How to sell books on Amazon: resell or publish your own

Selling books is how a lot of people take their first step on Amazon, and for good reason. The barrier is low, you can start with books you already own or pick up cheaply, and the demand never really goes away. It is also where I tell most beginners to learn the mechanics of selling, because the stakes are small and the lessons are real.

That said, “sell books on Amazon” hides at least four different businesses, and they are not equally easy or equally profitable. This guide walks through all of them, the real fees Amazon takes on books (which are different from other categories), how to price and source, the choice between letting Amazon ship or shipping yourself, and the mistakes that quietly eat the thin margins. It is written from the seller side, not the buyer side.

The four ways to sell books on Amazon

Before any tactics, it helps to see that “selling books” splits into four distinct paths. People blur them together and then get confused about fees, profit, and effort. They are not the same business.

Used and second-hand books. You acquire books cheaply, from your own shelves, library sales, thrift stores, estate sales, or charity shops, and resell them at a markup. This is the classic entry point, the lowest barrier, and where most people should start. Margins per book are small but the buy-in is tiny.

New books through arbitrage. You buy new books on discount, from clearance tables, big-box sales, or other retailers, and resell them at the market price on Amazon. This is retail or online arbitrage applied to books. It needs more capital than used books and sharper sourcing, but the condition is consistent and pricing is cleaner.

Wholesale. You buy new books in bulk directly from publishers or distributors at trade prices and resell them. This needs real capital, accounts with suppliers, and volume to be worth it. It is a later-stage move, not a starting point.

Publishing your own book. Through Kindle Direct Publishing you can publish your own ebook or paperback, including things like coloring books, journals, and low-content books. This is not reselling at all, it is creating a product. The economics, the skills, and the timeline are completely different, and I cover it on its own further down.

The cleanest way to think about it is two camps. The first three are all reselling, you have or source physical books and list them through Seller Central. The fourth, KDP, is publishing, you create a book and Amazon prints and ships it for you. Reselling is the fastest, lowest-risk way to start and the rest of the early sections cover it. But publishing your own book is the bigger, more scalable game, so it gets its own full section further down, with a calculator to show what a catalogue can earn. Knowing which camp you are in stops you from comparing apples to oranges when you read advice online.

Setting up to sell books

The setup is the same as selling anything on Amazon, with one or two book-specific notes. You create a seller account, and you choose between the two plans. The Individual plan has no monthly fee but charges a per-item fee on every sale. The Professional plan has a monthly subscription and drops that per-item fee. The rule of thumb is simple, if you will sell more than around 40 items a month, the Professional plan pays for itself, otherwise start Individual and upgrade later.

Books live in what Amazon calls the media category, alongside music, DVDs, and video games. The important practical consequence is that almost every book already has a catalogue page, identified by its ISBN. You are not creating a new listing with photos and a description the way you would for a private label product. You are adding your offer, your price, your condition, your fulfilment method, to a page that already exists. That makes listing a book fast, often just scanning the barcode in the Amazon Seller app and setting a price and condition.

Condition is the one field that matters most on used books, and Amazon has defined grades, New, Like New, Very Good, Good, and Acceptable, each with its own description. Grade honestly. Over-grading is the fastest way to collect returns and negative feedback, both of which cost you far more than the small extra you hoped to earn by calling a Good book Very Good. Buyers of used books are forgiving of an honest Good and unforgiving of a Very Good that arrives shabby.

What Amazon’s fees on books actually are

This is the part that decides whether book selling makes money, and it is the part beginners skip. Books carry a specific fee structure that is different from most other categories, so general “Amazon fees” advice will mislead you here.

There are two charges that always apply when a book sells. The first is the referral fee, which on books is 15% of the total sale price. The second, and this is the book-specific one, is a fixed closing fee of $1.80 on every media item sold. That closing fee is flat, it does not scale with price, which is exactly why cheap books are so hard to make work.

Look at what that means in practice. On a book you sell for $10, Amazon takes $1.50 as the referral fee plus the $1.80 closing fee, which is $3.30 before you have paid a cent for the book itself or for shipping it. That is a 33% cut on a $10 book. On a $40 textbook the same $1.80 closing fee barely registers, and the maths suddenly looks very different. This single dynamic, the flat closing fee, is the reason experienced book sellers chase higher-value books and avoid the penny paperbacks that look tempting but lose money once the fees land.

On top of those two, you pay for fulfilment, and that depends on whether you ship the book yourself or use Amazon, which is the next decision. Run the real numbers before you source anything, the calculator below does it for you in seconds.

