Amazon Advantage

The way it works is that Amazon will order a small number of your books to start with, and then they see how they sell. They decide the minimum inventory they want to keep, and then they strive to keep that inventory level. The annoying part is that many times they will send multiple "orders," often within the same week -- so you find yourself stuffing shipping boxes with small amounts of books constantly. They do allow you to ship multiple orders in the same package (if you make sure to indicate all the order numbers on the shipping label), but you will find you still will receive an order when it seems like you just shipped one off to them. Ah, the price of success, right?

As your book sells, you receive a portion of the sales proceeds once you reach a certain threshold or minimum sold. Amazon offers great resources for viewing your sales and keeping track of everything right from their Web site.

One of the annoying things about selling on Amazon is the ability for users to "rate" books. The problem with their rating system is that users are able to equate their experience with Amazon with the quality of your book -- which is quite unfair, of course. If you go to my book listing on Amazon, you will see what I mean: Mitral Valve Prolapse Syndrome: A Patient's Perspective. A user rated my book very poorly because it was "listed on back-order" and they still had not received it. Obviously that has nothing to do with my book but everything to do with Amazon's ability to ship an order out, and yet Amazon offers no way to "fix" this unfair rating by users.

Regardless of the annoyance-factor, selling on Amazon is still worth the hassle. It takes away the need for you to have your own e-commerce system and the need to have a way to accept credit card payments, and by offering your book for sale on Amazon it's another way to make your product look professional.

Amazon Advantage Resources

• How to sell books on Amazon
• Selling on Amazon