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What (self-publishing) platform pays the most (for books)?
My top 3 picks.
Comparing my results from different places.

| The Park Bench Method of Writing Rapid Release Fiction without Burning Out, by Wendy Christine Allen |



By Wendy C Allen

What (self-publishing) platform pays the most (for books)?My top 3 picks. Comparing my results from different places.

Answering this Reddit question today:

What publishing platform paid the biggest royalty for your book? Heard a ton of rumors from people who ironically have never published a book, so I thought I’d throw this one to Reddit. -SOURCE

I publish in a ton of places and most places are between 50% to 70%, but most places also have a range. Meaning one platform pays 50% for a book in one format while the same platform pays 70% or a different one.

For example:

Amazon pays 35% for some ebooks and 70% for other ebooks, but 35% for some paperbacks and 60% for other paperbacks.

The % changes depending on where the author lives (US vs Japan) and there are fees/charges/deductions based on where the author lives vs where the buyer lives (an author in Maine for example has federal taxes, state taxes, and entertainment taxes deducted, and if the buyer in in UK, the author has VAT deductions as well, even though the UK buyer ALSO pays VAT–this is why in a state like Maine, 70% royalty off a $2.99 book = only .60c NOT $2 like YouTube “gurus” say).

I live in Maine. Most of my readers live in Japan, Germany, and Brazil.

I have a $4.99 ebook that sold a million copies… even with 70% royalty on that $4.99 book, I earned only twelve thousand dollars even though the YouTube gurus and the 20to50k scammers would try to tell you I should have earned over three million dollars. They will also tell you it should have at least a few tens of thousands of reviews, given it sold a million copies - it has three.

Books that have more then ten or twelve reviews, especially books that have 500+ reviews of 5stars, are FAKE reviews that the AUTHOR BOUGHT from scam sites BookSprout or BookSirens — places that SELL FAKE REVIEWS, to authors.

500 reviews on a book under a year old is a HUGE RED FLAG - as many fake review copies offer "500 review packages", stating they will take a year to trickle the reviews in a mix of most 5 and 4 stars with enough 1, 2, and 3 stars to "make it look real". 

In most cases these books will reach 500 reviews LONG before they sell even ten copies.

The fake review scam is MASSIVE on Amazon, and it's best to ignore ALL 5 star reviews that do not include photos of the reader holding the paperback copy of the book.

Yes. We have reached that stage in book publishing, where readers have starts posting photos of themselves holding the book, JUST to prove they are a REAL reader writing a REAL review. Most reviews on Amazon are written by AI bots these days and, you should never trust a book that has large amounts of reviews.

REAL READERS almost NEVER leave a review and REAL readers usually leave 3 star or less reviews.

The rate at which REAL readers leave reviews is fewer then 1 reviews per every ten thousand copies sold.

Over 99% of ALL 4 and 5 star reviews on Amazon are FAKE and were paid for by the author, who will make excuses for buying reviews by calling them ARC (advanced reader copies), however, REAL advanced reader copies are ALWAYS PRINTED PAPERBACK BOOKS that are SNAIL MAILED VIA POST OFFICE to ACTUAL READERS. Those reader DO NOT GET PAID, the AUTHOR DOES NOT PAT A SERVICE, and NO REVIEWS ARE ECXHANGED. Advanced reader copies are NEVER given in exchange for reviews and no money ever changes hands for ACRs.

The review is FAKE IF:

  • The author paid a service
  • The reader paid a service
  • The reader was paid money
  • The reader joined a group to get free books in exchange for writing reviews
  • If the ARC was a digital copy
  • If the ARC was an ebook 

Everyone talks about the royalties.

No one ever talks about the taxes, delivery fees, download fees, etc.

And if your book is illustrated, Amazon ads a per image download fee AND it is 4x higher for colour as for black & white images, and it increases by size of image.

If your $2.99 ebook is image heavy, a 70% royalty could earn you as little as only TEN CENTS per sale… no anything even close to the $2 per sale gurus claim we earn on 70% of a $2.99 book.