Will this book make money? Run the numbers

Enter what you would sell a book for, what it costs you to get it, and your fulfilment cost. The tool applies Amazon’s real book fees, the 15% referral and the fixed $1.80 closing fee, and shows what you actually keep.

The lesson the calculator teaches faster than any paragraph is this, a cheap book and an expensive book carry the same flat $1.80 fee, so the cheap one has to clear a much higher hurdle just to break even. That is why I steer beginners away from bargain-bin paperbacks and toward books with a real resale value.

How to sell used and second-hand books

Used books are where most people should begin, because the buy-in is tiny and the lessons are cheap. The whole game is sourcing well and grading honestly, the listing itself takes seconds.

Sourcing is where the money is made. The books on your own shelves are a free starting batch to learn the process, but they run out fast. The repeatable sources are library sales, where libraries clear old stock for pocket change, thrift and charity shops, estate and garage sales, and clearance sections. The skill you build is recognising, quickly, which books are worth listing. A barcode scanner app that shows you a book’s current Amazon price and sales rank turns a shelf of unknowns into a fast yes or no, and that speed is the difference between a profitable scouting trip and a wasted afternoon.

Sales rank is the signal that separates a book that sells from a book that sits. A low number means the book sells often, a high number means it rarely does. A book can be worth $40 and still be a bad buy if its rank is so high that it might take a year to sell. I would rather hold a $12 book that sells this month than a $40 book that sells next year, because money tied up in slow stock is money you cannot reinvest.

Pricing used books is a balance. Amazon shows you the competing offers at each condition, and the temptation is to undercut to the bottom. Resist it. The lowest price is often a race between sellers who have not run their fees, and joining that race just means losing money faster. Price to the condition honestly and a little competitively, and let the slow, steady demand for used books do the work. Patience beats panic-pricing on books almost every time.

Where to find books to sell, ranked

Since sourcing is the whole game, it is worth laying out the channels in rough order, from the easiest entry to the ones that need more effort or capital. You will likely move down this list as you grow.

Your own shelves come first, free and immediate, the perfect way to learn the listing and shipping process before you risk a cent. They run out within a batch or two, so treat them as a training set, not a supply.

Thrift and charity shops are the everyday workhorse. Books cost a euro or two, the stock refreshes constantly, and a scouting app lets you scan through a shelf quickly to find the few worth taking. The hit rate is low, most books on the shelf are not worth listing, but the cost of a miss is tiny, which is exactly what makes it a safe place to learn.

Library sales are the step up in efficiency. Libraries periodically clear old stock in bulk at very low prices, and because the volume is high you can find more sellable books in one visit than in a week of thrift shops. They happen on a schedule, so it is worth knowing when your local ones run.

Estate and house-clearance sales can be gold, occasionally someone is clearing a collection of valuable or niche books priced as junk, but they are unpredictable and time-consuming, so they reward patience and a good eye more than they reward beginners.

Clearance and discount retail is where you cross into selling new books through arbitrage. Bookshop closing sales, big-box clearance tables, and end-of-line discounts let you buy new books cheaply enough to resell. This needs more capital than used books and sharper maths, because new-book margins are tight, but the condition is consistent and the listings are clean.

Wholesale sits at the bottom of the list precisely because it is the most demanding, real supplier accounts, real capital, and the need to move volume to justify it. It is where a serious book business eventually goes, not where one starts. The natural path is to begin at the top of this list, learn the process cheaply, and move down it only as your skill and capital grow.

How to sell textbooks on Amazon

Textbooks deserve their own section because the economics are the best in book selling, and the cluster of people searching to sell used or old textbooks is large. The reason is simple, textbooks are expensive, so that flat $1.80 closing fee barely dents the margin, and students pay real money for them.

The catch is seasonality. Textbook demand spikes hard at the start of each academic term and collapses between them. Sell into the start of a semester and prices are strong, list the same book mid-term and it can sit for months. If you are sourcing textbooks, the timing of when you sell matters almost as much as what you paid.

The other catch is editions. Textbooks get new editions that make the old one nearly worthless overnight, because courses switch to the latest version. Always check the edition and whether a newer one has just dropped before you buy. A current-edition textbook is gold, the previous edition can be close to unsellable. This is the one corner of book selling where moving quickly genuinely matters, because an edition change can wipe out value while a book sits in your pile.

The tools and apps you actually need

People overcomplicate this. You do not need a shelf of paid software to start selling books, you need one thing reliably and a couple of others as you grow.

