Direct sales versus the retailers, without the cheerleading
Selling from your own shop keeps roughly three times as much per copy. It also sells fewer copies. Here is the arithmetic on both sides, and the point where the crossover actually happens.
Inkwharf · August 23, 2026 · 4 min read
The case for selling books direct is usually made by someone who sells a tool for selling books direct. So here is the version with the losses in it.
What a copy is worth in each place
A $9.99 ebook through a major retailer at the standard 70% rate returns about $6.84 after the per-megabyte delivery fee. That rate is conditional on pricing inside a band — outside it, the rate drops to 35%, which is why almost every independent ebook in the world costs $9.99. The pricing of this industry is a royalty table wearing a market's clothes.
The same book sold from your own shop returns the full $9.99 minus card processing, which is roughly 2.9% + 30¢, or about 59¢. Call it $9.40.
So: $6.84 against $9.40. Not quite three times the margin, but the gap widens as the price rises, because the retailer's percentage scales and the processor's mostly does not. On a $19.99 technical manual the comparison is about $13.70 against $19.11.
What a copy costs to sell in each place
This is the half that gets left out.
A retailer has a search box that millions of people type into with intent to buy a book. Your website does not. On the day you open a direct shop, your conversion volume is whatever your newsletter, your socials and the back matter of your existing books can reach — and for most authors that is a much smaller number than the retailer's also-boughts were quietly delivering.
Three times the margin on a fifth of the volume is a pay cut. There is no arithmetic that turns that into a win, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
So when does it actually make sense?
At the point where you can reach readers without paying anyone for the introduction. Concretely: a mailing list in the low hundreds that actually opens, or a back catalogue with back matter in it, or an audience somewhere that is yours rather than rented.
Below that line, the honest advice is to stay with the retailers and spend the time building the list instead. Above it, every sale you route through your own shop is worth about three of the other kind, and the multiplier applies to a number you control rather than one a recommendation algorithm decides.
The useful framing is not "direct or retail". It is: which sales can I move, and the answer is the ones that were coming from my own list anyway. Those are sales the retailer was charging you 30% to introduce you to people you already knew.
The asset that is not in the arithmetic
Every direct sale gives you an email address. Every retail sale gives you a royalty line and no idea who bought it.
That difference does not show up in a per-copy comparison and it is worth more than the per-copy comparison. A thousand direct buyers is a launch mechanism for the next book. A thousand retail buyers is a number in a dashboard. This is the actual argument for selling direct and it is not the one usually made, because it does not fit in a headline about keeping 100%.
What you are not giving up
The word that stops most authors here is exclusivity, and it is worth being precise about what is and is not at stake.
Selling from your own shop is not exclusive to anything. The same EPUB can be on Amazon, Kobo, Apple and your own site simultaneously, and for most authors it should be — the retailers keep finding readers you cannot reach, and your shop keeps the margin on the readers you can.
The exception is the exclusivity programmes, which pay for reach with a contractual promise not to sell the file anywhere else. That is the one genuinely irreversible decision in this whole comparison, and it is a decision per title rather than per career. If a book is enrolled, it stays where it is until the term ends.
The version with your numbers in it
Take the number of copies a month you currently sell that came from your own list — not your total, the ones you introduced. Multiply by about $2.50, which is roughly the per-copy difference at $9.99. That is what going direct is worth to you this year, before any growth.
If that number is smaller than a coffee, keep writing and keep building the list. If it is not, the arithmetic against a platform taking a percentage is the next thing to run, and what the royalty split actually costs does the long version of the sum above.
Open a shop — free to start, nothing per sale, and no exclusivity in either direction.
Sell your book to your own readers
A storefront, a checkout and file delivery, in about five minutes. No listing fee and nothing exclusive.