Is it only me, or does anyone else think that the prevailing business practices of the likes of Amazon are an absolute rip-off when it comes to the low royalties? You go through all the work of writing, editing and producing a book and upload it. Amazon does nothing by the way of marketing & promition, so you end up marketing links to your book on social media yourself. If you want a decent price, you get 35% royalties, maybe another 5% for affiliate marketing. That means that Amazon gets more out of the project than you do, despite the fact that you're the one doing almost all the work (handling downloads & payments seems like a pretty commoditized thing these days).
Compare that to selling music on bandcamp: They take 15%, the rest is yours to keep.
It is absolutely beyond me, how self-publishing authors put up with that.
I GUESS the difference between music and e-Books, to some extent, is how the channel influences perceptions of the quality of the product. People have got very used to low quality writing being available for free on the web. So if your ebook is just another piece of text on some website, many people will not be willing to pay for it, whereas being on amazon creates an expectation that the quality would be in line with properly published work (where, at least, there is a four-eyes principle at work, at shouldering financial risks around a book project etc.)
Someone should do something about that and create an ebook marketplace that enforces certain quality standards and pays decent royalties.
I think it's because Amazon holds most of the cards, so if you don't like it, you can go hang....
My figures (quoted elsewhere in a separate post). Sell my £24.95 book on lulu.com - I get ~£11. Same book on Amazon, ~£4. I did another book which I sold on both platforms, and firstly I had to raise the RRP to £7.95 so I'd make more than £1 on an Amazon sale, and secondly, I didn't sell the ~3x as many as I'd need to to make the same money as selling on lulu.com - so I now only sell the second-latest version of any of my main book on Amazon so that people will hopefully see that there's a newer version on Lulu and buy it from there.
A friend of mine did $120k completely passive with his book (+ audio book) on Amazon. Without Amazon, he would have to get the outreach. Outreach is the expensive and difficult part. When the customers are already there, it's just a matter of converting them.
There are many people who make $25k/month completely passive on Amazon. I'm not a big fan of Amazon, either, but you're not signing a bad deal with them. Most publishers are worse (and don't deliver the outreach).
edit: Another thing to consider: Don't limit yourself to selling books. Add value and place upsells in your books. And for fiction writers: Maybe add merch and other stuff. For non-fiction: Sell online courses or coaching for your expert topic. Usually the book is just the entry.
What was the book's subject? I've always managed to convince myself that the poor performance (relatively to values such as I see you have quoted) is because my market is somewhat niche, but it may not be the case, so any info on such self-published success would be useful for me.
It's the definition of a money topic. But I know that there are people who make a fortune with small cook books.
I know some other very profitable niches, but I can't talk about them in detail - competition is already extreme. But trust me: There's a ton of money in most topics.
OT: About daytrading (most people think it's basically a scam) - I know people who do daytrading on a daily basis (what a pun) and who live relatively comfortable investing $25-40k. I know a guy who went from 12k to 80k with one investment (was a 2-year investment, though). He's not gambling, he is a trading nerd reading the news and all company reports constantly. But yes, 99% of daytraders lose money because they start to become greedy or have no discipline.
...well I guess the important question is whether or not you think you have a high chance of showing up at a high rank for search terms with enough traffic, whether you have a chance of being featured prominently by amazon's recommender engine etc etc. If you want to make that work for you, you probably have to play a game like being a demand-driven content farm gaming Amazon in a way akin to how SEO tries to game Google.
Maybe there's money in it, but it's probably not the kind of content I would either want to produce or consume.
For most authors, the point of departure is probably, more idealistically, some well written content, maybe with an audience that's a bit niche, and the desire to find a way to get remunerated fairly on the effort that went into producing the content. It sounds to me like that's not really what Amazon is offering.
His book is fairly good and well-written, but I know what you mean.
I'm currently helping an author who wants to write a book and make some money with it (she wrote books in the past and worked with publishers). I explained to her how the self-publishing business works and she also had the same reaction. It's possible to write high-quality content and get fairly compensated, but you should definitely know that most people seem to be content with sub-par books. The average quality is really bad and people seem to like it (e.g. another very profitable niche: erotic books, Shades of Grey is just one of many of them).
Amazon is very generic. If you want to build an audience, you should stick to Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Slack/chat groups, write a blog, do vlogs and videos, organize local and offline groups, events and other methods. You can then build a whole community around a niche and sell way more than a book. This is also what I've recommended to her because this is how you build high-quality communities.
One thing that Amazon provides over others that you might find worth the hefty royalties is the "Also Bought" section. Book discovery can be a pain, and I often find myself picking books up that are suggested to me by Amazon. That engine can be pretty powerful.
Compare that to selling music on bandcamp: They take 15%, the rest is yours to keep.
It is absolutely beyond me, how self-publishing authors put up with that.
I GUESS the difference between music and e-Books, to some extent, is how the channel influences perceptions of the quality of the product. People have got very used to low quality writing being available for free on the web. So if your ebook is just another piece of text on some website, many people will not be willing to pay for it, whereas being on amazon creates an expectation that the quality would be in line with properly published work (where, at least, there is a four-eyes principle at work, at shouldering financial risks around a book project etc.)
Someone should do something about that and create an ebook marketplace that enforces certain quality standards and pays decent royalties.