It’s a tale as old as time…er…no, not that old. But one often argued about. Authors want sales. Publishing outlets restrict how that happens. Authors always seek the easy way. Honestly, there is no easy way. There is no one way. And any way often changes from time to time.
Aside from print quality, returns issues, billing, lack of visibility, each outlet has pros and cons.
Amazon holds 70+% of the ebook market and 40-50% of the print book market. Ingram does better than Amazon with print distribution because bookshops and libraries won’t take an Amazon book because there are NO wholesale discounts, and many do not like the monopoly that Amazon represents.
I know many authors are fearful of Ingram because of horror stories of returns and shipping costs billed to the author. A partially justified fear, and yet not one that is justified. Ingram offers wholesale discounts of 40-55% with the option of return shipping. Go into a bookstore and look at the volume of books. If the retailer had to buy them up front, they would go out of business.
10–20% of book titles generate 70–80% of unit sales, while 30–40% titles sell occasionally, 40–60% do not sell in a given month
To offer a wide selection, distributors like Ingram offer a discount set by the author, generally 50-55% with the right of return. This way the store is not liable for holding onto dead inventory and also is relieved of return shipping costs.
Authors can choose to have the book delivered to them (since they are charged the wholesale price because the book got printed) and then have to pay the added postage, or they can elect to have the books returned to Ingram and destroyed, in which case Ingram doesn’t charge the shipping cost.
So, as much as you want your book in Target, Supermarkets, or Costco, imagine 100,000 copies printed and delivered to just these three national chains, only to have 60% (60,000 copies) returned. Your wholesale cost is what the retailer would have paid. For a $20 title, that might be $10, multiplied by 60,000 copies returned, and you are out of business as an author.
Which is why, unless you are signed with a major publishing company that can remainder out the returns and reduce the loss, your focus should be on the easiest path possible.
So, you tell yourself, who needs print anyway? YOU DO!
In 2024, 72.9% of the market sales of fiction were print, according to the Association of American Publishers (AAP). Digital and audiobooks only captured 14% of the market. Print is still king!
Other than Amazon and Ingram, there are other Print on Demand (POD) outlets, including Lulu.com, Draft2Digital, Books.by, and several others. Each offers a variance of the process with differing base costs, shipping costs, and royalty rates.
I’ve spent significant time analyzing the merits of each, including selling direct to buyers. My initial premise was that it was far better as an author to retain as much control as possible, therefore maximizing my royalty income. Amazon serves a purpose, and despite tighter restrictions on royalty rates, it is still the major dominant player globally. Now, many people argue that since bookstores won’t buy from Amazon, what’s the point? As I demonstrated above with the horrific potential for returns, one needs to have a distribution system that favors the author and not the publisher.
Selling directly to buyers means that I need to have inventory on hand, which I can do with the purchase of Author copies at a discounted price, and then a process to ship the book to customers, and in this age, where the Postal Service rates are becoming obscene, to keep that cost low, not to mention needed supplies like envelopes, packing tape and labels , etc.
So let’s do an example. The list price for my book is $16.99. I can buy an Author copy from Amazon for $3.79, but in order to make the shipping charge of eight dollars worthwhile, I buy 10 copies for a total cost of $37.90 +8 dollars shipping, which equals $45.90 or $4.59 per book. This means that as long as the customer pays shipping, any price above $4.59 is a profit for me. If my list price was $16.99 and I reasonably offer it at a reduced price of $12.99, autographed, then my profit is $8.40, far higher than I would get from Amazon, Ingram or anybody else.
If the customer expected shipping to be included, I would probably not reduce the list price so much.
Let’s say I then offer the book for $14.99 and free shipping, and I shipped it by media mail from the US Postal Service, which today runs about $4.79, meaning that my total cost for this book was actually $9.38 and I was paid $14.99, which means I made a profit of $5.61.
Selling directly to buyers is the best way if you can find the buyers.
Pay attention to that part because it’s the same problem that we all face, whether it’s Amazon, Ingram, or anywhere.
Finding the buyer is our primary problem. Buyers are out there; statistics show that books are being sold in large quantities, just not ours. And the reason for that is obvious: there are just so many books out there all competing for the same attention, and our books are not standing out.
