Self-Publishing An E-Book? Here Are 4 Ways To Leave Amazon's 30% Tax Behind

Reblogged from Forbes

In the book-author world, there’s been no bigger shake-up to the establishment than the arrival of the Kindle self-publishing platform (and other self-publishing platforms on iBooks, Nook, and others).

With the arrival of turnkey self-publishing in the form of Amazon’s Kindle platform that enables an author to instantly start selling their books on the world’s biggest book marketplace, authors big and small have realized that they no longer need big publishing in order to get their works out into the world and start making money.

Of course, while most authors don’t make a whole lot of money, those that do usually have their own followings. Whether they are an established writer who has made a name through traditional publishing or someone who happens to have a following as a result of their profession or through some other claim to fame, an author can monetize pretty quickly by uploading and hitting publish.

But there’s a big downside to Kindle publishing in the form of a 30% fee that Amazon takes off the top. Sure, paying only 30% is a heck of a lot better than the traditional splits an author would get through big publishing, but 30% is still a heavy tax, particularly if the author is bringing much of his or her own sales by promoting to their own network.

So what can they do? Well, in today’s democratized publishing world, there are an increasing number of payment and delivery platforms that allow an author to sell their own books while side-stepping the Kindle tax, while also allowing them to truly own the customer (remember: Amazon always owns the customer, especially since authors never know who is buying their books).

Here are four ways to sell your e-book and avoid the Amazon tax:

Gumroad

Gumroad is a simple payment and digital delivery system that allows authors (and anyone with a digital product) to integrate e-book sales directly into their website. Designer Nathan Barry decided to side-step Amazon because he didn’t want to pay the Amazon tax (which would have been higher than 30% because his books start at $39) and integrated Gumroad. The result? Less than a year later he’s made nearly $200 thousand.  And Gumroad isn’t the only upload & sell tool around. Others such as Sellfy, DigitalDeliveryApp and e-Junkie have also proven hugely popular.

E-commerce website platforms

While most people think of Shopify and BigCommerce as ways to sell physical goods, an increasing number of entrepreneur-minded authors are increasingly using these platforms as a way to sell digital goods. Making it easier is the ability to use digital-delivery app plugins like FetchApp to enable instant delivery of e-books to the customer.

WordPress

While WordPress doesn’t have its own built-in commerce functionality, a number of WordPress-centric plugins have been developed to enable the sale and delivery of digital goods. Perhaps the most well known is WooCommerce, which enables an author to set up a store, take payments and deliver their e-book in turnkey fashion.

Squarespace

When Squarespace launched Squarespace 6 last year, one of the first upgrades they made was enabling commerce, with easy turnkey transaction and digital delivery functionality built directly into the web publishing platform. According to Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena, commerce functionality was their most requested feature of all time.

So…Should Every Author Skip Amazon?

No. Amazon and other e-book publishing platforms have worldwide scale and hundreds of millions of built-in customers. Those without an audience – and many with an audience – just can’t beat what the Amazon marketing engine can do for their sales.

But, if you have your own legion of true fans you can access with a decent mailing list and large social media following, nowadays there are ways to avoid that heavy Amazon tax and know the names (and emails) of the people actually buying your book.

 Michael Wolf