A few places to sell your ebooks

So, you’ve written an ebook. Now what?

Obviously, you’ll want to sell it. These days, it’s a lot easier than ever before. There are a large number of online venues at which you can sell your books. Some are well known, others aren’t. But you have choices, and you can sell your work using more than one of them.

Let’s take a look at some of the options that are available for you to sell your ebooks.

The big boys

Any discussion about selling ebooks has to start with Amazon and Barnes & Noble, doesn’t it? They’re arguably the largest ebook sellers around and they have their own delivery and ebook reading platforms.

With Amazon, you can sign up with Kindle Direct Publishing. Once you have your book, you upload it along with a cover image and a description of your book. Then, anywhere from 24 to 48 hours later your book is available for purchase. You can opt to get either a 35% or a 70% royalty on sales, and buyers can download their purchases to their Kindle ereaders.

Barnes & Noble has something similar called PubIt!. As with Amazon, once you have your book — whether it’s an EPUB, Microsoft Word, HTML, or text file — you upload it along with a cover image and a description, and soon buyers can download your work to their NOOK ereaders (or NOOK apps on their mobile devices). PubIT! offers you royalties of either 65% or 40%, depending on the price of your book. But PubIt! only seems to be available to authors in the United States.

While Amazon and Barnes & Noble are probably the biggest markets for ebooks, their drawback is that your book could get lost in the shuffle of the literally millions of titles that are available. On the other hand, both give you a wider reach.

Scrappy contenders

While not quite as big as Amazon, the next two online vendors do have considerable reach. And they’re definitely a viable alternative to the big boys.

First up, Kobo Writing Life, run by Canadian firm Kobo Books. Kobo uses the EPUB format exclusively, which makes it a much more flexible choice. And its reach is growing. Kobo has a presence in North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. It’s a good alternative or adjunct to Amazon, especially in areas where the Kindle ereader is unavailable or not popular. On top of that, Kobo offers royalties of either 45% or 70% to authors.

Lulu.com has been around for a while, and sells electronic and printed books (among other digital and physical wares). You just need to upload your book, enter a description, and start selling. My only gripes with Lulu.com are that it doesn’t seem like you can upload your own book cover — you have to use Lulu’s cover generator — and that occasionally, the service will choke on a PDF file and prevent you from uploading it.

Interesting upstarts

If you like things a bit more DIY, then the next three sites will pique your interest.

e-junkie is a venerable site for selling both physical and digital goods. You can upload your books to e-junkie, and then add them to your personal storefront. When someone buys your book, e-junkie makes it available for download immediately. And you get paid instantly using PayPal, Google Checkout, or one of a handful of other payment processors that you choose. It’s fast and effective. You only need to pay a small monthly fee to use it.

Both Artery and Sellbox take a unique approach to selling your books. You store your books in DropBox (SellBox also supports Google Drive) and when someone buys your book it’s securely downloaded from a folder in Dropbox. It’s all quite fast and efficient. It does come at a small price, though — Artery takes 10% of each sale, and SellBox takes 5%. Still, both make updating and managing your books easier, especially if you’re already using Dropbox.

Is that it?

Not by a longshot. There are a number of other places online where you can sell your ebooks. And there seem to be more coming into existence.

Have a favourite service which you use to sell (or buy) ebooks? Why not share your picks by leaving a comment.

Photo credit: brendan76