# Where to sell your ebook, and what each store takes

> Amazon, Apple, Kobo, an aggregator or your own site: what each one takes, what it gives back, and why the answer is usually two of them at once.

Canonical: https://buk.press/blog/where-to-sell-your-ebook

9 September 2026 · 7 min read

Sell direct from your own site for the margin and the email addresses, and list the same book on Amazon for the discovery. Those two cover most of what any author needs. Go wide to Apple, Kobo and Google Play through an aggregator when the book is fiction or has a long shelf life, and choose Amazon exclusivity only if you have worked out what you are giving up.

"Where should I sell it" is really two questions wearing one coat. Where will strangers find the book, and where do I keep the most of what they pay? Almost no channel does both well, which is why the useful answer is nearly always a combination rather than a winner.

## The two jobs a channel does

Every place you can sell a book is somewhere on a line between these two poles, and knowing which end you are looking at makes the rest of the decision straightforward.

- **Discovery.** People who have never heard of you are browsing, searching, and being recommended things. This is what a store gives you, and it is the only thing a store gives you that you cannot build yourself.
- **Margin and relationship.** You keep most of the money, you know who bought, and you can tell them about the next book. This is what selling direct gives you, and no store will ever give you any of it.

A store's cut is the price of the first. A direct sale's silence is the price of the second. Anyone who tells you to pick one has decided in advance which of those two problems you have.

## What each channel actually takes

Rates change, so treat this as the shape of the market rather than a quote, and check current terms before you plan a business around a row of it.

| Channel | You keep | What you get for it |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon KDP | 70% at $2.99–$9.99, minus a per-MB delivery fee | By far the largest ebook audience |
| Apple Books | ~70% at any price | Second-largest, strong outside the US |
| Kobo | ~70% above $2.99 | Canada, Netherlands, and library reach |
| Google Play Books | ~70% | Android, and it appears in web search |
| Draft2Digital (aggregator) | ~60% at retail after its ~10% | One upload to a dozen stores |
| Gumroad | ~90% | Nothing. You bring the buyers |
| Payhip | ~95% on the free plan, before card fees | Nothing, plus EU VAT handled |
| Your own site + Stripe | ~96% | Nothing, and the tax is your problem |

Read the last four rows as one row. Selling direct is not a channel. It is the absence of one. You keep almost everything because nobody did anything for you, and the entire question is whether you can put the book in front of people yourself.

The delivery fee on Amazon's 70% option is charged by the megabyte and comes out of every single sale. On an illustrated book nobody downsampled, it can eat most of the royalty (see [why your PDF is 80 MB](https://buk.press/blog/reduce-pdf-file-size) before you upload).

## Amazon, and the exclusivity question

Amazon will offer you KDP Select: enrol the ebook exclusively with them, and it enters Kindle Unlimited, where subscribers read it for free and you are paid per page read. The terms run in 90-day periods and the exclusivity is real: the ebook cannot be sold anywhere else, including from your own site.

|  | Exclusive (KDP Select) | Wide |
|---|---|---|
| Kindle Unlimited reads | Yes, paid per page | No |
| Sell from your own site | No | Yes |
| Apple, Kobo, Google Play | No | Yes |
| Promotional tools | Countdown deals, free days | Whatever each store offers |
| Best for | Genre fiction, series, binge readers | Non-fiction, professional books, back catalogue |

The honest version: for genre fiction with a series behind it, Kindle Unlimited is often where the money is, because the readers who binge live there. For practical non-fiction sold to a professional audience, it is usually a bad trade. Those readers are not browsing Kindle Unlimited, and you have just given up the right to sell your own book on your own website.

Exclusivity applies to the ebook, not to print or audio. A KDP Select title can still be sold as a paperback anywhere, which is the exception most authors miss.

## Going wide: aggregator or direct uploads

If you are not exclusive, you can upload to each store yourself or hand one file to an aggregator that distributes for you. The trade is a percentage against your afternoons.

|  | Direct to each store | Through an aggregator |
|---|---|---|
| Cut | Nothing extra | ~10% of retail |
| Setup | An account and a tax form per store | One account |
| Updating a typo | Re-upload everywhere, by hand | Once |
| Payment | Several small payments, several schedules | One payment |
| Stores you can reach | The ones that accept direct uploads | Including ones that do not |

A reasonable middle: go direct to Amazon and Apple, where the volume is and the dashboards are worth having, and let an aggregator handle the long tail of stores and library systems where you will never look at the numbers anyway.

Whichever route, the metadata you type on the first store is the metadata you will be typing on all of them, so write it once, properly, and keep it in a file. [Book metadata: title, author, categories and keywords](https://buk.press/blog/book-metadata-and-categories) is what that file should contain.