So, possibly the argument isn’t where or how we should be selling our books so much as how we should be marketing our books and getting the necessary eyeballs in order to make sales.
Let’s address this more a little later on.
Draft2Digital has a very nice setup that looks very streamlined, easy to use, and gives you the option to go both Print and digital and even audiobooks. And for a while, I thought it was a fantastic opportunity, especially since they are affiliated with Smashwords, which has been an outstanding e-book outlet for many, many years. Then I looked at their royalty structure, and finally, I looked at the wholesale opportunity for retailers because they also go through Ingram. What I noticed was that their wholesale discount was only 20%. And in addition, the selection indicated that returns were not accepted. When I approached them and asked about this, the curt response I received was that the information was confidential. Since I have an account with Ingram as a wholesaler, I could see clearly that the discount offered was only 20% with no returns, which in essence would mean no exterior store would buy the book unless the author was already a major best-selling author with a recognizable name.
This, by the way, is a good way if you list with Ingram to prevent the problems I referenced earlier. Keep your wholesale rate, but select no returns. That way, stores that wanted to order could still get the discount, knowing full well that they needed to sell the book and could not return it. That way, the author wins, the bookstore wins, and everybody should be happy without any risk to the Author. This is what I do with my clients. I can order their books wholesale and sell at whatever price I choose.
Books.by is one of the newer contenders and functions a little bit differently. Yes, it is a print-on-demand outfit and basically will do whatever Ingram can do, except it does not do any distribution marketing. What it does do is allow the author to market or sell directly, and outside of Print costs and an annual fee, the remainder of the royalty stays with the Author. Sounds terrific. Their printing cost is higher than Amazon’s or Ingram’s, and they do charge the customer shipping, although their rates for shipping are very, very reasonable, including internationally. However, the books have to be purchased online from your book webpage on their site, and to me, it seems an unnecessary step since I have to find the buyer in the first place, so I may as well just sell Direct and make a better profit margin on top of that. My first thought was that it sounded like a good opportunity for me as a publisher to maximize sales profits for my Author clients. But at the end of the day, the amount of work versus the payoff made it less interesting. And as such, I don’t use them.
Which brings me to Amazon. Whether I sell my e-books on Amazon exclusively or sell them elsewhere, the primary problem remains, which is finding the buyers. That, in and of itself, is a lot of work. I don’t need more work. Selling exclusively on Amazon for e-books has some added bonuses. You get to enjoy select free days or discounted days and other featured promotions every 90 days, plus you are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, which offers a pretty good revenue chunk to authors that I know who have a number of books. The proviso of this, of course, is that your book is exclusive to them, so it cannot be sold through other outlets. There’s a workaround for this, which I won’t detail here, but the point is…
if Amazon has 70% of the market, am I better off utilizing the methods available that I just mentioned, or struggle just to get a small piece of the other 30%?
One author I know with many books manages to make a living from Amazon e-books and KENP page reads. Another author, I know, refuses to do print and relies strictly on e-book sales that he generates himself from his own website. And if you ask yourself where you buy your books from, generally speaking, Amazon holds the market, and if you’re a Prime member, you get free shipping, which is a difficult combination to beat, especially since Amazon also reprices your book for better sales.
But here is a good thing that you may not know. If Amazon lowers the list price that you set, they still pay you the royalty from your list price, not the sale price. This is just one of the ways that they can beat out other outlets often with discounts that pass way beyond a wholesaler discount.
I will share a funny story. I recently revised my Texas Dead books and asked Amazon to remove the old version. They refused. I did not want competing copies out there so I raised the price for the obsolete books to $200 a copy believing no one would choose to pay that. Amazon lowered the price on their own, made some sales, and I enjoyed a $117 royalty just from one book.
There are no exclusives when it comes to print editions. And you can also sell those yourself and offer personalized autographs since you’re shipping it out.
My advice is to place your print and e-books with Amazon, but not Amazon’s expanded service-avoid that like the plague-and your Print book with Ingram, selecting no returns, which will keep you safe from unnecessary and pricey expenses. When you become a best-selling author with millions of fans and wrapped by a large, big-name publishing house, they can handle all that.
If you have tried other variations, let me know.
~William
PS: Best wishes for a Happy New Year. B&P Magazine January 2026 will be available January 5th
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