Selling Your Book with Amazon Advantage

Sometimes you want to print your book in a large print run and sell your book. When you do that, you can't use Print on Demand to or the services of Ingram or KDP to print and sell your book. So if you're not using Ingram or kdp, how are you selling your book to Amazon? Well, you'll set yourself up with Amazon Advantage. If you're wondering what this is and how to use it, well, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers, a self publishing services firm. We have writers and writing coaches, all the editors, publishing experts, and most importantly, I believe, book marketing professionals that surround you with tender loving care to help you sell that book you've worked so hard to write. Now, while most of our clients print their books with Print on Demand technology, meaning the book gets printed on order by the company, we set up the distribution with IngramSpark or KDP. Sometimes a book might be in color or they have some other feature where the author has decided it made more sense to print thousands of copies somewhere else and set up distribution in other ways. Amazon Advantage is one of those ways. It's a consignment program that allows you to sell a book printed by any printer. And because it's consignment, you have paid the cost of printing and will only get paid when your book has sold. Now why would an author want to use this and not Print on Demand, which is way more convenient and less risky? Well, an offset print run will have better quality than Print on Demand. While most of the time Print on Demand is pretty good, there are times where the spine can come out crooked or there's funky issues inside of a book. Most of the time though, the reason our authors would use this is for lower pricing or the ability or the need to to choose a different stock of paper, different kind of binding or special size of book. And those things aren't available or they're just way too costly. With Print on Demand, Amazon Seller Central is really the only other way to sell on Amazon without using Print on Demand. There are book distributors, but as we've talked about in a video on book distribution, the options for those are limited and you'll only really be successful in securing one if you have a sales track record that will justify them giving you a spot on their roster. Okay, so let's get into this program with some things you should know. First, this is for new books which you have printed, not reselling. So this is not a reseller service and they need to be Your books, you must have the rights to these items. You're the seller here, so you have to store the books. Amazon is not going to store the 4,000 books you had printed overseas and shipped here. They will tell you how many books they want and that is the amount you send them. And the amount is based on their algorithmic. Algorithmic. Yeah, that's the right word. Algorithmic calculation. Which may or may not be accurate. And if it's not accurate and they order too much inventory, they'll send it back to you at your expense. That can hurt. But when they order the books, you pay to ship them to the warehouse that Amazon tells you to ship it to. You don't choose which warehouse they choose. And then you set the retail price and they pay you 45% of that retail price for the book. In this case, the buyer is the reader. So from the reader perspective, they can't tell that your book is distributed this way. Your product page will look the same and you can create A plus content just like you can if you set up through kdp. Your book will show as sold and shipped by Amazon. So prime members will receive free shipping and it will look normal to regular Amazon shoppers. Now a couple of caveats. This is not as easy to set up as a KDP account. You have to apply for the program. It takes a few weeks for the application to be reviewed and you do have to pay $99 a year to be a part of this program. It's also only available the country you live in and not every country has it. For example, if you're living in Canada and have a Canadian address and bank account, you're in the Canadian Amazon Advantage program. Same for us living in the us. If you want to sell in Canada and in US you have to apply to each individual account. I haven't done that. We have only helped authors with US accounts. Books can be set up for pre order this way though, so that is still an option. Oh, and I said you can set the retail price, but Amazon always has the final say and they will still be the one that decides the selling price. If they do discount your book, you still get 45% of the retail price, which is a price you control. I guess that's better than ACX where you can't control your price at all. Have you seen this? They have set the audiobook price for Self, Promote and succeed at $7.49. Isn't that nice? I paid thousands of dollars to produce that and they value it at $7.49. Well, you know what Amazon? I'm giving it to everybody for free. So you make nothing. Do you want it? Go to self promoteandsucceed.com audio and it's yours. I'd rather you get it for free than make Amazon money on a book they're practically giving away anyway. But I digress. Can you tell I dislike their price reductions and control over the pricing just a little? All right, a few more details to know. This is not a program to sell to bookstores. Then again, even in the checkbox where they say they're going to sell to bookstores, the global distribution option on kdp, bookstores aren't going to buy from Amazon. So you have to use IngramSpark for that. Or you're doing a print run and you need a distributor agreement. But this is a specific Amazon country store such as Amazon.com for the United States for bookstores. You can also try to get it listed through Ingram's IPAGE system. But again your best route is going to be through a distributor if they'll take you. Or just doing print on demand with IngramSpark. Now how this is different than Amazon Seller Central? Well, it's also known as the marketplace. But in the case of Amazon Seller Central, you're the retailer essentially advertising your books on Amazon. When a customer buys your book, Amazon holds the payment while you ship the order to the customer. You can sell books new or used this way. An alternative to you doing the shipping is using Amazon's Fulfillment by Amazon fba. With FBA you ship books to an Amazon warehouse and Amazon fulfills customer orders, thus making your book available for prime shipping. That's a whole process too. When you use Seller Central, your book will be displayed as available from a third party third party seller, which might not be as appealing to some customers. I know I try to avoid third party sellers, but you will be able to control the pricing. Woohoo to that. Now here's the video on distribution options for self publishing authors. That's a good one to watch after this. Or you might be interested in this one on offset printing versus Print on demand. So you know what I'm talking about. Go ahead, click on over. I'm waiting for you.