Some alternatives to selling on Amazon

If you're not keen to sell your books through Amazon, this post will give you a few ideas about other options.

First of all though, I want to preface this by saying that I am not trying to convince you to ditch Amazon. I sell my work through Amazon, and that's where the majority of my sales come from despite all the other sales channels I use.

Indie Author Solidarity is seeking to help drive positive change at Amazon, not to bring it down. Some authors may decide that boycotting Amazon is the way they want to go, while others may want to advocate for change in other ways while still being part of the Amazon ecosystem.

Either way, having options is a good thing, so I'm here to tell you about some of them.

Smashwords

Smashwords is probably the leading alternative to Amazon. It only sells books, and it’s developed by authors with authors in mind.

Smashwords also sells to other retailers including Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple, and even Amazon. So if you put your book in the Smashwords catalogue it will be available in a range of stores that your customers might be more likely to visit than Smashwords itself.

Google

You may not be aware (but probably not surprised) that Google has an ebook selling arm. It’s part of the Google Play store, the same place you buy apps and movies.

IngramSpark

IngramSpark is a platform that does both print and ebook distribution. So, like Smashwords, it sells to a range of other retailers. IngramSpark has a fairly steep upfront fee to publish a book though.

Setting up your own store

I’ve set up my own store to sell my books directly. It hasn’t exactly done a booming trade, I think in part because people are a little sceptical about giving their money to some random guy on the internet. But I’ve sold a few books this way, and one advantage is that you keep almost the entire sale price yourself.

My store is run through Payhip. They make it really easy to set up a store, and they host it themselves so you don’t need your own website. They take a cut of 5% (I think) for each sale, and you also have to pay a fee to either PayPal or Stripe to process the payment. For me the payhip fee plus the Stripe fee has generally worked out to be about 15% or less of the book price (leaving me with about 85%).

Alternatively if you already have your own author website you could upgrade it to include an online store and take payments. My website was created by Wix, and there’s an option to upgrade to an account that includes a store. This would be a little more seamless than directing people to a Payhip page with a different look and feel to your main website. I believe Squarespace has a similar setup.

There's also Shopify. They do some nice-looking integrations with social media, which is useful if you don't have a website and you do most of your selling through social media.

Wix, Squarespace and Shopify all charge per month, while Payhip charges per transaction. So which option's better value for money will depend on how many sales you're making (or expecting to make) each month.

Any others I’m missing?

I’m sure there are probably other options I haven’t thought of. If you know of any good ones please add them in the comments.