In addition, I’m averaging about 700 digital downloads per month, which net me $2,870.Īmazon’s suite of services for independent authors makes it possible for me and many other authors to bypass traditional publishing companies.

Typically I sell 70 to 100 print books per month, netting around $400 per month from that version of the book. I also now sell paperback copies, which Amazon prints as orders come in, accounting for 10% of my book sales each month. That’s more than double the number of downloads of either of the previous two books during the first four months of publication. Sales during the first four months exceeded 4,000 downloads. I also signed up for distribution through Bookbaby, but didn’t promote those avenues, so I noticed little or no sales.Ĭurious about Amazon’s services for independent authors, last year I listed my third book, Everything I Know, for sale exclusively through their website. My second book, Be Awesome at Online Business, I sold exactly same way. In the following guest post he provides a roadmap to the various Amazon services that have liberated authors from traditional publishers. His upcoming book, The Good Creative, due out June 4, explores 18 traits of the world’s most interesting and respected creative professionals. He’s a web designer and author who has self-published four books, including Everything I Know, which between the print and ebook versions sold a total of 4,000 copies. I'm one of them (see my post, “ How My Book Became A (Self-Published) Best Seller ). Various tools for self-publishing have taken down these barriers for authors who prefer to go it alone. If they didn't ship the package back to you unopened, they would either send you a form rejection letter or make you a lowball offer. Most would grumble that your idea would not be likely to make a lot of money, or that it sounded “more like a magazine article than a book.” At this point you might abandon the project or, if you were really persistent, send your proposal directly to publishers.

Then you might contact a bunch of agents to see if they would be interested in pitching your book to major publishers. First you would have to spend weeks or months writing a book proposal and sample chapters.

Not so long ago, the first hurdle for an aspiring book author was to get past the gatekeepers.

Selling ebooks on amazon