I’m on tons of places, to there are tons of percentages.

The 3 highest are as follows:

  • GumRoad pays 90% royalties.
  • DriveThruRPG pays 85% royalties.
  • Amazon pays 70% royalties.
  • All the other places are 65% or less.

These are the places I use:

  • Hardcovers: Amazon and Lulu
  • Paperbacks: Amazon, Lulu, and DriveThruRPG
  • Ebooks: Amazon, Lulu, DriveThruRPG, GumRoad, and Patreon
  • Read online digital: my website, RoyalRoad, ScribbleHub, Tapas, GumRoad, OnlyFans, Patreon, Medium, Vocal, Notd, FictionPress, Tumblr, and SubStack.
  • 1 sheet cardstock TTRPG d100 charts: DriveThruRPG
  • Card decks: DriveThruRPG and GameCrafter
  • Character art merch: Zazzle and CafePress
  • Board Games: GameCrafter

There are several other places, but the rest bring in under $100 a year so are not worth mentioning.

Genre/format: Dark Fantasy novels, novellas, novelettes, poems, and short stories. As well as TTRPG game guides/charts/card decks.

Amazon is by far the biggest money maker and where most of my sales come from, but also, more than 80% of my sales are for paperback books.

I focus predominantly on paperback sales via Amazon, simply because that is where the most sales and income are.

GumRoad however is my favourite platform, because I like the dashboard interface better, and I like that they don’t lie about 90% royalty. You actually make 90% off the cover price of your book.

Whereas Amazon SAYS 70% royalty on a $2.99 book… which would be $2 earned… HOWEVER… 70% royalty on a $2.99 book is ACTUALLY only .61c earned, because it is NOT 70% off the $2.99 cover price. It’s 70% off WHAT IS LEFT after Amazon deducts delivery fees, processing fees, size of digital file fees (which includes a per image fee and a 4x higher per colour image fee — -fees are higher if the readers uses a Kindle device vs uses an app on their phone), federal tax, state tax, VAT fees, entertainment taxes, and any other additional taxes, … which is why I sold over a million books on Amazon but only earned twelve thousand dollars, in spite of the book being 70% royalty on a $4.99 cover price!

Funny thing is Amazon, being a public company (meaning sells stock shares) is required by the IRS to release quarterly tax records, which are all linked to the ToS Help pages of KDP and list each writer's real name and home address, then all the pennames they use, then all the irs tax receipt earning totals for that person. And any one can access that list.

Since 2007 Amazon KDP has had exactly three authors earn one million total earnings: 1 Amanda Howking, 2 Jon Locke, 3 Hugh Howey. That's it. One. Two. Three.

The report also states that since 2007 Amazon KDP has had fewer then one thousand writers whom have earned $120k lifetime earnings. Which calls Bellshill on EVERYONE who preaches the 20to50k scam (which claims if you publish 20 books you'll earn $50k monthly from KDP).

The report also states only seven thousand authors since 2007, have ever sold a million copies of their books. I'm on that list. You can look it up and see my exact sales and earnings. And you want to know how much 70% royalty on a $4.99 that sold a million copies earned me? Twelve thousand dollars. Because Amazon's 70% royalty is NOT off the cover price, it's off what is left after the download fees, processing fees, vat, federal taxes, states taxes, entertainment taxes, and other fees Amazon slaps on. The average authors makes around twenty cents on each 70% royalty of a $2.99 book, not even close to the $2 per sale scammers claim they earn.

You know what else is on that list? The fact that since 2007, there are also twenty million authors on Amazon KDP who have yet to reach earning even one hundred dollars in lifetime earnings and many of then have a dozen or more books published.

So sick of scammers bragging KDP earns them millions when it is so damned easy to verify exactly how much every author on KDP makes. The 6 figure scammers of KDP are among the easiest 6 figure scammers of all the prove are scammers, and yet people still fall for them anyway.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you 70% royalty on a $2.99 book on Amazon = $2 earnings, because that just proves they are a scam artist who never actually sold a book on Amazon and doesn’t actually know how Amazon calculates royalties.

