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Sell a self-published book on Amazon?

Fellas- I have a question for the folks on here that have written books. I self-published a book, Fly Fishing the Gunnison Country, in May. It is selling great locally, but I'd like to give the book a wider exposure via Amazon,com. I haven't been able to figure out how to go about making the book available on Amazon.com, and it is physically impossible to speak to a homo sapiens there. So my question, can anyone that has written a book and made it available on Amazon.com please point me in the right direction? How did you do it? I know there are numerous folks on here who have written books, as I have some of them, so I'm hoping to benefit from your knowledge. Thanks for any help you can offer me! Doug Dillingham Ohio City, Colorado

Contact DirtyD (Matt D) as he wrote a book about public land elk hunting. He also has the book available in the Kindle version on Amazon

See link

Just open an Amazon Seller's Account. It will prompt you from there with instructions how to set it up.

Best of Luck, Jeff

There is a soft ware program that will tell you how your competitors are doing before you go to the trouble. Well, actually it is for ebooks. I checked on various subjects. Whitetail hunting has a much larger potential audience than your book and they sell very few copies, just a few a month; but of course it depends on the author and title, quality.

I suggest you do a bit of research on YouTube or Google for "Amazon ebook software" or "Selling your ebook on Amazon". Or replace ebook with book and do the same search. My guess is your topic is so narrow it is best sold locally.

I'm not a writer but curious if you shopped the book to Stonefly Press, Amato, Headwaterbooks, etc. or if you purposely wanted to self publish.

Thanks for the responses. As to Glunt's question, I purposely wanted to self-publish. Going through a "real" publisher just means that the author loses all control of the project and on top of that, makes a few dollars a book. I wanted to make money on this project so self-publishing was obviously the way to go for me.

What's the book called? About?

I think elkmtngear is right. Just open an Amazon sellers account.

That said, you should consider your own website for sales, as you retain decision making power and sales dollars. As you are finding out, Amazon can be a real pain to deal with.

I recently published a book on traditional bowhunting (A Traditional Bowhunter's Path) and sell on Amazon and my own website (www.TraditoinalSpiritOutdoors.com).

The Weebly platform makes it really easy to create your own e-commerce site.

In my experience (a few years ago), there was more than one level of seller account. The basic one will let you sell items that are similar to those already being sold, or items that have been sold on Amazon in the past. In order to list a new item, that has not previously been sold on Amazon, you had to have a seller store or something like that. Also, I believe your book will need a UPC Code, etc. There are online sources to get a UPC assigned for your book for a very low price. I contacted a person with a seller store on Amazon, and asked them to please create a listing of my book for sale (sent them a photo of the cover and all other pertinent info for the description, etc.). They simply listed it for sale, and then unlisted it, which created it in the Amazon system. Once they did that, I could go in and sell a "similar" item from that point forward under my own seller name. Perhaps things are different now, but that's what I recall from doing so a few years ago.

They do take a pretty large chunk of the selling price as a fee, however, as compared to eBay and others. Good luck!

Not a hunting book but a friend of mine is selling a self-published children's poetry/illustrated book on Amazon.

Fellas- Wow, I had no idea so many folks had knowledge about selling a book on Amazon. I do have my own website and sell quite a few off of it, that is until I got booted from Facebook, which is the greatest marketing tool ever invented in my opinion. The only reason I'm considering Amazon right now is because my Facebook gravy train left the station. I'll have a lot to sort through with all these posts, so thank you for helping. Doug Dillingham Ohio City, Colorado

Whatever you decide Doug----- I hope it all plays out well for you.

Good luck, Robb

Ho the heck did you get booted off facebook?

Yeah, please share the facebook story if you don't mind.

As for the questions about getting the boot from FB, there really isn't much to tell. I was running ads for the book on numerous buy, sell, and trade groups for numerous areas around Colorado. That is what these groups are for, so not sure what FB objected to in my particular case, but I tried to log on one day and got a message stating that some "suspicious activity" had been detected on my account and I would no longer be able to log in until they "investigated." The only suspicious activity that was occurring was that I was making money. That was last Friday and I've heard nothing so I'm guessing I won't ever hear from them and will just be permanently banned. It really sucks cuz I was selling quite a few books and doing things by the letter of the FB law (at least as far as I know). No worries, the book sells incredibly well in local fly shops and book stores, so I'll just have to be ok with a little hiatus in sales until it gets closer to fly fishing season in the spring. Thanks again for all of your advice as to how to get on Amazon. Doug

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