Vook: No Delivery Fees Vook

Vook: No Delivery Fees

by Matthew Cavnar on June 13, 2024

Yesterday, author Andrew Hyde wrote a blog post titled “Amazon’s markup of digital delivery to indie authors is ~129,000%.” Hyde had discovered -- the hard way -- a clause in Kindle Direct Publishing that stipulates a charge of $.15/MB for downloads of books from KDP. To those authors familiar with KDP -- or ePublishing platform creators who have spent years struggling with arcane distribution terms -- this charge comes as no surprise. To a new author it could seem like a “gotcha” -- and certainly did to Hyde, who wrote, “...but damn Amazon, you sure know how to take a great feeling and turn it sour.”

Hyde details how the delivery fee affected his bottom line. Though Amazon accounted for more than 70% of the sales of his self-published book, Travel: A Modern Manual, which he priced at $9.99, he made the least through that channel -- $5.10 per book after taking into account the delivery fee of $2.58 per download. Bonus: His graphs are great marketing collateral for anyone pitching their own eBook delivery system.

Which brings us to Vook. If you distribute through Vook, you don’t have to pay a delivery fee. If you’re a subscription customer, we don’t take any of your revenue from the amount Amazon pays you. This makes a difference if you’re selling a 75 MB ebook packed with pictures and videos -- but even for a standard ebook with images -- like Hyde’s -- you don’t have to worry about size constraints.

Why? Vook is on a wholesale model with Amazon. That means we pay our authors off the list price. The list price is the price that an author or publisher or blogger or content holder sets for their eBook in our tool. Amazon will always pay off of that list price, even if they discount the book. For example, if you set your book at $8 and Amazon discounts to $4 -- Amazon still pays you off the $8.

If you distribute through Vook, you don’t have to worry about gotcha clauses. Our terms are right out in the open: //corp.vook.com/distribution/

So sign up today -- and start distributing “fine print worry” free.