The authors who do best financially aren't the ones who left Amazon — they're the ones who stopped depending on it exclusively. "Should I leave Amazon?" is one of the most common questions in author communities, forums, and Facebook groups, and it's the wrong question to be asking in the first place, because it assumes a decision that was never actually required.
Why This Is the Wrong Question
Framing the decision as leave-or-stay assumes the choice is binary — that an author has to pick exactly one channel and commit fully to it. It isn't, and they don't. Amazon and direct sales solve two different problems — discovery versus profit — and an author doesn't have to sacrifice one to get the other. The question itself is built on a false premise that's caused a lot of authors to avoid direct sales entirely, out of an unnecessary fear of "abandoning" Amazon.
What Amazon Does Well for Authors
Amazon offers reach that no individual author's own website or storefront can match on day one: built-in discovery through search and algorithmic recommendations, decades of accumulated consumer trust in the checkout process, and a customer base that's already primed to buy books without any convincing. For a brand-new author with zero existing audience, that discovery engine is genuinely, meaningfully valuable — it's often the only realistic way to reach readers who have never heard of the author before.
What Amazon Does Poorly for Authors
Royalties net out lower than they appear once print costs are subtracted, reader data stays entirely with Amazon and never reaches the author, and payouts take up to 60 days after the end of the month a sale occurred in. None of these are secrets — they're documented plainly in Amazon's own terms — but together, they mean an author's most loyal, highest-intent buyers, the ones who would happily pay full price directly if given the option, are generating the platform's lowest-margin transactions for the author specifically.
The Both/And Strategy
The strongest approach uses Amazon for exactly what it's good at, and direct sales for exactly what direct sales is good at: Amazon for discovery and reach among readers who don't yet know the author, a direct storefront for profit and reader relationships among readers who already do. Neither channel needs to be sacrificed for the other to work well.
How to Use Both Channels Together
- Keep the book listed on Amazon for organic discovery, algorithmic recommendations, and reviews from readers who found it independently.
- Direct all of an author's own personal marketing efforts — social posts, email, live events, interviews — to the direct storefront link instead of the Amazon listing.
- Let readers who find the book organically discover it on Amazon; direct the readers the author personally reaches to the channel that pays significantly more for the identical sale.
The Risk of Amazon Dependency
An author whose entire income depends on a single platform is exposed to that platform's algorithm changes, policy updates, and unilateral account decisions — with no appeal process and no alternative revenue stream to fall back on if something goes wrong through no fault of the author's own. Diversifying a sales channel mix isn't about distrust of Amazon specifically; it's basic business risk management, the same logic that applies to any business over-concentrated in a single customer or a single revenue source.
How to Gradually Build Your Direct Channel
Start small and low-risk: add a direct storefront link to existing social bios and an email signature, without removing or changing anything about the existing Amazon listing. Measure which channel an author's own personal marketing efforts actually convert better on over a real measurement period, and let that data — not an ideological preference for one platform or the other — guide how much future marketing weight shifts toward direct sales over time.
A 90-Day Transition Plan
- Days 1–30: Set up a direct storefront alongside the existing Amazon listing — no changes to Amazon required.
- Days 31–60: Route all personal marketing — email, social, events — to the direct link exclusively, while Amazon continues collecting organic traffic on its own.
- Days 61–90: Compare actual earnings per copy across both channels over the full period, and decide how to weight future marketing effort based on the real numbers.
The goal was never leaving Amazon behind entirely — it's making sure Amazon is one channel among several an author actively uses, rather than the only one they've ever had access to. Start building a direct channel without touching an existing Amazon listing at all.
What Authors Who've Made the Switch Actually Report
Authors who have added a direct channel alongside an existing Amazon presence consistently report the same pattern: Amazon sales continue largely unaffected, while a meaningful share of what used to be Amazon-only revenue shifts to the higher-paying direct channel over time, as an author's own marketing increasingly points there instead. Total sales volume rarely drops — the mix of where those sales happen simply shifts, in the author's favor, without any dramatic single decision required to trigger it.
The Question Behind the Question
When an author asks "should I leave Amazon," what they usually mean is some version of "I feel like I'm not earning what I should be, and Amazon is the channel I know" — a completely reasonable feeling, given how opaque royalty math and reader ownership tend to be across the industry. The actual answer isn't about Amazon specifically — it's about making sure every channel an author sells through is a deliberate choice, evaluated on its own merits, rather than a default an author never got around to reconsidering.
Addressing the Fear of Losing Amazon Reviews and Rankings
A common hesitation is worrying that adding a direct channel will somehow hurt an existing Amazon listing's reviews, rankings, or algorithmic visibility. In practice, a book's Amazon listing is entirely unaffected by sales happening on a separate direct storefront — reviews, rankings, and recommendation placement are all driven by activity on Amazon itself, not by an author's total sales across every channel combined. There's no mechanism by which building a direct channel penalizes an existing Amazon presence, and no publisher or platform policy that treats parallel direct sales as a violation of anything.
The Realistic Timeline for Seeing Results
Authors who add a direct channel shouldn't expect an overnight shift in their sales mix — readers take time to notice and start using a new link, and an author's own marketing habits take time to fully redirect toward it. Most authors report a gradual shift over the first 60 to 90 days, as consistent promotion of the direct link steadily increases its share of total sales, rather than a single dramatic jump the week the storefront goes live.
That gradual timeline is exactly why the decision to add a direct channel is worth making sooner rather than later — the compounding benefit of reader ownership and better per-copy earnings only starts accumulating once the channel actually exists, and every month spent deliberating is a month of sales that could have already been building toward it.
The Bottom Line
Amazon isn't the enemy, and leaving it isn't the goal. The goal is making sure an author's income doesn't depend entirely on decisions made inside a company they have no visibility into, and that the readers who buy directly from an author's own marketing efforts are rewarded with the channel that actually pays the author the most for that sale. Both things are true at once: Amazon remains a genuinely useful discovery tool, and a direct channel remains the better home for every sale an author personally generates.