Sell ebooks online

Amazon KDP: reach, at a price

Kindle Direct Publishing puts your book in front of an audience nobody else can match, and readers already trust the checkout. In exchange, royalty rates depend on your price band and delivery costs, Amazon owns the customer relationship — you don't get the buyer's email address — and pricing decisions are constrained by the platform. For a first-time author with no audience, that trade is often worth it. For someone who already has readers, it means paying for reach you brought yourself.

Your own store

Shopify, WooCommerce or a Squarespace shop gives you full control: your price, your presentation, your customer list, your upsells. The cost is a monthly subscription that runs whether or not the book sells, plus the work of building and maintaining the thing. It makes sense when the ebook is one product in a catalogue, or the front door to a bigger business.

A direct payment link

The third option is the least discussed and often the best fit for an author with an existing audience: skip the store entirely and sell the file directly through a link. You keep the customer relationship, set your own price, and there's nothing to build or pay for monthly — but you supply all the traffic, which is exactly the deal if you were going to be doing that anyway.

This works particularly well for a niche ebook sold to a specific community: a newsletter list, a subreddit you're active in, a Discord, or an audience on one social platform. See how to sell digital downloads for the broader picture.

Which format to sell

PDF is the safe default: it opens everywhere and preserves your layout exactly, which matters if the book has design, worksheets or code samples. EPUB reflows properly on e-readers and phones, and readers who use a Kobo or Kindle will prefer it. Selling both in one download costs you nothing and removes the "will this work on my device?" objection, which is a more common reason for not buying than price.

Protecting the file

An ebook is the easiest thing in the world to forward. DRM mostly annoys legitimate buyers without stopping anyone determined, so the practical approach is traceability: a per-buyer watermark carrying a purchase reference, a cap on downloads per purchase, and links that expire. None of it makes copying impossible; all of it makes a leak attributable, which changes behaviour more than a lock does.

Pricing

Non-fiction ebooks solving a specific expensive problem routinely sell for €20–€50 and up. Fiction and general-interest titles sit far lower because they compete with an enormous supply of alternatives. The most common mistake is anchoring on Kindle store prices when you're selling a niche professional guide directly to people who need it — those are different products in different markets, and copying the price of one into the other leaves most of the money on the table.