Julie Broad explains why most authors shouldn't skip Amazon despite its commissions and control. Without Amazon's reviews and rankings, potential readers and clients doubt your credibility, not your book. Direct sales work only if you already know paid advertising, copywriting, and have an audience ready to buy.
A lot of authors love to complain about Amazon. And one of those people I was just on the phone with and they said, I don't want my book on Amazon. And you know what? I get it. Amazon takes a cut, controls reviews, can shut accounts down, takes some of your control away. All true. So the logic is sound. And this author was like, I'll just sell direct from my website and use Ingram to skip over Amazon. And that's only sort of gonna work. If you're great at paid ads, great at funnels, great at writing copy, you're really good at upsells and backend offers, and you have an existing audience and network that's going to go there for your book, you can absolutely build a great business selling direct. But what I'm saying is you're not just another author. You're already a high-level direct response marketer, and most authors are not that. Most nonfiction authors are not trying to build a book business. They're trying to gain authority or speaking or clients, or they just really want to have impact with their story. For all of that, there's a very important piece of the puzzle that you need. It's called social proof. And whether you like it or not, Amazon is the default place people look for to see if a book has social proof. When someone hears about you, what do they almost always do? They go to Amazon and check your book or look you up on Google or ChatGPT. But usually, if they know you have a book, they go to Amazon. And if your book isn't there, it has no reviews, it has no ranking, it has no validation. And that creates doubt, not because your book is bad, but because it's missing a really important signal.