The one tool that matters from day one is a scouting app that scans a barcode and instantly shows the book’s current Amazon price, its sales rank, and the fees. Amazon’s own Seller app does this for free and is enough to begin, and it is what turns a shelf of unknown books into fast yes-or-no decisions while you are standing in a thrift store. Without it you are guessing, and guessing on thin margins is how scouting trips lose money. As you get more serious, paid scouting apps add live profit calculations and triggers, the criteria that tell you to buy, but that is an upgrade for later, not a requirement to start.

Beyond scouting, the practical kit is mundane. If you ship yourself, you need basic packaging, padded mailers or boxes and a way to print labels, and access to a media-rate postal option, which is the cheap shipping class for books in many countries and the thing that keeps FBM margins alive. If you go the FBA route, you need the printer for the item labels Amazon asks you to apply and boxes to send your stock in. None of it is expensive, and none of it is worth obsessing over before you have proven you can source profitably.

What you do not need is a course promising secret suppliers or a tool for every step. The book business rewards doing the simple things consistently, scanning, grading, pricing, shipping, far more than it rewards owning clever software. Start with the free app and the books around you, and only add tools when a specific bottleneck makes you wish you had one.

How much can you realistically make

This is the honest part most guides dodge with a vague “it depends”. It does depend, but I can give you the shape of it so you set expectations right.

Per book, after everything, a decent used-book flip nets a few dollars, and a good textbook or a higher-value title can net ten, twenty, or more. The number that actually matters is not the per-book profit, it is per-book profit multiplied by how many books you can source and sell each month. Someone scouting part-time, a few hours a week, might list a few dozen books a month and make a modest side income, the price of a nice dinner or a small bill covered. Someone treating it as a real operation, sourcing in volume and running FBA, can build it into something far more serious, but that takes time, systems, and reinvesting the early profits into more stock.

The trap is expecting the second outcome with the effort of the first. Book selling does not scale by wishing, it scales by sourcing more and selling faster, which means more hours scouting or more capital buying in bulk. The margins are thin enough that there is no shortcut around volume.

What I tell people is to judge the first month not by the money but by the process. Did you source books that actually sold? Did your grading hold up without returns? Did your numbers match the calculator? If yes, the money follows as you scale the volume. If the process is broken, scaling it just loses money faster. Get the process right on a small batch first, then pour effort into it. That order, process before scale, is the whole difference between a book business that grows and a garage full of unsold paperbacks.

FBA or FBM for books, which to choose

You have two ways to get the book to the buyer, and the right one depends on your volume and the kind of books you sell. I cover the broader trade-offs in the guide to how FBA works, but here is the book-specific version.

With FBM, fulfilled by merchant, you store and ship the books yourself. For media, Amazon gives you a shipping credit toward each sale, and if you can ship a book for less than that credit using media mail or its equivalent, the difference works in your favour. FBM suits low volume, heavier or odd-sized books, and anyone testing the waters without committing inventory to a warehouse. The downside is that you do the packing and posting, and you do not get the Prime badge that lifts conversion.

With FBA, fulfilled by Amazon, you send your books to Amazon and it handles storage, shipping, and customer service. You get the Prime badge, your books convert better, and you are not packing boxes every evening. The cost is the FBA fee per book plus storage, and for a slow-selling book that storage fee can quietly eat the margin while it waits. FBA suits higher volume and faster-selling books where the convenience and the conversion lift outweigh the fees.

For most people starting with used books, FBM is the sensible first step. It keeps costs variable and teaches you the process. Move books to FBA once you have enough volume that packing is the bottleneck, and once you are confident they sell fast enough not to rack up storage fees sitting in a warehouse.

The bigger opportunity: publishing your own book with KDP

Everything above is reselling, and it is a fine place to start. But if you do not already have a pile of books to sell, the path most people are actually looking for is publishing their own, and that is a different and far more scalable game. It runs on Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon’s free self-publishing platform, and it is worth understanding properly because the economics are nothing like reselling.

With KDP you upload your book once and Amazon prints it on demand whenever someone orders, or delivers it instantly if it is an ebook. You hold no stock, you pay nothing upfront, and there is no closing fee eating each sale. You are not sourcing or shipping anything. You create the book, set the price, and Amazon handles the printing, the delivery, and the customer. Your income is a royalty on every copy sold, for as long as the book stays listed.

You do not have to be a writer. This surprises people, but a huge share of KDP is low-content and no-content books, journals, planners, notebooks, logbooks, and coloring books, where the value is in the interior layout and the cover, not in pages of prose. A well-designed planner for a specific niche, or a coloring book for a particular audience, can sell steadily without a single paragraph of writing. The category is crowded, so a real niche, a strong cover, and the right keywords matter far more than volume, but the barrier to creating one is genuinely low.