GumRoad on the other hand says they pay you 90% royalty, and it ACTUALLY IS 90% of the cover price, not 90% off what is left after dozens of deductions.

That’s why even though Amazon is a bigger income for me, I prefer GumRoad as a platform best.

Vocal is near identical to Medium.

Notd is very similar.

Substack is a place to write IF you have followers you can take there with you. SubStack has no system in place for people their to find you, and being newsletters, every thing you write on SubStack does not go to search engines like Google or Bing.

Beehiiv is like Medium and SubStack combined.

GumRoad, DriveThruRPG, WattPad, ScribbleHub, FictionPress, DeviantArt, RoyalRoad, and Tapas are all good as well.

OnlyFans, Patreon, and KoFi are all like SubStack ... no internal audience, you must bring your own followers.

I do NOT recommend SubStack, OnlyFans, Patreon, or KoFi to anyone with fewer then 10k die hard readers (not followers, but actual readers), because all 4 of them have no internal system for people onsite to find you. All 4 rely fully on you bringing your already established fans with you.

The problem with SubStack is there is no system in place to gain internal readers. And SubStack has bot blockers coded in which prevent search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, ect) from indexing pages, so nothing you write on SubStack brings in outside traffic either. SubStack is fully dependent upon the writer bringing their own readers with them.

In other words, established writers who already have 50k followers on Medium, can go to SubStack and enough of their followers will go with them that they can earn an income.

But new writers looking to get started, need to build a following FIRST outside of SubStack, because they are literally shouting into a void if they write on SubStack but did not bring readers with them, due to the way SubStack is set up.

All the big writers leaving Medium and finding success on SubStack are giving new writers false hope, because the big writers are not telling the truth about how they earn the money.

SubStack is a newsletter. It requires you to already have an email list before you get started. You will not gain followers via SubStack the way you gain followers via Medium.

If you are looking for a place like Medium, the alternative is Vocal or Notd but both had much more difficult to earn money on then Medium.

I use all of the above as well as Amazon KDP.

Amazon, Medium, and GumRoad are best money makers, but all the ones I’ve listed have the ability to write and publish short stories and poems, though each has different methods of uploading stories.

Anyways, hope that helps.

UPDATED TO ADD: Someone wanted to know if I published poetry and if so if I could do another page like this one but for poetry. I'm going to add a poetry update to the end of this one.

On the topic of poetry specifically, my advice is DIFFERENT from for short stories, novellas, and novels.

I’m adding this update because I was asked if the above advice applied to poetry as well, or just to short stories, novellas, and novels.

Yes… the above advice was ONLY considering short stories, novellas, and novels.

Here is the advice I have in the same regards, but this time for poetry specifically:

For poems I say this:

Focus on Medium for poems. Medium is where you will make the most money from poetry.

Focus on Amazon KDP secondary for poems.

Vocal, Notd, SubStack, and OnyFans are so-so for poems, but worth putting poems on them.

Pretty much every place else is not worth putting poems on.

I write and publish poetry, and this comes from my personal experience and so others may have different experiences.

  • 1: Poetry, is VERY DIFFUCLT to sell.

It sells, IF you happen to market it in just the right places, at just the right time, while just the right people are there to find it. aka it takes a LOT of marketing RESEARCH (researching the market is more important then the marketing itself — the more research you do, the less marketing you require, but researching markets is NOT easy) and a shit ton load of luck.

  • 2: I publish poetry on over a dozen different places, and the place where I get both the most reads and the highest pay for my poetry is the website Medium (dot) com.

For example, in November 2024, I published 3 poems every day on Medium, got around 1.2k reads on them, and was paid $60…. it can take 6 months or more to make that same amount from poetry on all other platforms combined.

  • 2a: If poetry is you main focus, I highly recommend you start out by building a fan base, via publishing a poem daily on Medium. Don’t bother with Amazon KDP or any other place yet.

