You sell an ebook in one of three places: a marketplace that brings traffic and takes a cut, a storefront you own where you keep the whole price, or inside a membership people already pay for. Which one is right depends on a single question, and it is not a question about the book: do you have any way to reach readers yourself? If you do not, a marketplace is renting you an audience and the royalty split is the rent. If you do, the split is paying for something you already have. One disclosure up front: we make Drry, which takes 0% of what you sell, so we are not a neutral party here and we will say so again where it matters.
How do I sell an ebook?
Decide where the money changes hands, then point everything at it. The mechanics are genuinely small: an ebook is a file, the buyer needs a way to pay, and you need a way to hand over the file after they do. Every option below does those three things and differs only in what it charges and what it gives you back.
- A marketplace. Amazon KDP, Apple Books, Kobo. You upload, they list, and they take a royalty split of every sale. Some browse traffic comes with it. The buyer is theirs: you usually do not get an email address, so you cannot tell that reader about your next book.
- Your own storefront or payment link. A page with a price and a download. You keep the price minus card processing, you get the buyer's email, and you supply all the traffic.
- Inside a membership. The ebook is one thing in a library people subscribe to, rather than a single purchase. This is the option almost nobody considers first and it is usually the one that earns most, for the reason the arithmetic section below sets out.
These are not exclusive, and the sequence that works is usually boring: put it on a marketplace to find out whether anyone wants it, then sell the same file from a page you own to the readers that book brought you.
Where should you sell an ebook, Amazon or your own site?
Amazon if you have no audience and want distribution; your own site if you have any way at all to reach readers. The honest version of this trade is that both sides are paying for traffic, and you are choosing the currency.
A marketplace charges a percentage of every sale, forever, including on the sales you brought it yourself. That last part is the one people miss: if you post your book link to your own newsletter and somebody buys, the split still applies, and you have paid a distribution fee on a reader who needed no distribution. Royalty terms also come with conditions attached, typically a price band you have to stay inside to earn the better rate, plus a delivery charge that scales with the file size, so a graphics-heavy PDF earns less per sale than a text one at the same price.
How much should you charge for an ebook?
Charge $9 to $29 for something practical, and lean to the top of that range. Page count is the wrong unit: nobody buys length, they buy the end of a problem. A 40-page document that replaces a weekend of guesswork is worth more than a 300-page one that gets abandoned at chapter two, and the short one is also the one people finish, which is what makes them buy from you again.
The instinct to charge $3 comes from comparing your book to novels, which are competing with every other novel ever written. A specific guide for a specific person is not in that market. If your ebook tells a wedding photographer exactly how to price their packages, its competition is not fiction, it is the cost of getting pricing wrong for another year.
What earns more than selling one ebook?
Selling the same reader something that renews. This is the pivot that changes the numbers, and it is worth being precise about why, because it is not a trick of pricing.
A one-off sale means every dollar needs a new human being. You find a reader, they pay once, and then you are back where you started looking for the next one. That is a treadmill, and it is why authors with genuinely good ebooks still describe the income as pocket money. A membership breaks the pattern by earning more than once from the person who already decided they trust you.
This is also the answer to the audience problem. An ebook sold to a stranger is a dead end, because you have no way to tell them about anything else. The same ebook given to somebody joining a community starts a relationship you can still use in two years.
How do you deliver an ebook after someone pays?
Automatically, and to an address you keep. The delivery itself is a solved problem: a payment link or storefront hands over the file the moment the payment clears, and a members-only library simply has the file sitting in it. What matters is the part either side of the download.
- Capture the email address. It is the only durable asset in the transaction. A marketplace keeps it; a page you own hands it to you.
- Do not gate it behind an account they resent. One payment, one download, no hoops.
- Say what happens next. The receipt is the most-read email you will ever send, so it should point at the next thing rather than just confirming the charge.
What does it cost to sell an ebook?
On a marketplace, a percentage of every sale for as long as you sell it. On your own storefront, the card processing fee, plus whatever the platform charges on top. Those two words, "on top", are where the market differs most, and it is worth reading a price page carefully: a platform fee is charged in addition to the processing fee that everybody pays, which means a 5% platform cut and a 10% platform cut are not 5% and 10% of your income, they are that much on top of roughly 3% you were always going to pay.
For the disclosed version: Drry takes 0% of what you sell, the payment runs through your own Stripe account so the customer is yours, and the free plan carries 100 members and 5 GB with no card required, which is enough to sell an ebook and run the community around it before you pay us anything. We think that is the right shape. We also make it, so read the argument about percentage fees with that in mind and check our numbers against anyone else's.
Where to go next
If you are deciding between specific tools rather than between models, the comparison of places to sell digital products is the practical next read, and how to sell digital downloads covers the mechanics for files that are not books. If the membership argument above is the part that landed, how much to charge for a membership does the pricing, and owning your audience is the longer version of why the email address matters more than the sale.
Questions coaches ask
How do I sell an ebook?
Pick where the sale happens, then send people to it. There are three places: a marketplace like Amazon KDP, which brings some of its own traffic and takes a royalty split of every sale; your own storefront or payment link, where you keep the money and supply all the traffic yourself; and inside a membership or community, where the ebook is one of the things people already pay you for. Most authors start on a marketplace because it is the shortest path to a first sale, and the ones still earning in year three have usually moved the same book to a page they own.
How much should you charge for an ebook?
Between $9 and $29 for a practical, problem-solving ebook, and the top of that range more often than the bottom. Price on the problem it solves rather than the page count: a 40-page document that saves somebody a weekend of work is worth more than a 300-page one they will not finish. The exception is a marketplace with royalty bands, where the platform's own pricing rules can make a specific number worth more to you than a higher one.
Can you sell an ebook without Amazon?
Yes, and nothing about the file changes. An ebook is a PDF or an EPUB, so any tool that can take a payment and deliver a download can sell one: a payment link, a storefront, or a members-only library. What you give up is Amazon's browse traffic, which is real but is also the thing you are paying the royalty split for. What you gain is the buyer's email address and the whole price.
Do you need a big audience to sell an ebook?
No, and the arithmetic is the reassuring part: a 200-person email list converting at 3% to a $19 ebook is about $114, which is a small number that tells you the thing works. What a small audience rules out is living on one-off sales, because you have to find a brand-new buyer for every dollar. That is the reason to sell the ebook to people who can then buy something else from you rather than to strangers who vanish after the download.
What file format should an ebook be?
PDF if the layout matters, EPUB if the reading experience does. A PDF holds its design exactly and is what almost every worksheet, template pack and workbook should be. An EPUB reflows to the reader's screen and font size, which is what somebody reading a long book on a phone or a Kindle actually wants. Supplying both covers it, and both are ordinary files you can attach anywhere.