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!
Gratz, I get a habit to check twitter followers count before I check the content when I saw the sale numbers. In this case it's inspiring, would you mind sharing the numbers you sold on gumroad vs amazon.
TIL, "Amazon will take care of the printing costs."
I thought authors need to settle with publishers for paperback versions.
And have you checked stripe checkouts? I don't have a PayPal account, so I'm not familiar with Gumroad. I don't get what it offers beyond Stripe to take that extra cut.
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.
Oh I didn't see that you have a separate account for the project. You have a nice niche over there.
Thanks for sharing the numbers, I guess Gumroad also offers affiliate marketing out of the box. Which also helps a bit as I read through other author's breakdowns.
Gratz, I get a habit to check twitter followers count before I check the content when I saw the sale numbers. In this case it's inspiring, would you mind sharing the numbers you sold on gumroad vs amazon.
TIL, "Amazon will take care of the printing costs."
I thought authors need to settle with publishers for paperback versions.
And have you checked stripe checkouts? I don't have a PayPal account, so I'm not familiar with Gumroad. I don't get what it offers beyond Stripe to take that extra cut.
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.
Oh I didn't see that you have a separate account for the project. You have a nice niche over there.
Thanks for sharing the numbers, I guess Gumroad also offers affiliate marketing out of the box. Which also helps a bit as I read through other author's breakdowns.