Can you (profitably) sell your own hardcover on Amazon?
Spoiler: No. No, you can’t.
Even before I finished writing The Gap Year, I knew I wanted to offer a hardcover edition. They feel great in your hands, and look great on the shelf, even if they’re pricier than paperback and Kindle editions. But I had no idea how little financial sense it makes to do this as a self-published, print-on-demand author. I’m doing it anyway, but it turned out to be just a vanity edition for friends and family, not something any normal customer would ever want to buy.
The original Indy, facing her literary counterpart
I published the hardcover edition through IngramSpark, the Tennessean print-on-demand colossus. As an author, I can buy a copy of my own book directly from them, at a cost of $14.61. And at first blush, this price sounds pretty okay! A sci-fi book of similar size on Amazon, like James S. A. Corey’s Leviathan Falls, sells for $16.50 with free Prime shipping. So maybe this isn’t insane?
My first problem is getting my printed books shipped to me. If I order just one copy of The Gap Year from IngramSpark, it’ll cost me $26.30. That’s with the 10-day printing speed, not expedited in any way, and with the cheapest shipping they offer that has tracking.
All right, but I’m going to sell these on Amazon, right? What if I buy a whole box at once, and sell them one at a time? IngramSpark charges $208.61 for a box of twelve of my books, which comes out to $17.38 per book, delivered to my front porch. You can see where I’m going with this, though. I’m already above a normal retail hardcover price, and that’s just to get the books into my inventory!
To ship each book to a customer, I need a book mailer and some bubble wrap. Uline S-11215 mailers are perfect for my book, along with Duck 12” small-bubble cushioning wrap. If I buy these in bulk, the amount I need to package one book costs me $1.61 (one mailer and 2 sq. ft. of bubble wrap). That puts my cost per book now at $18.99. Then shipping it to my customer via USPS Media Mail (the cheapest option with tracking, which Amazon requires), is another $6.13. So my final cost per book, from IngramSpark in Tennessee, to me, to my customer’s doorstep, with no profit margin, is $25.13.
At least I’m at no risk of running out of mailers…
Okay, that’s a lot of money. But newer sci-fi/fantasy hardcovers can cost up into the mid-twenty-dollar range from Amazon, right? I just ordered Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan) yesterday, which cost me $22.90. So maybe this isn’t completely ridiculous?
There’s one last thing, though. I still need to sell the book on Amazon. I created an Amazon seller account, added a listing for The Gap Year, and set the pricing. Which is where Amazon shows you that their fee for selling each book will come to $6.55.
That’s right. To sell my print-on-demand hardcover book on Amazon, the breakeven price is $31.68.
I did it anyway, since I wanted my friends and family to be able to buy one on Amazon and have it show up on their doorstep, hand-wrapped by me, with a cute little border collie return-address sticker. I just had to apologize to each of them for the ridiculously high price!
Completely waterproofed with a ridiculous amount of packing tape!
The final twist is that Amazon themselves are now selling my hardcover, at a price of $29.38. They say it ships in 2-3 days, which would have cost me an extra $1.50 - $4.50 per book from IngramSpark. And IngramSpark will ship it directly to me for Amazon, though their packaging isn’t as nice as mine. This way, I do actually earn $1.00 per book, since I set the IngramSpark price so that my royalty would be a dollar.
Yep, you heard me right. For every one of my scorchingly-expensive $30 hardcovers that Amazon sells, I earn the princely sum of $1.00 :)