About a month ago, we started publishing our eBooks on Amazon in addition to our regular marketplaces Gumroad, Itch, Payhip, and Marketsy.
Our first eBook was written in 2019, and today we have published more than sixty, but until last month we didn’t make them available for purchase through Amazon. However, we have decided to do so now, about which I’ll talk later in this blog.
But first I will explain why we didn’t work with Amazon. The first thing is that their commission for a sale through their platform is about 35%, while fees on our other marketplaces range between 5% and 10%.
On top of that, we pay an extra 30% for “tax compliance” on American sales, which makes for a total of 65% fees for Amazon US, plus currency conversion rates, plus payout rates, plus VAT rates for Amazon EU if applicable.
To be fair, on our other sales platforms there are taxes also, and to make a long story short: taking all international Amazon stores into account (on some you pay more tax fees than others), Amazon leaves us with an average of 40% revenue, while selling through other platforms makes for about 70% revenue on an eBook sale. It means that an eBook of USD $10 earns us USD $4 on Amazon and USD $7 on our other platforms.
Obviously, the above was an important reason why we didn’t want to work with Amazon. But there’s more. On Amazon you cannot implement a Pay-What-You-Want purchasing model, which is an important trademark for both our paid and free eBooks.
In addition, Amazon only allows you to offer one eBook file version (Kindle/AZW3/MOBI). That bites with how we do things now, that is, we offer PDF + EPUB + MOBI/AZW3 eBook files. Not to talk about the impossibility to offer Video Workshops on Amazon.
So, quite some limitations there. However, the way the Internet is developing due to AI infusions in search engines (for instance, AI Mode in Google and Copilot in Bing), and the rise of so-called AI answer engines, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, our site has been suffering from a decline in website traffic.
In fact, “AI training” of search and answer engines simply means “collecting” (read stealing) available data from existing websites and presenting it as their own, without sufficiently linking back to the websites they got their data from. This has been going on for the past two years or so, and thousands and thousands of websites have closed shop or fired employees, because they don’t any longer receive enough visitors to run a profitable business.
Well, the same is happening to us. The so-called “blue links economy” is over, and we cannot any longer count on receiving enough traffic through the traditional search engine ecosystem. It means we make less product sales, because less and less people are able to find us or our books.
Now, Amazon is a known book marketplace (globally they have a 60% market share), and those who look for a book often include Amazon in their search. Well, there you have it. It’s the reason why we joined. We need to take the loss (the hefty sales fees from Amazon), hoping to perhaps compensate those losses by making more book sales on Amazon because of their reach.
Another unexpected “benefit” of Amazon is that they don’t make a fuss about publishing adult content. Amazon is such a powerful player that payment processors like Visa and Mastercard, don’t (and cannot) mess with them (yet). As the Not Suitable For Work (NSFW) thing has increasingly become an issue on smaller marketplaces due to pressure from payment processors, Amazon may be a better place for us to safely offer our content.
At any rate, we have just started copying our eBooks — being a lot of work due to Amazon specific eBook requirements — and we have only published about 12 eBooks on Amazon so far. The sales results are not great yet, but then again — we have still a lot to publish there, and things also just take time.
So, well, that’s the story. Honestly, we have this feeling of having sold our soul, but what can we do? The world is changing fast and the Internet has entered a shaky AI rollercoaster glide. We do what we can and hope for the best.
