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In today’s episode, we talk about whether to self-publish on Amazon, or sell from your website.
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Flipped Lifestyle Keyword Video
- Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing
- Hostgator – hosting for your own website
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey all you’re listening to the Q&A of S&J.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? Let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Welcome back to our Q&A podcast where we answer one of your questions each week, actually two and today’s question is from Marty and Marty says:
“If you’re creating an e-book that does not have a huge list of follow-up topics, would you suggest self-publishing on Amazon or creating your own sales page and doing your own self?”
SHANE: There are a couple of advantages and disadvantages to both. If you publish on your site, the huge advantage is that you get to keep all of the money so when you sell something for $10 you’re going to get to keep all $10 of that. If you’re going to sell on Amazon you’re going to have to share at least some of the revenue with them. I don’t know the exact percentages but I do know they take a portion of your sales and I know at their highest tier they pay out 70% so at best you’re going to get $7 out of your 10 but I think that’s only for people who sell exclusively through Amazon so I would say it’s a higher percentage they take if you’re just selling on the Kindle store, you might lose upto 40 or 50%, I’m not sure but I do know that Amazon is going to take a good chunk of your money.
The big advantage of Amazon is when people are going to look for a book, they’re going to the Kindle and search for a book. I believe in your email you said your topic was “how to negotiate car sales” so if someone is on Amazon looking for that topic then there are good chances that your book would come up and you might get more exposure that way. However, your website is still going to get exposure from Google. Someone’s going to search for that topic on Google and you might do some good SEO and get your website in a way that it shows up in search results so you’re still going to get that exposure but that is definitely a limiting factor if you don’t have a large audience, that might be a reason you use Amazon to do that.
JOCELYN: I would say you could do both. A lot of people use their entry-level product on Amazon to get people to be aware of their website so that’s definitely a viable strategy if you want to try that. I would definitely recommend starting a website or sales page using some of the language that some of the people in your target audience will use and you can find that by using the Google keyword tool and we actually did a video about that a while back and we’ll put that link for you in our show notes today for the Q&A number 11, but I would recommend definitely doing that. Figure out what your audience is looking for and use that kind of language in your sales page and see what happens.
SHANE: If you go on Amazon and post on Kindle don’t forget you can still do both. I think it’s called their independent publishing program. They do have a tier where you have to give them exclusive rights to the digital copy of your content, that if your e-book is on this program then you don’t get to sell it anywhere else but they have other levels where you can choose to sell it on Amazon and still be able to sell it on your website and maintain the rights to that product so don’t be afraid to do both.
Internet marketing isn’t about all or nothing, you can make choices and go out and try to do both, if one is not working then stop promoting it there and promote it on the one that works the best. We sell lesson plan to teachers and we sell them on online marketplaces like teacherspayteachers.com as well as our own website. Sometimes we will charge more for them on those marketplaces like we have some products that cost 5$ on our website and we want $5 per sale so we might sell it for $8-9 on the marketplace to make up for that hit where that company takes part of the sale from us but it gets us in front of people, more exposure and we get to sell more product.
JOCELYN: As always, make sure you read the terms and conditions that come along with any company you work with. You don’t want to end up in a situation where the company later tells you that you cannot do that because you’ve agreed to this with us.
SHANE: Great question. Go out there and get your product on as many places as possible, don’t limit yourself because if you limit yourself online then you limit the money that you can make. Thanks for asking the question and if you want to ask us a question then go to out Facebook page to Facebook.com/FlippedLifestyle and we will open a post where you can ask your question for a future Q&A with S&J.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
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If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Jerry Stumpf says
Hey there wonderful folks!
So glad this is the topic for this Q & A session.
My Kindle book went “live” this past Tuesday so I would like to add a bit to the discussion.
Kindle Direct Select is the program you mention where they retain exclusive rights for 90 days. They do market your book for you so for new authors it can generate a wider market than you could do for yourself.
There is also a sliding scale of a “royalty” they pay you for listing your book through them.
As you advised to Marty, do your homework and consider which is the best in his specific situation. He can also do a Print On Demand through their CreateSpace department so people can go into the Amazon website and order a paperback copy of his book.
You have to submit a different type of format for each one, Kindle : eBook; and CreateSpace : Paperback.
Hope this helps! It is exciting to look on a site such as Amazon.com and see my book listed there.
Let me know if I can serve in any other way?