How the money works. On ebooks, Amazon pays a royalty of either 35% or 70% of your list price depending on the price band you choose. On paperbacks and hardcovers, you earn roughly 60% of the list price minus a printing cost that depends on the page count. So a $9.99 ebook on the 70% tier earns you close to $7 a copy, while a low-content paperback might net a couple of dollars after printing. Your margin lives in the royalty, and you set the price.

The lever most people miss is reach. When you publish on KDP, your book is not limited to one country. A single upload can be sold across Amazon’s stores worldwide, the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, Canada, Australia, and more, around a dozen marketplaces, each with its own buyers. That is the real power of publishing over reselling. A reseller sells one physical book once. A publisher sells the same digital asset over and over, in many countries, with no extra work after the upload. Multiply that across several titles and you start to see why a KDP catalogue behaves like an income engine rather than a job.

How you actually create a KDP book, and why AI does most of it now

Creating a book used to be the hard, slow part. It is not anymore. With today’s AI tools you can get something like 95% of the work done with assistance, and your real job shifts to direction and quality control rather than grinding out every piece by hand. Here is the process in short.

You start with the niche, and AI helps you research what people search for and where the gaps are, the same product research thinking that applies to any Amazon product. Then comes the content. For a written book, AI drafts and structures it from your outline. For the low-content books that dominate KDP, journals, planners, coloring books, AI generates the interiors, the prompts, and the images. Next the cover, where AI image tools produce professional-looking designs in minutes instead of a paid designer and a week. Then the listing itself, the title, the description, and the keywords, which AI writes and optimises. Finally you format the interior to KDP’s specs, upload, set your price, and publish.

What AI does not do is the 5% that actually decides the outcome, choosing what is worth making, judging whether the result is genuinely good, and keeping it original rather than generic. Amazon also expects you to follow its content guidelines and to disclose AI-generated content, so the human stays responsible for taste, quality, and the rules. The tools do the heavy lifting, you do the thinking. It is the same way I use AI across the rest of my work, as an accelerator, not an autopilot.

That multiplication, more titles across more marketplaces, is exactly what the calculator below lets you play with.

What a KDP catalogue could earn

Set how many books you publish, roughly how many copies each sells per month in a single marketplace, your royalty per copy, and how many Amazon marketplaces you publish to. The tool shows the potential, the point is to see how titles and countries multiply together.

The number that should jump out is not the size, it is the shape. Reselling earns you a one-time margin on a book you have to find, grade, and ship. Publishing earns you a royalty on an asset you made once and that keeps selling, in many countries, for years. Both are real, but only one compounds, and that is why I point anyone serious about books toward learning KDP.

A quick separate note on Handmade, since people ask. Amazon Handmade is for genuinely handcrafted goods and is not really about books, so treat it as its own decision with its own application and fees, not an extension of selling books.

The mistakes that quietly lose money

A few mistakes show up again and again with book sellers, and every one of them comes back to the same root, ignoring the real fees.

Buying penny books is the classic trap. A book selling for a few dollars looks like easy money until the flat $1.80 closing fee and the referral take most of it, and shipping takes the rest. Run the numbers first, and most cheap books simply do not clear the bar.

Over-grading condition is the next. Calling a Good book Very Good to win the sale earns you a return, a refund, and often negative feedback, all of which cost far more than the small premium you chased. Honest grading is not just ethics, it is economics.

Ignoring sales rank is the slow killer. A valuable book that never sells is worse than a cheap book that sells this week, because the first one is dead money and the second one is cash you can reinvest. Always read the rank, not just the price.

And forgetting storage fees catches FBA sellers. Sending slow books into FBA means paying month after month to store stock that is not moving, and that quietly turns a thin profit into a loss. Match the fulfilment method to how fast the book actually sells.

Is selling books on Amazon still worth it?

Honestly, yes, but as a real small business, not as a quick win. The margins per book are thin, so this is a volume and discipline game, the people who do well are the ones who source relentlessly, grade honestly, price patiently, and always know their fees. It will not replace an income overnight, but it is one of the cheapest, lowest-risk ways to learn how selling on Amazon actually works, and those lessons carry straight over into bigger models.

That is really the best reason to start here. The mechanics you learn selling used books, the fees, the fulfilment choice, the pricing, the account, are the same mechanics you will use if you later move into private label or chase higher-value products of your own. Books are a low-stakes classroom for a high-stakes business.

If you want a hand building any of this into something serious, from the strategy to the day-to-day, it is the kind of work I do with the brands I run through Novazon. You can see how I work on my Amazon page.