it comes to public domain.
Sometimes people will turn a public domain book
into say a workbook of sorts.
To where maybe at the very end,
they have like a quiz of some sort
of the chapter that was read.
Or maybe they put some behind the scenes type things
about the specific author that they know about.
The last one is gonna be illustrations.
You need to have at least 10 or more
unique illustrations inside the book.
Now again, you can use one or all of these things.
But either way illustrations is one of the ways to do this.
But the illustrations must be relevant to the book.
So you can't just go and grab some random thing
and throw it into your book
and expect everything to be hunky dory with KDP.
What does not qualify as differentiation?
Though they're a nice to have,
and this is gonna include a clickable table of contents.
Yeah, it's nice to have
a clickable table of contents in any ebooks.
I'd highly recommend you do that,
but that's not differentiation.
Improve formatting, just because you price your book
for the Art of War at 19.99,
while somebody else has it at 9.99
doesn't mean that's its different,
doesn't mean that it's a deviation.
They're nice to have, but in the same instance
it's not one of the three things I discussed before.
How much does KDP pay for the public domain work?
It's really rather simple.
I'll just go ahead and tell you
exactly what KDP is looking for.
And they say, the 70% royalty option is
for in copyright works only.
Works in the public domain
or consisting primarily of public domain content
are only eligible for the 35% royalty option.
If you add substantial original content
or publish an original translation,
so that your book is not primarily public domain,
then it would be eligible for the 70% royalty option.
Just kind of a fair warning that
some works that are public domain
in certain regions of the world are not in other regions.
So you're going to want to make sure
that you do your due diligence
when you utilize any type of public domain.
Because just because it's public domain in the US,
doesn't mean that it's going to be public domain in the UK.
You want to make sure it's public domain worldwide
if you utilize that to your KDP dashboard.
Hey, I told you I was going to give you
a full public domain resource list.
Actually all you got to do
is head over to my website right now.
Got a full post put together
by my ever faithful assistant Eva Fails.
When you visit dalelinks.com/publicdomain,
you get quite a bit of resources there.
She was very helpful in putting it together.
You get some additional insights
when it comes to publishing
public domain work on Amazon KDP.
And speaking of Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing,
hey, is it worth it?
I mean, is KDP worth it in 2020?
We're going to find out in this very next video.
You're gonna come on over and join me
I'm gonna share all the pros and cons.
It's gonna be a great time.
I'll see you there.