Why Amazon is Integral to the Success of Indie Authors
There’s always been a love-hate relationship with the big ‘zon in the author world. But for authors who publish independently, Amazon is a partner that’s enabled the success of the majority of our careers.
In fact, the origination of the KDP platform in 2007 along with the first Kindle ereader revolutionized the indie publishing process, allowing authors to easily upload and distribute their books, bypassing traditional publishers or expensive/predatory vanity publishers, and go straight to an ever-expanding audience of readers.
It’s not like digital books hadn’t been available prior to this, they had—but the Kindle system/reader made digital books far less cumbersome to acquire and consume. While it took a while, eventually traditional publishers couldn’t ignore the growth of the popularity of the Kindle platform and eventually began utilizing it as well. In 2024, Amazon held a “68% market share in global ebook sales, which rises to 83% when Kindle Unlimited is included,” according to Goodereader.com. While other estimates put Amazon’s share closer to 81% and others as high as 85%.
While there are some healthy competitors in the market today like Nook (Barnes & Noble), Apple Books and Kobo, their market share splits up the remaining percentage with Nook in the lead and Apple Books trailing closely with Kobo coming in at 3% (at least in the USA.) Kobo has bigger market shares in other countries.
For print books, Amazon also controls a majority of the sales in the US—reportedly at more than 50% for all new book sales and more than 90% for all indie published titles. Their print-on-demand (POD) system has allowed for a streamlined process that produces a professional product. So much so, that some traditional publishers use the POD system for printing when their book stock runs low and a new print run has not yet arrived to replenish the warehouse.
Amazon’s market share for both digital and print books makes it essential that indie authors distribute their books through Amazon to capture their share of these sales. Now, you CAN, as an indie author, distribute your books to Amazon from a different source than KDP; however, your royalties will likely be a little lower than if you used the KDP platform to distribute directly to those Amazon buyers.
Personally, I’ve tested being wide (distributing to Kobo, Nook, apple books and more) with my ebooks versus being exclusive to Kindle/enrolling my books in the Kindle Select. (That’s the author side of the Kindle Unlimited library that readers access which pays authors per page for their reading.) I’ve never been able to make more royalties from those other ebook platforms than I can via the page read payments via Kindle Select/Kindle Unlimited. I know some authors have made this work and others have been very successful selling their books directly from their own websites.
But for the majority of us, Amazon sales will continue to deliver the biggest share of our royalties. It’s the sales platform that offers the ease of use consumers have grown used to and it’s where our books are most discoverable by new readers.
