Have you searched for Amazon alternatives to sell your ebooks online? If you have, then here is our experience using alternatives to Amazon to sell our ebooks online.
Related: How to sell more books on Amazon
What are Amazon alternatives?
Amazon alternatives are other ebook publishing and ebook selling platforms whose operations are similar to Amazon. Amazon has a book publishing platform called Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).
With Amazon KDP, authors can leverage the various powerful features to publish their books and also give them some good marketing and publicity push.
Authors need to learn about how to publish and sell ebooks on Amazon KDP to maximize the immense free benefits the platform offers.
We are not here to talk about Amazon KDP in this post but to talk about our experience publishing and selling ebooks on other Amazon alternatives online.
So let us go into that now.
Why we tried this experiment
So as you have read from the introductory sections above, we just want to let you know of our experience when we decided to test other platforms for selling eBooks online apart from Amazon and Smashwords
You should know that there are other platforms for selling ebooks online apart from Amazon and Smashwords, Draft2digital, Apple, etc. I mean the big giants in the ebook publishing industry.
You should also know the reasons why we took that decision sometime last year.
- To spread the message more about our books online
- To make more income especially as it has to do with the royalty or commission we get from other platforms (Amazon alternatives) which are of higher percentages than that of Amazon and the other big giants when you put everything into consideration
- We also did not want to put our eggs in one basket. What about if Amazon (this is the biggest platform for our organization to sell our ebooks) changes its policy and it becomes unfavorable to Nigerians and Africans? Remember that Smashwords did that recently. They were acquired by Draft2digital and the new owner had to screen out some Africans and Nigerians. Very bad policy I must tell you. Thank God Smashwords was not our major platform for selling books online. But it affected us and our yearly income. I wrote a nasty email to them but they replied professionally that when the situations are right they will send an email to me. Too bad
So we don’t want to put your eggs in one basket, we decided to try out other platforms as lots of them are spreading out today.
Other Amazon alternatives we tried
The other Amazon alternatives we tried are:
- Babelcube
- Payhip
- Gumroad
- Publish Drive
- Bambooks
- Okadabooks
- LeanPub
What has been our experience so far?
Bambooks.io
I start with one of them in Nigeria
Bambooks.io
This is a Nigerian book publishing platform. The mode of operation of bambooks is just like the Amazon Kindle Select program. You publish your books without a list price.
Paid Subscribers of Bambooks will read your book free of charge but you will be paid quarterly on the number of pages read from your book. They have a way of calculating this and distributing the royalties among all published authors.
Now our experience:
We published about five books in two years and we saw good patronage and a good number of pages were being read from our books. So we were taking a good share of the royalties and good passive income two years ago.
We were encouraged and we published more books including my best-selling book The Prostitute, a Christian romance novel.
This book also gave us good income from Bambooks.
But since the beginning of this year or late last year, Bambooks became a no-go area for us. The income dropped drastically. I believe this was due to lots of authors now joining the platform.
The royalties are being shared by more authors. Subscribers base of bambooks reducing. And also more books begging for attention from subscribers.
The last royalty payment from Bambooks last week was nothing to write home about. Well, we stopped publishing on the platform late last year.
But sometime last year, Bambooks introduced audiobook publishing. We have not published one. We hope to consider this soon. You know it takes much more work to turn your ebook into an audiobook.
This should give you information on how to set up multiple streams of income as an author.
We stopped publishing on Bambooks but you can try it out if you like.
The website again is publish.bambooks.io
Okadabooks
Next, in our Amazon alternatives where you can publish and sell ebooks online is Okadabooks. Hmmm, our experience here is also not too good. I will tell you why below.
Our publishing experience with Okadabooks
The problem we have with Okadabooks has to do with the threshold placed on payment. It used to be 10000 naira. Which to me was too high considering a lot of factors like:
- Okadabooks is not Amazon where you are sure to have lots of traffic to your books when you do the right things.
- An average author can stay on Okadabooks for over three years to make 10000.
- This means that if I have 9900 naira in my account I have to wait for a lot of years to receive my money.
- You may even have to wait till eternity to receive anything. To me that was very bad.
We fought for reduction
A group of authors had to fight this out with the management of Okadabooks and they changed payment threshold to 5000 naira.
This is still too high. Considering the fact that many stores are now paying authors even if they sell one book.
At NowNowBooks (our online bookstore where you are reading this), we pay authors even when they make one sale.
We left Okadabooks
We lost interest in the Okadabooks platform. We still have 3000 naira worth of book sales trapped in our account. We stopped promotion because of this anomaly.
I wonder what the owner of Okadabooks is doing with the income of authors. I believe they are using the trapped income of authors for investment.
So We stopped putting more books on the platform and we stopped promoting the books.
Want to publish books on Okadabooks?
If you want to publish ebooks on okadabooks, you should check it out at https://okadabooks.com
Please visit The link to one of our books on okadabooks
I will update this post with our practical experience so far with each of these platforms listed above. Watch out.
Selling eBooks on Amazon
And talking about selling on Amazon, we have received lots of emails from Authors who desire to sell more Ebooks on Amazon. We always tell them the truth – if you are not ready to market your published books you won’t really see good results. Talking about a strategy that has helped us over the years…
The use of freebies on Amazon. I disclosed this simple very good secret in this short article. Read it now
