If your published through Amazon’s KDP program (Kindle Direct Publishing – which used to known ad DTP) you might have gotten a letter from them a few days ago telling you about an exciting new “kindle store” called Amazon.de.
What is Amazon.de? It’s Amazon in German and it’s available to residents in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg.
Snazzy, huh?
So what do you need to do to make sure your book is listed there? If you have already ticked the little checkbox that states you have worldwide rights to publish/distribute your book, then nothing. Amazon has already listed all books that have available rights in Germany, to the tune of 650,000 on opening day.
If you’re not sure whether you’re book is available, then you can go to Amazon.de and look yourself up. (I did! It was fun to see my books surrounded by German. It felt very international!) If it’s not there, or if you don’t feel like a search, then you can log in to your Amazon KDP account and check or edit the book’s settings.
What does this mean? Not only is it a new market for authors already published through Amazon’s KDP, but it’s likely to mean an increase in German authors and German language books, as well. European authors will be able to choose whether to be paid in pounds, euros or U.S dollars and – more good news – Amazon is now offering European authors electronic transfer royalty payments, so they can get the money deposited directly into their bank account., which makes royalty payments faster and easier.
Th
e opening of the new Amazon.de kindle store leaves me with just one question: What do you think is next?
Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors 
My only complaint is, I wish they would have warned us. I want to get a German translation of my books out now. I was reassured by my twitter friends that are German that it won’t be a problem. But I thought it would have been nice to have the option for them, when it started.
Still very cool, and who knows, some of us that are struggling in the American market might take off there. It happens to a lot of bands I listen to (unheard of in the US, where they live, but you go to a European country and they are huge.) So why not an author.
That would be very cool to have your books translated!
I actually found the Amazon.de thing before they sent the mails because I’d logged in to check my reports and saw it as a listing. I was like, “what!?” and had to look it up, LOL!
My first thought was that Germans speak…well, German. How common is English there? I’m not really familiar with Germany that much. But even if Germans speak English as a second language, would they choose a book written in English?
That being said…I had my first DE sale yesterday. :0)
I’m not sure. My cousin married a German girl (they live in the uS now) and she spoke excellent english from the beginning. I think a lot of people in other countries do because it’s sort of become the “universal language” for whatever reason. Like a lot of foreign bands sing in English so that they can tour and sell to the whole world easier.
Whoo-hoo! Congrats!
I think it makes more sense to go indie all the time. Distribution is no longer a problem!
I agree!
Well, first let me say I miss you guys! 😦
The Kindle.de is rather cool. I don’t have a clue about how to get my book translated but I’m not too worried about it. Only we in America seem to have an aversion to learning foreign languages. When I travelled in Europe I rarely, rarely had a problem b/c almost everyone, especially if they were under 40, spoke English and I saw a lot of things that were printed in English too. I met a man from Russia recently and his English was excellent. He emailed me later and I was amazed at his English — it was perfect. I’m sorry to say he wrote better than most of the American college students I’ve taught. He explained English is taught in Russia from the earliest grades up and usually to get into any university one has to show a fluency in two foreign languages. I heard the same thing from a woman I know from Poland. I think many Europeans can read English better than they can speak it; pronunciation and accents make speaking it difficult but reading seems pretty standard to them.
So anyway, guess I’ll just see what happens but if anyone knows anything about getting a book translated I’d appreciate the info so I have it in my files.
Hope everyone is happy & well and selling books!
*waves* Hi Maureen!
You;re probably right. I know that in many countries they require at the least a basic grasp of English in order to graduate. I am often amazed at how perfect someone from another country’s English is – and then they will humbly apologize for their “bad” English. I’ve often replied that they write it better than many English speakers I know!
Hi, very interesting to have found this site – I actually wonder how to convert my pdf and self-published book on lulu and amazon.com to kindle and make it also available on amazon.co.uk and amazon.de – I tried various ways of making it available on kindle, the formatting simply seems to be corrupted due to having images inside as well. Ideas???
If you have converted it to a word document from a PDF you may need to do some reformatting to get rid of the extra junk code. You might want to do the nuclear method, depending on how bad it is, where you copy it all into notepad and then paste it into a brand new word document and basically start over (including having to re-insert the images) It can be time consuming but sometimes there’s no other way to do it. Hope this helps!