Self-publishing author Henry Melton has a post on his blog looking at the process of self-publishing his e-books internationally through Apple. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are relatively easy to publish through—once the e-book masters are ready, it only takes about an hour and he’s done.
But things are trickier with Apple, partly because he has to create a separate master to make sure he doesn’t mention the Kindle edition by accident, and partly because for each book he has look up conversion rates and then go through an option screen and set prices for 32 different countries. (Google Editions has a similar process, with 9 different countries, but lets him download a spreadsheet to make the changes all at once.)
“It’s a chore, but it’s an opportunity as well,” Melton writes. “I’ve got writer buddies who are more popular in other countries than the US. It could happen.” On the bright side, the metadata update only takes an hour to come on-line, whereas it’s been almost a week since he submitted his newest book and Apple hasn’t yet approved it for publication.
It’s interesting that Apple and Google are offering self-published e-books to so many international locations. But I thought Amazon made self-published e-books available internationally, too. I wonder how it handles setting prices across the different countries?
Update: Henry Melton replied to a comment I left asking about that indicating that authors can choose to have Amazon handle international sales automatically.
I don’t know about print, but Amazon has Kindle stores in the UK, Germany, Spain, France, and Italy. When you make a book for sale via KDP, Amazon gives you the choice of tying the foreign prices to the US price, or setting each country’s price individually.
Smashwords lets authors publish internationally by making the book available to iBooks, Sony, and Kobo bookstores, among others, and those three bookstores are available in other countries. There is no option to change the price, however; it is always merely converted using the US price as a basis. I believe that at the moment, Apple has the edge in terms of foreign selling of ebooks because iTunes was already set up for sales in many countries. The only English-speaking Kindle stores are in the US and the UK, but iBooks also sells in Canada and Australia.
Kindle Direct Publishing lets you set the price for euro (Germany, France, Spain, and Italy) and GBP based on the U.S. price at the current exchange rate. You can also set it country-by-country if you wish. Those are currently the only countries that are listed in the publishing portal.