Selling books online without depending on Amazon is possible, legal and less expensive than it seems: an online store of your own for a publisher starts at €2,970 + VAT and is usually up and running in a few weeks. At Mister Mikel we build online stores for publishers, bookshops, foundations and cultural centers from Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, and this article shares what we’ve learned doing it.
The reason to take the step is simple. When Amazon sells your book, you supply the catalog and they keep the margin, the data and — this is the serious part — the relationship with your reader.
It’s not that Amazon is the devil. It’s that it doesn’t work for you.
What do you lose on every Amazon sale?
On every marketplace sale you lose three things: part of the margin, the buyer’s data and the chance to talk to them again. The discount is the least of it. The serious part is that this reader is recorded in Amazon’s database, not in yours. You can’t write to them when you release the next title in the series. You can’t invite them to the launch. For you, they don’t exist.
The difference, in a table:
| Selling on Amazon | Selling in your store | |
|---|---|---|
| Margin per sale | Shared with the marketplace | All yours (minus the payment fee) |
| Reader data | Amazon’s | Yours |
| Newsletter and community | Impossible: you don’t know who bought | Every purchase adds a contact |
| Preorders | You don’t control the format | You launch them yourself, whenever you want |
| Book page | Standard template | You tell it the way you want |
| Dependence | Their rules, their changes | Your platform, your rules |
A publisher lives on two things: its catalog and its community. Giving away the second to move the first is a bad deal, especially when the alternative costs less than it seems.
What mistakes do publishers make when selling online?
We’ve been building stores for cultural projects for years, and the pattern almost always repeats:
- Confusing “being on the internet” with “selling on the internet”. A pretty website with a PDF catalog doesn’t sell. It informs, at most.
- The hijacked website. Someone built it years ago and today changing a price means calling, waiting and paying. The result: nobody touches it and the catalog goes stale.
- Handling orders by hand. Emails, bank transfers, a spreadsheet and half a Saturday. It works until it stops working — usually in the middle of a preorder campaign.
- Five tools that don’t talk to each other. The store on one side, the newsletter on another, the catalog in a third. And you in the middle, acting as the glue.
How do you know if this is you?
Three quick questions. If you answer no to any of them, you have homework:
- Can you change the price of a title right now, yourself, without calling anyone?
- Do you know the name and email of your last twenty buyers?
- Could you open a preorder this week if you sign off an edition tomorrow?
A well-built store of your own answers yes to all three. And we’re not talking about a pharaonic project: we’re talking about a store with your catalog in book pages that make people want to buy, payments and shipping configured, and an admin panel anyone on your team can understand.
And the fixed book price?
In Spain, the retail price of a book is set by the publisher and is the same in every channel, with a maximum discount of 5% (Ley 10/2007, the law on reading, books and libraries). This, sometimes seen as a drawback, actually plays in your favor: Amazon can’t sell your book cheaper than you do. The reader pays the same in your store as there — the difference is who keeps the margin and the contact. In your store, you do.
How do you build a store you can run yourself?
Our philosophy at Mister Mikel is short: we build it, you keep it, you run it. We build the store, leave the catalog loaded, and on handover day we show you how to use it in ten minutes. From then on you don’t need us for the day-to-day — and that, which sounds like a detail, is the heart of the matter.
A real example: Ya lo dijo Casimiro Parker, an independent publisher in Madrid with almost two decades publishing poetry and fiction and a catalog of more than a hundred titles spread across collections. We built them a store where the catalog looks after itself: new releases, backlist, collections. No intermediary platforms, no marketplace commissions, and every reader recorded in their own house, not someone else’s.
And if you’re wondering whether this also works for something bigger: the Centro Federico García Lorca in Granada sells its cultural catalog from its own store, including international sales in dollars. Same method, different scale.
What does it cost and how long does it take?
Straight to the point: a store ready to sell starts at €2,970 + VAT, and a simple store is usually up and running in a few weeks. There are three plans — €2,970, €4,985 and €6,860 — covering everything from the small imprint to the institution with a large catalog. The details are on our page about online stores for publishers and cultural projects.
An honest caveat before we finish
Leaving Amazon doesn’t mean deleting yourself from Amazon. For many publishers it makes sense to stay there as a shop window — some readers only buy there. The difference lies in where you put the center: if your main channel is your store, Amazon is an add-on that brings extra sales. If your main channel is Amazon, you are the add-on. And that position costs dearly over the years.
FAQ
Yes. As a publisher or bookshop you can sell directly to readers from your own online store. In Spain the fixed book price applies (Ley 10/2007), so the price is the same on your website as in any other channel, with a maximum discount of 5% — what changes is the margin you keep and the relationship with the buyer.
A store ready to sell starts at €2,970 + VAT. At Mister Mikel we work with three plans — €2,970, €4,985 and €6,860 — ranging from a small imprint’s simple catalog to an institution’s international, multi-currency sales.
No. That’s precisely the criterion we build every store by: adding a title, changing a price or launching a preorder should take a couple of clicks, without calling anyone. We show you how to run it on handover day.
Yes. The ebook delivers itself: the reader pays and downloads it on the spot. You can sell the print and digital editions of the same title, each with its own price.
For most publishers we recommend Shopify, because it can be managed without tech skills and it handles growth; WooCommerce comes in when something very custom is needed. We are members of the Shopify Partner program and advise case by case.
In short
Selling books online without depending on Amazon means having a store of your own where the catalog, the margin and — above all — the reader are yours. Thanks to Spain’s fixed book price, your price is the same as Amazon’s; what changes is who keeps the value of each sale. It doesn’t require tech skills or a multinational’s budget: a well-built store starts at €2,970 and you run it yourself.