Selling an ebook without Amazon

Every guide to selling an ebook is a list of platforms. The list is the easy part. The decision underneath it — store or direct — is the one that changes what you earn, and it comes down to one question: do you have a way of reaching readers, or are you renting somebody else’s?

The arithmetic

Take a $15 ebook. On Amazon, priced above the 70% band, you are in the 35% band and take about $5.25. Sold direct through a checkout that charges a few percent plus a fixed fee, you keep somewhere around $14.

Nearly three times the money. Which sounds decisive until you notice the last column: on Amazon, ten strangers a month might find the book on their own. Direct, the number of strangers who find it is exactly zero.

Where to sell direct

• A digital-product marketplace (Gumroad, Payhip, Lemon Squeezy and similar). Fastest to set up, handles files, payment and — importantly — sales tax on digital goods, which is a genuine legal obligation in most of Europe and easy to get wrong alone.
• Your own site with a checkout (Stripe, Paddle, Polar and similar). Best margin and full control of the customer relationship. More setup, and the tax question is yours to answer.
• Payhip-style storefronts with built-in email capture, if the book is the front of a bigger business rather than the business itself.

The third option: wide

Between the two sits “going wide” — the same ebook on Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, Barnes & Noble and the library systems, usually through an aggregator like Draft2Digital that handles the uploads and the payments for a cut.

Royalties are typically better than Amazon’s lower band, and no single platform owns you. The trade is that none of those stores has Amazon’s traffic, so wide only pays if you are bringing some readers yourself.

The honest recommendation

1. 1No audience yet? Start on Amazon. It is the only route where strangers find the book without you doing anything, and 35% of something beats 95% of nothing.
2. 2An email list, or a following anywhere? Sell direct, and treat the store as a second channel. Your own readers should not be routed through a middleman taking two thirds.
3. 3A business behind the book — consulting, coaching, courses? Direct, always, and consider giving the book away as a lead magnet. The book is not the product; the reader is.

What you need either way

An EPUB for stores, a PDF for direct sales — many buyers of a direct-sold book want the PDF specifically. A cover that reads at thumbnail size. And metadata written for search, which matters on Amazon and matters just as much on your own site, where Google is the store.