Where to Sell Your Self-Published Books: Start With Kindle

You have written your book, formatted it and made a cover, and now you are ready to put it on the market. But where should you sell your self-published books? Here are the best places, and the order I recommend.

The Distribution Route

The question has three answers, and the third one is about the one mistake that costs many authors the most when they choose where to publish. It is a question I hear a lot.

Because when you first get into it, you write your book and now you’re ready to put it onto the market. But where on the market should you put it? There are just too many choices, We have Apple Books, Kobo, Draft2Digital, Lulu, IngramSpark, Kindle and ACX.

There are just too many options available. So as you start to research the different options, you come to some conclusions. “This is good for this” or “This is good for that”.

And many authors and some of my students even are tempted to not publish anything. Because they spend so much time researching all of the different options. That is what we’re going to clarify here.

But before we get into the answers, grab a copy of my free Self-Publishing Checklist. It will help you make sure that you aren’t skipping any of the steps. To make as much money off of your books as possible and to get them published easily.

So, let’s get into it, from my own story. When I first started, I started with the distribution route called Kindle Direct Publishing. So using Kindle, I had read a lot about it.

Check out this related article: Can’t Decide Where To Start In Self-Publishing?

I realized that the formatting was not so difficult as paperbacks, audiobooks, and a lot of other things. Kindle was the right choice I was amazed to discover that even just using a Word file you could just upload it.

Let them use their cover creator and you have a book on the market in seconds. Not that book that would make any sales but it’s an option. In terms of the ease at which you can get your book onto a market in front of a lot of people very quickly.

That was what I started with, I began to learn in forums and from other authors that you should not stick with just Kindle. So I moved over to paperback books even though the covers and some of the formatting can be a challenge.

Now, for the covers, you should learn how to do that yourself in Photoshop or GIMP. But in terms of the formatting, what I used for my early books was Jutoh. These days I recommend Atticus instead, because it is easier and does ebooks and paperbacks in one place. I have published 230 books, and formatting is something you can learn.

The Picky Readers

Then audiobooks, how exactly do you go about doing that? Because these people were saying they were making a lot of money off of these types of books. And I wasn’t making that money.

So I moved my books over to the paperback versions which at the time was CreateSpace. CreateSpace has since been folded into KDP Print. Then on ACX audiobooks and it took a period to discover how to do that.

Initially, I was splitting the profit with the narrators. Until I discovered I can hire narrators to do it at a much lower price. I could make a lot more money if I just pay and own all of the rights.

I can earn the full 40% royalty on the audiobooks I’ve published on ACX, which is the rate for books that are exclusive to Audible, Amazon and Apple. I learned that there is such a thing as a “picky reader”, that is readers who only read in one format including hardbacks. And many books do not come in hardback.

So if you can put your books in hardbacks, you get an advantage over your competition. I started going over to Lulu and putting my books out there and discovering that was the best route. Since you don’t have to come with an ISBN and you can just simply order one proof.

Check out this related article: Is Lulu Self Publishing Any Good?

So Lulu is a fantastic option for hardbacks. I continue to get royalties every month from them as well. With having a huge distribution of all series of channels that I personally started using, I discovered that the total revenue started to jump.

It gave me the ability to invest more money in the books that I’m coming out with. As well as other things that I’m doing including the videos I’m creating right now.

To help you avoid the mistakes that I made because that’s exactly what we’re here for, so we’ll move into our final exact answers for the day. Where to sell your self-published books in 2021?

The first answer is you should start with Kindle. KDP or Kindle Direct Publishing is the correct starting spot for authors who are trying to get their books self-published and want to make as much money as possible. So you should start there until you’ve done that.

As I tell all my students don’t talk to me about anything else. I don’t care about marketing or anything else, you need to first get your book published on KDP. The next thing we do is KDP Print and that is the next one to get our paperback versions.

And if you’re using Atticus, the tool I recommend, it makes it easy just to click a button and you got your paperback version with a few extra clicks. But still, it’s pretty easy.

The Path Through Success

Then comes Audible, I’ve discussed before how to find narrators and such. You can ask me about that. Then we move to IngramSpark, which costs a little more since you need your own ISBN, but depending upon which country you’re in.

You may be able to get it for free, here in Norway we get it for free. Then Lulu is the next one, that’ll give you your hardback books. After KDP you might add Draft2Digital (which absorbed Smashwords), because you can simply use the EPUB version that Atticus produces and upload it there.

It doesn’t cost you anything, you just won’t use KDP Select. That is to say, you’re not allowing Amazon to only sell your Kindle book only on their site. They’re allowing you to sell the digital versions of your book on other sites as well. But to get the initial reviews you may wish to do free promos and stuff. So you’ll need to be in KDP Select. So for the wide stores, you may need to wait for the 90 days of your Select enrolment to end.

That’s just another tip that you will want to do. You’ll notice we’re going through a whole series of different routes here to maximize the number of places that our books will be found. That brings us to our secret answer of the day.

The third answer is you just do one thing at a time, starting with Kindle. This is the thing that so many indie authors fail to do. They don’t understand that you will lose money if you try to publish your book on all of these platforms at the same time.

Check out this related article: Self-Publishing What You NEED to Know NOW!

Or spend too much time researching all of the different platforms. So number one, just get your book onto the market. Then you will start to see some sales coming in once we start running ads against it. Then we move over to these other platforms.

It is amazing, I can’t tell you how many students I’ve seen where you suddenly start seeing the money coming in. It starts with a trickle, it starts to build up. And the excitement that comes with seeing people reading your book.

Maybe even commenting and writing back to you if you put your email into your book as you’re building email off of that. So this is a very powerful way of building an audience, of finding the audience. Wherever they are, in whatever format that they wish to read your book.

Platform rules change from time to time, so check each one’s current terms. But for the most part, this is still the path that I use personally.

I had a great deal of success using this exact path and I would recommend that you also follow this path. Still not sure where to publish your books? If you would like help with your own book, book a free 25-minute discovery call with me, or start with the free 12-step checklist. Our coaching can also walk you through each platform one step at a time.

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