When it comes to selling books (particularly ebooks) in the United States, there are two categories: Amazon, and everybody else.
It’s been estimated that Amazon controls around 2/3 of the ebook market in the US, which means that unless you’re available there, you’re missing out on a huge number of potential customers. (Elsewhere this may differ; for example, I’m told that Kobo is big in Canada) In fact, many ebooks are available ONLY at Amazon — but we’ll get to that in just a minute.
Getting started is simple: just go to https://kdp.amazon.com/ and sign in with your Amazon account. You’ll be taken to your bookshelf, where you can create an ebook or paperback.
[There would be an image here, but I’m guessing Amazon may claim ownership of the look and feel of the dashboard and I don’t feel like fighting over it]
Setting up the book requires filling out just three pages: details, content, and pricing. If there’s interest I can write more about all of those, but for now let’s just hit what you’re probably most interested in: money.
Profits: paperbacks vs ebooks
Many self-published authors make the majority of their profits from ebooks, for two reasons. The first is the additional overhead of printing. For example, let’s take a look at the one book I currently make available in print. It’s fairly short — about 180 pages. For print on demand, one copy of a paperback that size costs about $3 to print. When you sell a paperback on Amazon, they will take 40% of the list price, leaving you with 60%, out of which you have to pay printing costs — which means that if I sold the book for $5, I would make no money. In this case, it’s a technical book and the cover price is actually $29.99 (which is in line with what readers would expect to pay for something like this), but a fiction reader might not be happy paying more than $5 or $6 for something this size. The other reason is that ebooks can be borrowed — Kindle Unlimited subscribers pay $10/month (or less on sale) to read as many books as they want and the authors get a cut of that — usually a little under half a cent per page. I don’t do KU for my nonfiction (for this book I’d get less than $1 for someone reading it all the way through, vs $3.50-$6.50 for a purchase) but many people make the majority of their money from borrows. It depends partially on genre; for example, I’m told that romance readers borrow a LOT of books. Being in KU is optional, and in order to sign up your ebook has to be exclusive to Amazon (the print book can be available anywhere, but the ebook has to be Kindle only for the 3-month KU period).
Pricing
When you sell a paperback, you can price it at whatever you want as long as you don’t lose money on it. (Amazon does have an upper limit, but it’s something ridiculous like $1000) For ebooks, books priced under $2.99 or over $9.99 earn a 35% royalty (with one exception), while books priced inside that range (inclusive) have the choice between a 35% royalty or a 70% royalty. You almost always want the 70%, of course; the exception is if your book is extremely graphics-heavy, as Amazon charges a delivery fee based on the file size if you take this option. Other booksellers, such as Apple, don’t try to keep you from pricing the book higher in this way, but Amazon wants ebooks to generally be $9.99 or less.
Generally you want your price to be in line with what other people charge in your genre. I don’t charge less than $2.99 or more than $9.99 for an ebook (except for sales, which we’ll talk about when we get to promotions) but I charge a lot more for my technical material than I do for my science fiction. Genre matters a lot for Kindle Unlimited as well; genres where people read a lot of books (romance) or where books tend to be very long (epic fantasy) tend to do well in KU, and in some cases you’ll actually make more on a borrow than you would on a sale. Interestingly enough, many people find that putting a book in KU doesn’t significantly impact sales, as many people are either borrowers or buyers, but not both. But again, the type of book makes a difference: is your ideal reader looking for your book specifically (and willing to spend the money to purchase it) or is she just looking for anything good in that category?
Distribution
Amazon may be the largest market, but it certainly isn’t the only one. If you want your book to be available at your local bookstore, you’ll have to go through another distributor as they’re most likely not interested in handing money over to Amazon. For print books, the standard is Ingram Spark. Setup is a little bit more involved than Amazon, but not too bad, and you have the option of doing both paperback and hardcover. (Also ebook, but you don’t want to do ebooks through Ingram). You’ll need to set a percentage discount (generally between 35% and 55%) off cover price that bookstores and libraries will get when they buy your book, as well as decide whether to make it returnable. If a book can’t be returned, bookstores generally won’t buy for their shelves it but they will order it if a customer asks for it. I consider allowing returns to be too risky for an indy author, so I don’t allow it; thus, you can order my book from Barnes and Noble, but you won’t find it on the shelf.
For ebooks, you can go direct to each distributor (Apple, Kobo, etc) or go through an aggregation like Draft2Digital that handles all of that and takes their own cut. I specifically set up an account with Kobo so that I can get into overdrive, which makes my ebooks available to libraries.
Next time: dos and don’t of book reviews.
Part 1: What to write
Part 2: Getting ready to publish