## Selling direct: the arithmetic and the catch

The margin argument for direct sales is not subtle. The same book, the same price, the same reader:

| Channel | Price | You keep | Per 100 sales |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | $9.99 | ~$6.90 | $690 |
| Apple or Kobo | $9.99 | ~$7.00 | $700 |
| Via an aggregator | $9.99 | ~$6.00 | $600 |
| Your own site | $9.99 | ~$9.20 | $920 |
| Your own site, bundled | $29 | ~$27.60 | $2,760 |

And the catch, which is the whole of it: a store's hundred sales happened because the store found those hundred people. On your own site the number is whatever your audience produces, and for most first-time authors that is a number closer to four than a hundred.

There are two other things to know before you take payments yourself. Digital goods are taxed where the buyer is, so a platform that acts as merchant of record (Payhip, Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad) is handling something real on your behalf, and a bare Stripe integration is not. And you now own delivery: the download link, the second file, the person who cannot open an EPUB on a Tuesday night. [How to deliver an ebook to the people who buy it](https://buk.press/blog/how-to-deliver-an-ebook-to-buyers) is that job in full.

The email address is the real product of a direct sale. A hundred store sales earn more today; a hundred addresses earn more for the next four books, and the store will never give you one of them.

## A sequence that works

1. **Set the direct price first.** Your own site is where the book is worth most, and the store price should be decided against it rather than the other way round. [How to price an ebook](https://buk.press/blog/how-to-price-an-ebook) has the bands.
2. **Open a direct storefront** on Payhip, Gumroad or Lemon Squeezy. An afternoon, and it is where the margin and the addresses come from.
3. **Upload to Amazon** unless you have a specific reason to be exclusive. This is where strangers find you.
4. **Add Apple, Kobo and Google Play** yourself or through an aggregator, once the first two are stable and the file is final.
5. **Bundle on your own site.** The book plus the templates, the worksheets, the checklist: the same words at three times the price, in the one place where nobody takes a cut.
6. **Leave it alone for ninety days.** Store rankings and category placement move slowly, and changing four things in three weeks teaches you nothing about any of them.

## What you need ready before any of this

Every channel above wants roughly the same package, and getting it wrong once means fixing it in six places later.

- **An EPUB and a PDF.** Stores want the reflowable EPUB; direct buyers want both, and giving them both is a real reason to buy from you rather than from Amazon. [EPUB or PDF](https://buk.press/blog/epub-vs-pdf) covers why the answer is both.
- **A cover that survives a thumbnail.** It will be judged at 100 pixels wide in a list of forty others; see [ebook cover sizes that work in every store](https://buk.press/blog/ebook-cover-dimensions).
- **Metadata written once:** title, subtitle, author, description, two categories, seven keywords.
- **An ISBN, or a decision not to have one.** Some stores assign their own; some require yours. [Do you need an ISBN?](https://buk.press/blog/do-you-need-isbn) is a shorter answer than you would expect.
- **A description that sells the book,** because on every channel it is doing the work the cover started. See [how to write a book description](https://buk.press/blog/writing-a-book-description).

None of the channel arithmetic matters if the file itself is wrong. A reader who buys direct at a higher price and opens something with a cover pasted onto page one has learned exactly what the extra money bought, which is the argument for getting the export right before you spend a week choosing a storefront.

**About this article.** Written by the team that builds bukpress, which turns Markdown into print-ready PDF and EPUB books. Spotted something wrong or out of date? Write to [support@buk.press](mailto:support@buk.press).

## Read next

Guides 5 September 2026 · 5 min read

## [How to price an ebook you published yourself](https://buk.press/blog/how-to-price-an-ebook)

Price a self-published ebook between $2.99 and $9.99 on the major stores, because that band pays a 70% royalty and everything outside it pays 35%. Sell the same book direct from your own site at a higher price (you keep around 90% there) and let the store price be the discovery price rather than the one you optimise.

[Read it](https://buk.press/blog/how-to-price-an-ebook)

Guides 4 September 2026 · 5 min read

## [How to deliver an ebook to the people who buy it](https://buk.press/blog/how-to-deliver-an-ebook-to-buyers)

Send a PDF and an EPUB together, delivered as a download link from a platform that handles payment and delivery in one step. Do not email attachments: they bounce on size and land in spam. Do not bother with DRM on a direct sale; it inconveniences honest buyers and stops nobody, and a personal note on the title page does more.

[Read it](https://buk.press/blog/how-to-deliver-an-ebook-to-buyers)

Explainers 30 August 2026 · 4 min read

## [Do you need an ISBN to self-publish a book?](https://buk.press/blog/do-you-need-isbn)

You need an ISBN to sell a printed book through most retailers and libraries. You do not need one to sell a PDF from your own website, and you do not need one for a Kindle ebook on Amazon KDP. If you use a free ISBN a platform assigns, that number is tied to that platform, so it cannot come with you if you also publish the same edition somewhere else.

[Read it](https://buk.press/blog/do-you-need-isbn)

## Write it in Markdown. Ship a book.

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