Hi there! Hello! I’m the Author Coach, and it’s nice to meet you! I hope I’m catching you at the beginning of some research you’re doing on self-publishing, because I am an absolute wealth of information in that area. In fact, if you want to publish your own book and sell it on Amazon, you are in the right place! The Self Publishing Checklist is your one-stop, comprehensive resource for self-publishing information.
1. Selling Books on Amazon as an Author: Self-Publishing on Amazon with KDP
Amazon deals with books through a “print on demand” model, meaning you upload your book files into their “KDP” website (KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing, and this division handles electronic books as well as paperback and hardcover). When someone buys a copy of your book, Amazon collects the money, prints the book, and ships it out to the customer. They even pay you!
If that’s what you meant, click here to go to the checklist. By the time you’ve worked your way to the end of the list, you will be a self-publishing expert!
2. Selling Books on Amazon as a Reseller
But, what if that’s not what you meant? If you meant you wanted to sell other people’s books on Amazon as a marketplace, that business model is called “reselling” or “retail arbitrage,” and here are the steps to setting that up.
–Go over to Amazon Seller Central and sign up for an account.
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- Visit SellerCentral.Amazon.com.
- Choose between an Individual Account (for fewer than 40 items per month) or a Professional Account (for higher-volume sellers).
- Provide payment, tax, and personal information.
–Decide on Your Fulfillment Method:
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- Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA): You send inventory to Amazon, and when someone buys it, they pack it and ship it out. This model is often not scalable or sustainable for selling individual books because of the fees you pay to send the inventory to Amazon and have them store it. If you want to learn more about Amazon FBA here is a comprehensive video on that subject (and by comprehensive I mean it is 8 hours long).
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- Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM): That’s where you have stuff for sale on Amazon’s marketplace and when someone buys it, you ship it out to them. Here is a video that explains how to do that.
So, that’s selling on Amazon in a nutshell. Confusingly, you can also use this model to sell your own books, if that’s something you want to do. 🙂 You’d first need a bunch of your own printed books to list and sell on Amazon’s marketplace, so if there is some reason you didn’t want to put your books through KDP, here is a guide to printers.
3. Selling Books on Amazon as a Publisher
This is probably also not what you meant, but I wanted to cover it anyway on the off chance that someone needs this information. You might be interested in publishing a book and using Amazon as a distributor (rather than using them as the printer and distributor, if that makes any sense). If that is the case, you’d want to choose one of the following distributors and set your book up over there so it can be “sold” to Amazon via their distribution channel.