Where to sell your book besides Amazon, and when it pays

Amazon is the biggest store, not the only one. If you did not opt into its exclusivity programme, you may sell the same book in other stores at the same time — and for a translated edition that matters more than usual. That is the short answer to where to sell your book besides Amazon.

The long answer turns on one question: how much the subscription reading service is worth to you.

The real choice: exclusive or not

When you upload a digital book to Amazon you are offered an exclusivity programme. According to Amazon's own help page, it is a ninety-day programme for the Kindle ebook only, and enrolling puts the book automatically into its subscription reading service.

That is the whole deal in one line: you give Amazon exclusivity on the digital version, and in return the book enters a service where subscribers read it without buying it, and you are paid for pages read.

Print has no exclusivity. It is not part of that programme, and you are free to print and sell it anywhere in parallel.

When exclusivity pays and when it does not

The practical rule is simple. If your book is in a genre people read one after another — romance, thriller, series fantasy — many of those readers are inside the subscription service, and exclusivity pays.

If the book is non-fiction, a memoir, a professional guide or something read once and slowly, its readers are less concentrated there, and exclusivity mostly closes doors.

There is one more consideration that has nothing to do with money: an audience outside the United States. In some countries Amazon is not the main bookstore, and there exclusivity means not being in the shop where your readers actually buy.

The other stores

Four main addresses, each behaving a little differently:

The store	Who it matters to
Apple	Readers on iPhone and iPad, a strong presence in Western Europe
Kobo	Readers using Kobo devices, and a long-standing presence in Canada and Europe
Google	Readers on Android, plus exposure through search results
Libraries	Public lending, which arrives through distributors rather than directly

Apple's information page for authors states that you can upload both an ebook and an audiobook, and that it accepts both a Word document and EPUB (the standard ebook file) — meaning someone who already prepared a file for Amazon usually does not have to prepare a new one.

One account or five

You can open an account with each store separately. That gives full control and the largest share of every sale, and it costs you time: five interfaces, five reports, five places to update when you change a description.

The second option is a single distributor that uploads to all of them. You upload once, it distributes onward, and it takes a cut of each sale. For most independent authors that is the right trade, especially in a language you cannot read.

Before choosing a distributor, check two things: whether it reaches libraries, and how easy it is to leave. Getting in is always easy.

Why this matters for a translated book in particular

Here is the part that is easy to miss. A translated book is a separate book in every respect, so the exclusivity decision is made afresh for it.

That means you can keep the original exclusive and publish the translated version wide, or the other way round. If you translated into the language of a country where Amazon is weak, that is exactly the decision worth making differently.

It also means the new edition's sales do not start from the same place. We explained why in what Amazon's platform does with your book, and we covered the language choice itself in which language to translate your book into. If you are ordering the steps, frequently asked questions helps.