After 1 Full Month Selling My Book on Amazon - Things I Have Learned
Including a breakdown of my printing costs, Amazon's take, and my royalty per book sold.
Writing and finishing a manuscript is difficult; completing it is a huge accomplishment. If you’re currently in the process of finishing your book, keep at it! Eventually, your manuscript will be complete and then it’s a question of what comes next.
For me, the obvious choice was to put my book on Amazon and see if anyone would buy it. Amazon is the biggest book marketplace in the world and they make publishing easy. (Well, relatively easy…) I’ve been reflecting on what my first full month on Amazon has been like, and here are some crucial things that I have learned.
Amazon’s royalty system is transparent and seems to treat authors fairly.
Here’s how the price for my paperback in the U.S. breaks down:
List Price: US$ 14.99
Printing Cost: US$ 3.71
Amazon Takes: US$ 6.00
My Royalty: US$ 5.28
For someone making precisely zero dollars from writing a couple of months ago, I’m very grateful to receive $5.28 per book!
People go on Amazon with the intent to buy
This is a big advantage that Amazon has over other platforms. People visit other platforms (Facebook, YouTube, etc.) for many reasons. However, people visit Amazon for one reason only… to buy something. I know from Amazon’s analytics that my book received 57,708 impressions in August. That’s a lot of people, all with the intent to buy. From those impressions, my book has received 100 clicks to visit my book’s sales page. One hundred strong prospects to sell my book to… that’s awesome. (My click-through rate is 0.17% and I’m told that anything over 0.10% is considered good.)
Amazon Reviews are Essential
Amazon ranks and displays books based on a mysterious algorithm that it constantly updates. However, Amazon’s review system is critical in choosing which books it shows you. I have come to understand that when you type in a search term, the algorithm first checks the keywords. One of my keywords is “dating,” but hundreds of books use that keyword. The algorithm also looks at the book’s sales and assumes books with higher sales are better, so it will show those. Once it goes through that, it still has many books to show you, so then it considers reviews. Books with more reviews (and most importantly) 5-star reviews are far more likely to appear on your first search page. Since most customers don’t look past their first page of search results… reviews matter!
So far, my book has had 21 reviews across all Amazon regions. That's not bad for a first-timer, but it’s quite low considering that there are books about dating that have hundreds and even thousands of reviews. I’ve been pretty active in getting reviews for my book, and I’ll write an article in the future on how I do this.
There’s much more to learn about Amazon than this… like Amazon Ads… oh, man. Amazon ads are a complicated topic on their own. What I will say here is that I have been running ads consistently, spending around $5 per day, and ads do work. However, setting them up and optimizing them is a complicated task.
Ultimately, I am happy to have my book on Amazon and I will publish more books on Amazon in the future. I highly encourage everyone working on their own book to finish and go through the experience of putting your book on Amazon. You will learn a lot. It is not a guaranteed path to success, as some books sell well while others do not. However, you will be able to apply what you learn to your future books, and in this way, you’ll be able to grow on Amazon.
Happy writing!
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I do appreciate your clarity here, and keep up the explanations, however if you are using Amazon Ads, that's not really a fair representation for those who purely publish on Amazon without ads and want to know how many clicks and hence royalties they should expect.
I love the excitement and transparency in your Posts.
That's a fantastic result, especially the ratings. They are so hard to get and you have done an excellent job at leveraging Substack to get them.
Keep it up!