3 Ways to Sell Your Self Published Book

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Where should you sell your self-published book? Through Amazon. You can also sell from your own website or through a small distribution company, but unless readers already know you, those two make very few sales. Here are all three ways, and why I rank them in this order. If you are curious about marketplaces beyond these three, I explain how to sell self-published books on Etsy as well.

Can you sell your book from your own website?

Yes, and it is the first way. You can sell the ebook straight from your website without Amazon. The reason to do it is the royalties. After payment processing fees and any sales tax or VAT you have to charge in your customers’ countries, you keep nearly all of each sale. A card payment through Stripe, for example, costs 2.9% plus 30 cents in the US (Stripe pricing). On Amazon.com, the 70% royalty option covers ebooks priced from $2.99 to $12.99 since 07-Jul-26, up from $9.99 (KDP eBook list price requirements), and delivery costs come off that.

The catch is that nobody searches for your website the way they search Amazon, and people hesitate to enter card details on a site they do not know. I go into the pros and cons in can you sell directly to readers?

Is it worth selling through a small distribution company?

The second way is a small, unknown or limited self-publishing distribution company. I sometimes get offers from small companies saying they can print copies of my book if I promote them. I only promote companies I use myself, so I say no.

Why would anyone choose this? They don’t pay a much higher royalty. The usual reasons are that Amazon banned them, or that they want to protest against Amazon. Some authors have been banned after other people copied their content onto websites and Amazon asked why they were making books from commonly available material. It was not common. Someone was ripping them off.

This happened to one of my books once. The rule is to contact Amazon immediately if they raise any problem. Their robots can ban you automatically if you do not respond. In my case I could show the registration date of the other site’s content, 2020, against my book’s release in 2017. They stole from me. It is whack-a-mole, so it is not worth going after the copycats.

The other reason is that people simply do not like Amazon, and use their book to punish it. That is your choice. But unless you are famous, it does not work. Super fans will buy your book wherever it is. If nobody knows you, a smaller pool of readers means fewer chances of any sales. And did you punish Amazon? You gave your book to a small publisher that cannot sell it either. I would rather find my readers, build an audience and then pull them off the platform.

I would never recommend either of these first two options to an author who is not famous, because the number of sales will be tiny.

Why do I sell my books through Amazon?

Because millions of readers there already have a card on their account, trust the payment process and can buy with one click. Selling from your own site can feel a bit fishy to a stranger. On Amazon people are used to buying. When they see your book in search results or in your ads, some will click Buy Now. Those searches run on keywords, so see do this now with your KDP keywords. If you want more sales with less effort, see now you can have more book sales with less pain.

Then you put the royalties back into the business: for me that meant hiring virtual assistants and employees who help with book production, and who have moved into video production too. The aim is to be on as many channels as possible, reach as many readers as possible, make it easy for them to buy, and then publish the next book. Amazon also prints hardcovers through KDP, and I recommend KDP and IngramSpark for paperbacks and hardcovers.

Even if I disliked Amazon, I would still sell there. Why shoot myself to punish somebody else? On a micro-distribution network nobody would see my book, so I would hurt myself and the readers who would value my books, and a small self-publisher would gain nothing. A no-name author gains from “know, like and trust”, not from a protest. Amazon started me on my business journey, and I am grateful for that. I value getting my books selling more than getting them not selling.

In what order should I add formats and stores?

One at a time, starting with the Kindle ebook. Here is my own sequence, which I follow and teach. No store requires it:

1. Kindle ebook on KDP. I tell my students not to worry about marketing until the book is published here.
2. Paperback on KDP. Once the ebook is live, add the paperback.
3. Audiobook. Find a narrator and publish through ACX, which puts it on Audible.
4. Hardcover. Added after the paperback.
5. IngramSpark. It reaches more print outlets than KDP alone. It can cost a little more because you need your own ISBN, though depending on your country you may get one free. In Norway I get mine free.
6. Other ebook stores through Draft2Digital. Do this after KDP, and mind the KDP Select rule below.

Publishing everywhere on the same day is the mistake. You spend weeks on platforms before the book has a single sale, and I would rather you get one version on the market, run ads against it and add the next place once sales come in.

The KDP Select rule. KDP’s help page says KDP Select is “a free 90-day program for Kindle eBooks and audiobooks”. For a Kindle ebook, it says the ebook “must also be exclusive to the Kindle Store for the KDP Select enrollment period” and that “during the 90-day enrollment period, the Kindle eBook can only be distributed through KDP and public libraries”. It adds that you can continue to distribute print, video or other formats elsewhere (KDP Select enrollment, read 14-Nov-26). So if you enroll a new ebook in KDP Select, it stays off other ebook stores until you leave the program at the end of a 90-day period, while the paperback can go wide at once.

Did selling books on Fiverr work?

It was an experiment. On a podcast I heard of someone who bought a house from royalties earned by selling books as gigs on Fiverr, a freelance marketplace. I had never thought of selling a book as a gig. I put my book in PDF format, which was easy because I already had it for my paperbacks. With Atticus, which I use for formatting, the PDF has a table of contents already, so I only added the cover. I listed three or four books. When a buyer starts the gig, they get the link, mark it complete and leave a review.

I saw a few sales over a couple of years, all with five-star reviews, which fits how non-fiction works: a book that solves a problem gets a positive review. But the money was too little to be worth my time, so I mostly ignored it. I would not buy formatting there, because you keep needing changes and many sellers do not do it correctly.

It was still worth the experiment. In my experience, of every 100 experiments one or two are real wins, like IngramSpark and my first hardback books on Lulu.

Which ways of selling have you tried? Tell me in the comments. If you want help choosing the right route for your book, book a free 25-minute discovery call.

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