For someone with a $25+ book, it ends up making very little sense to list it on Amazon at all. You are probably making at least $20 on the downloadable copy, while the Kindle one would net you $8.75 at the 35% rate.
The royalty from the edition on the Kindle store is like 1/4 of the royalty from selling it on the website. I published it to the Kindle store more as an experiment than anything else to see if I could reach a wider audience there. I still make more sales on the book website than with Amazon.
Not necessarily true. There is a genre fiction writer named Michael Sullivan, who writes fantasy in a similar vein as "A Song of Fire and Ice" (Game of Thrones for fans of the TV show).
His sales from April 2010 to August 2011 was over 70,000 and since then, he's sold over 12,000 a month, never pricing below $4.95 on Amazon, which after their cut, he receives over $40,000 a month.
He recently did a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything)[1], where he disparages the 99-cent price and feels writers should have more dignity and respect for their work than that.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/s6375/hello_reddit_...
KDP has been an experiment for me. I get ok money from it. But I'm not sure it is the correct model for niche technical books. The idea of giving away my book during promotions (I've given it away probably 100x more than sales), makes me wonder if for technical niche books you aren't shooting yourself in the foot by flooding the market with freebies.
But I'm also wondering if I need to change my price. It seems a lot of technical self-pubs seem to be in the $20-$30 range when they sell them themselves. Care you elaborate on that decision?
A side benefit is that it might reduce "book bloat" - the tendency in recent years for programming books to weigh about 20 kg.
and by them I mean Amazon...not the author.
A <$10 kindle purchase for Amazon...means that the person will spend extra to bring the cart up to $25 to get free shipping