The ways of the world can be exceedingly mysterious. I had given up on this goal, mainly for financial reasons. There was no way I could make a single title listing on Amazon.com be profitable.

Then, in September, one of my clients started twisting my arm to get her new book on Amazon. I explained the economics to her. It would lose money unless she priced her book very high…much more than the $20 she was asking. But she didn’t care if it lost money. She wanted to be able to tell everyone it was on Amazon, and she would cover whatever it cost to get it done.

Well, it took a month, including two weeks waiting for Amazon to place a purchase order to take her book on consignment. They ordered only a single copy. It will end up costing her about $40 to sell her $20 book. Her share of its sale will be only a couple of bucks after S&H, Amazon’s cut (55%), and my fee for setting everything up. But she says she doesn’t care. She was thrilled when she saw the page where it will be listed on the Internet. And now she wants me to convert it for Kindle. Again, cost is no object, she says.

So I’ll earn a few dollars for helping her out, and as long as I had to go to all of the trouble of setting up the merchant account and listing her book, I decided to go ahead and do it for my thin volume of verse, too. One copy is all they will stock initially. It can’t possibly make money. But at least going through the process allows me to cross this goal off my list. It’s a New Year’s resolution accomplished in the very strangest of ways. 2 years ago

The appropriate way to do this is through the Amazon Advantage program. I checked the requirements and I can meet all of them, including the ISBN and EAN barcode requirements, but there is an annual, non-refundable Membership Fee of $29.95. Advantage takes 55% of the cover price. Since the book sells for $7.95 retail, I only get $3.58 per copy sold. Even if I do not consider the production cost and costs of getting copies to Amazon, I need to sell nine copies just to recover the fee, so it is like giving nine copies away.

This doesn’t make a lot of sense for one title. It would be nice to have the book available through Amazon, but I think I would rather donate nine copies to the local library system. This will have to wait till I have other books to sell. 3 years ago