My friend William, the “Will Bontrager” in Will Bontrager Software, LLC and my go to guy for custom server software programming, has this interesting habit: He gets inspired by things bloggers write, usually problems, that some custom software can solve, or support and enhance, and he quickly writes the software to do just that. Then he often gives it away for free in one way or another. I don’t know where he finds the time since he’s awfully busy (apparently I’m not the only one who considers him the custom server software go to guy), but that’s William for you. Apparently my post, $100,000/Year in Kindle Earnings – Doing the Math, was just such an inspiration.
William sent me an email and said after reading the post, he wrote an online calculator that will help us calculate or estimate those Kindle royalties. Just plug in the required figures and variables. Here, take a look:
See that Amazon Royalties Estimator on the right? It works as you would normally expect — enter some figures into the top fields, and it will spit out how much money you’ll make. But get this: It also works as a reverse royalties calculator!
Try it out! Enter 100000 in the Total royalty income per year field and see what happens. Cool huh?
Now change or reenter any of the values in the fields at the top of the form (number of titles, price, royalty, etc.), then enter 100000 again in the Total field, click on Update and you can see the numbers change accordingly. Immediately.
Read my post to get a good idea on the math that’s going on, and come back here to fiddle with the figures. Neat!
But you know what? You don’t even need to “come back here” to do that. Because that Amazon Royalties Estimator (or Kindle Royalties Reverse Calculator as I like to call it) you see there? You can put that exact estimator/reverse calculator tool right on your own site… free!
Embed it in a post like I have here, or put it on the sidebar (it’s about 250px wide), that’s completely up to you. Undoubtedly useful for your own use. But if you have a site that attracts other indie authors, this’ll give them yet another reason to keep coming back to your site — or at least bookmark it, don’t you think?
And again, it’s totally free. You don’t even have to sign up for anything. Just pick up the code from this page on William’s site:
http://willmaster.com/t/EstRoyal.html
You can copy-and-paste the code he’s got there as-is, but you can also tweak things a bit. If you have any questions or need some support, ask William. He’s incredibly helpful. Or even post your questions in a comment below. I can field questions I know the answers to, and I’m sure William will monitor the comments himself.
Have fun!
UPDATE: William says he tweaked it a bit, and the form now dynamically resizes down to fit in sidebars as little as 200px wide.
Article by Eldon Sarte
