Posted By Scath on June 13, 2009

It’s a fact that self-publishers will learn about profit splitting and have to make some choices about where to sell their books, whether they’re e-books or physical copies.

So I’d thought I’d try and be a little useful to anyone considering the self-publishing route by laying out what I know on the subject based on the sites I currently offer my titles through.

I’ll start with Amazon.

Selling e-books for their digital reader, the Kindle, is a great step in marketing your title and yourself as a writer. There are over 100k Kindle owners looking for entertaining reads – dedicated audience going on.

Amazon puts your title in front of thousands of eyeballs by setting up a listing page (which is no different from listing pages for print books or Kindle editions from traditionally published authors) and cross-promoting your title.

They store the file and deliver it for you; if they put it on sale, that discount comes out of their portion of the proceeds, not yours.

The drawbacks are that your Kindle edition is DRM (digital rights managed) and that pisses a lot of people off. Of course, Kindle owners knew the content would be DRM when they chose to buy a Kindle, so I think it’s not that big of a deal. Amazon takes 65% of your cover price, which you set yourself. You receive your full 35% no matter what for each sale, but that’s the lowest split of the sites I sell my titles through.

For example, I have Resurgence listed for $1 everywhere. At Amazon, I receive 35 cents per sale. Not much, but Amazon is by far and away the site my titles sell the most from. Bless you, Kindle owners!

Another drawback is that you have to wait 45-60 days before receiving your payout and you have to reach a $10 threshold before it’s paid out. So if you earn $9.45 during May, it’ll roll over into June’s sales and you won’t see it until August. Amazon pays out through EFT (electronic funds transfer), so you have to provide valid U.S. bank account information to receive payment.

My opinion? You can’t beat Amazon for marketing your title and customer base, and the quantity of sales from both outweighs the low split.

Now for Lulu.com.

Lulu offers the same services as Amazon. They store and handle delivery, create a listing page, etc. But the cross-promotion isn’t all that (if there’s any at all) and their customer base must not be as big as Amazon’s, because sales in my experience have been few and far between.

However, the split is much better. For that $1 title of mine, I receive 80 cents of each sale. With Lulu, you have to reach a $5 threshold before receiving a payout, and the payouts are made by the end of the following month. So about a 30 day wait on your profits.

Lulu offers payout through PayPal or by check, your choice.

My opinion? Lulu’s a good option to have your titles on, but if you want to really sell through them, you’re going to have to promote, promote, promote.

Next up is Smashwords.

I was really excited to learn about this site for two reasons: they have a great split and your titles are converted into several different DRM free formats used by different digital readers, including the Kindle.

Smashwords is the baby of these three, heading towards its 4th birthday. Right at the moment, I’ve yet to see a sale through them, but I’m willing to let it ride and see how things go, just because the idea is excellent.

You receive 85% of your cover price and they offer the same service: listing page, some marketing, storage and delivery of your file. They also allow you to offer some titles for free, which Amazon and Lulu don’t.

My opinion? I’m reserving judgment but really like the idea and the hands on approach of the staff there, who’ve been super to deal with on the one tiny problem I experienced (which they speedily fixed and no longer exists).

The other ways I offer my titles are through my publishing press, Katarr Kanticles Press and here on my site.

The plus to selling through your own site(s) is that you receive your profits immediately. If you’re using PayPal as your payment processor (which you should until you have enough sales going on to justify paying a monthly fee to a different one), you’re looking at a 30 cent transaction fee plus 2.9% of the total price for each sale.

So whether I sell a copy of that $1 Resurgence from KKP’s bookstore or from here on my own site, I receive 67 cents of each sell after PayPal fees. With the use of Zen Cart at KKP or of Instinct’s E-commerce plugin for WordPress, I’m set up for both securely storing and delivering my titles to buyers.

There’s the upside: people coming to either site are probably looking for my e-books. The downside: neither gets the traffic those other three sites do, which means I have to promote my ass off to see any sales through them. But self-promotion is an entirely different blog post, and so is pricing your e-books.

Anyway, if you’re considering self-publishing this will give you an idea of what you’re looking at when it comes to selling through these four different venues. The most important piece of advice I can offer is to not put all your eggs in one basket and keep your prices consistent across the board for each title.

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Categories: Self-Pubbing
Tags: Amazon, Babble, DRM free, e-books, Katarr Kanticles Press, Smashwords, writing