Indie authors are burning up the bestseller e-charts in the United Kingdom, according to a press release this month from Amazon.co.uk.
The company says independent British writers are matching the success of Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader with its Kindle Direct Publishing platform to take top spots in the Kindle Store’s bestseller list.
In the last quarter of 2011, Lancashire novelist Kerry Wilkinson was the Kindle Store’s #1 bestseller with his independently published Locked In, the first book in his Jessica Daniel detective series.
Wilkinson has also released two other books in the series, Vigilante and The Woman in Black, using the Kindle publishing platform and together they have sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the Kindle Store at Amazon.co.uk. Books four and five in the series, Think of the Children and Playing with Fire, are due for release this year.
Also finishing high in the standings was Katie Stephens of Surrey, a self-confessed ‘chick lit’ writer, who saw her debut novel Candles on the Sand become the #5 bestselling book in the Kindle Store in the last quarter.
Kindle was the biggest selling product at Amazon.co.uk in 2011 and sales of Kindle books in the three months following the launch of the all-new Kindle were almost five times higher than the same period in 2010, the company said.
The Kindle Direct Publishing gives writers a free and relatively simple way to self-publish their books for distribution through the Amazon Kindle Store.