Well, I’ve taken a little look at it all. Initially it seemed that the 70% rate was a load of bollocks because when searching you mostly come up with 35%. However, further searches (thanks Geoff Lynas) reveal that there is a 70% rate for certain regions, and most importantly for me they are UK, USA and Canada. It’s also the case that there is a ‘shipping charge’ of $0.15 X number of megabytes and a 15% VAT rate (though when and where that’s applied I’m not sure).

Another thing putting me off was finding pages with all sorts of instructions about loading the books in HTML or plain text but, on checking, I found that the Word ‘doc’ format is supported. Just to check all this out I signed up (here) with my Amazon ID and finding that there’s a ‘draft’ setting I loaded up my novella The Parasite and, sure enough, I can take a look at how it will look on a Kindle and it’s fine.

The only drawback here for me is that this is all (please correct me if I’m wrong) on Amazon.com and, because its US, any payments I get will have to be by cheque rather than direct to my bank account. Then again, if the cheques turn up promptly I’ve no problem. I do wonder what the minimum amount is before a cheque can be sent.

Okay, I am now going to rework The Parasite and give it a go. When it’s up for sale I’ll let you know how it all goes.