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Crossed 500$ in book sales

The book I wrote in May/June just crossed 500$ in sales.

I put the book on Gumroad first as this was the easiest and cheapest way to share my work with the rest of the world. It had some success and I decided to explore other distribution channels. I read good things about Amazon KDP so I gave it a try and published the book on Amazona as ebook and Paperback on 11 August.
Here the Pros and Cons.

Cons

  • The process of putting a book on Amazon is a bit more complex and it involves writing the book in another format (I had a pdf so I needed to translate to ebook format)
  • The pricing needs to be adjusted as royalties drop to 35% for products with a price higher than 9.99$
  • The profit per sale is much lower than Gumroad. Max royalties is 70%

Pros

  • You leverage the Amazon store audience and reach many more potential readers.
  • You can sell the printed version of your book. Amazon will take care of the printing costs.

I was not even monitoring how the sales were going until 2 days ago when I got a surprising email from Amazon saying that some funds were on their way. Hurrah!
In the end I managed to sell enough copies to cross the symbolic 500$ mark and more importantly reached people from all over Europe, US, UK, Brazil and Mexico!

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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      Yeah I don't have a big following on Twitter, AlfaData account has less than 700 followers.
      I sold 27 copies on Gumroad and 15 on Amazon.

      I find Gumroad has a much easier setup. You can also play easily with pricing, discount codes and different versions of the same book. For example I have 2 versions and it took me very little time to set up. I pre-sold the first copies before writing a single chapter of the book.

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        This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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