Selling your own book on Amazon Marketplace

Most small publishers these days use a distributor to get books into the hands of retailers. Today this is easy to arrange thanks to print-on-demand firms such as Lightning Source, which can wholesale your book through Ingram Books. But some self-publishing authors prefer to handle sales fulfillment themselves, for a variety of reasons.

Handling the shipping chores provides access to buyer information, giving publishers who sell a line of related books the ability to upsell and pitch new titles directly to those buyers.

A third option favored by many authors today is to allow retailers to handle most sales, while reserving the option to ship books in times of emergencies – like when a major outlet like Amazon unexpectedly goes out of stock on your title.

Authors have several options for making their book available for sale on the Internet:

Amazon Marketplace

Anyone with a U.S. bank account can open an Amazon seller account to list copies of books for sale in exchange for a 15 percent commission and certain other fees. Aside from being the Internet's main destination for book shoppers, selling on Amazon allows you to start selling without devising your own billing and marketing system.

Amazon will deposit funds from your sales to the bank account you designate. You'll also receive a shipping credit that will cover most of your shipping costs.
Amazon charges a 15-percent commission on Marketplace sales and separate fees of $1.23 and 99 cents per transaction. The 99-cent fee on each sale is waived, however, if you become an Amazon Pro-Merchant subscriber. If you sell more than 40 books per month on Amazon Marketplace, the subscription will pay for itself.

Having a Pro-Merchant subscription also provides access to bulk sales and inventory tools that can help automate your bookkeeping. A Pro-Merchant subscription also enables you to enter your book into Amazon's catalog by creating a product detail page, a handy option if you are the sole distributor of your book.