Many small publishers supply Amazon with books through the Amazon Advantage program, which is a consignment program with a $99 annual membership fee. For books sold through Advantage, Amazon pays the publisher 45 percent of the list price (an industry standard). Small publishers use Advantage because it’s a means to sell books on Amazon they’ve printed themselves, which can result in better profit margins and better print quality than using print on demand. It’s also an easy way to make a non-POD print book available for pre-order through Amazon.
Last fall, Amazon Advantage paused new enrollment in the program to make “improvements to the registration process.” No information has been forthcoming about how long this pause will continue, but we heard from Ian Lamont of i30 Media that upgrades have now been made to Amazon Advantage that make it look almost identical to Amazon Seller Central. Seller Central is most commonly used to sell secondhand books, but booksellers, publishers, and individuals (including authors) can use Seller Central to sell either new or secondhand books on Amazon Marketplace—becoming what is known as a third-party seller. Third-party sellers can also use Fulfillment by Amazon to take advantage of Amazon’s warehouses to pick, pack, and ship their products. The Seller program can be more expensive than Advantage, depending on the volume of sales. (David Wogahn has an excellent comparison of Advantage and Seller Central.)
Lamont has speculated that the Advantage program may ultimately be merged with Seller Central so that Amazon doesn’t have to deal with publishers and media sellers through the smaller Advantage program. However, he said, there would be some major issues still to be worked out—the Seller Central fee structure doesn’t work that well for book publishers, and there are differences in shipping costs between the two programs. Below you’ll find screenshots comparing the new Amazon Advantage dashboard with the Amazon Seller Central dashboard. Lamont notes that when you click through to the purchase orders area on Advantage, everything looks the same as before, without any similarity to Seller Central. But other areas are completely new and obviously copied right from Seller Central.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