Then after you have 100 to 300 poems on Medium (depending on word counts of each poem), compile them into a collection, and sell the print paperback and hardcover editions on Amazon KDP. But NO ebook version, because you’ll make more leaving them on Medium for digital readers.

  • 2b: Once you have print collections for sale on Amazon KDP, go back to each of you Medium pages and edit it to add a link that says something like “This poem is one of the 100 poems you will find in my paperback poetry collection: BOOK TITLLE by Author Name, available for just $$$price of your book”

That is what I do, and I seem to have a higher sales rate of my poetry collections, then many other writers on Amazon KDP, due to the fact of Medium has a large (tens of thousands) base of poets and a HUGE reader base (over 100million) for poetry. I have built a following over over a thousand readers on Medium for my poetry, and they also buy the collections on Amazon KDP.

Additional info:

For my poem collections I use 8x11 (so BIG book) format, with 1" margins all around, and the layout is: illustration on one page, poem on the page across from it.

I write “story poems” in a series about a single character and his family, where each poem is a different day in their lives. So readers tend to become fans of the main character of someone in his family, and end up buying all the books in the series, because they want to find out what else he’s done in his life.

So, based on that, I would also say having character driven series based story poems is more likely to get sales then just random free verse with no characters will.

The more character driven and story based poems are, the better they sell.

Poems that are free verse or are characterless embodiments of emotion, are the single most difficult type of writing to sell, and if you write this type, you’ll want a HUGE fan base of loyal dedicated readers BEFORE it’ll be (monetarily) worth the effort of publishing a collection on Amazon.

On the other hand, if money is not your goal, you can put it up on Amazon any time, just know chances of selling even a single copy are slim.

Anyways, hope that helps you out.

| ©2025 Wendy Christine Allen | All Rights Reserved |

The Park Bench Method To Writing (and the series of articles and rants that go with it)

I've Written An Entire Series on The Park Bench Method of Writing. Here are more of the articles in this set: 

The Park Bench Method To Writing (Just the article - no prompt lists)

The Park Bench Method of Writing (the really old long, rambly post from years ago; the long page with over 10k writing prompts and lots of lists)

Want to see The Park Bench Method of Writing Rapid Release Fiction without Burning Out, in action? Each of the stories linked below, used it:

Looking to read more Quaraun stories?

  • Stuff over 5k and under 20k words I post on GumRoad.

Writing Prompts I Use When Writing this series:






What Is This Site?

I'm an author. This is an author home page. It's about me, my life, my books, my hobbies, my home town, and anything else that applies to me and my life. 

Since starting my writing career in 1978, I have written 130+ novels, 2,000+ short stories, 6,000+ non-fiction articles (ALL are found on this site), a few dozen stage plays, 12,000+ blog posts, and a few comic book scripts for Disney's Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck (I only worked for Disney one year (in 2005) and only wrote a few stories for their Danish comic books).

NOTE: I ONLY write the Quaraun series (aka The Twighlight Manor series aka The Adventures of Quaraun the Insane). In recent years there has been an issue with impersonators trying to pass books off as written by me, notably several non-fiction and Erotica books. I write neither nonfiction nor Erotica.

ALL of my books and their cover arts are listed on my website here. Beware of any books you find claiming to be me. If the books are NOT listed here on my website, they are NOT my books.

In fiction works, I specialize in Weird/Bizarro Tales set in 40th century CyberPunk-Quasi Medieval, Cozy Dark Fantasy and Science Fiction worlds featuring an intersex Elf and his Faerie husband main characters.  I DO NOT WRITE ANY OTHER SERIES - THIS SERIES IS THE ONLY ONE I WRITE.

Non-fiction (found ONLY here on my site) is daily updates of events in my life, and how-tos on how I write my novels.

I DO NOT write Erotica.

I DO NOT write books with HUMAN characters.

The Erotica books and books with Human characters, that you are finding, are written by scammers trying to impersonate me.

There is an ongoing FBI investigation into this matter. If you find any such books, please report them to FBI Agengt Andy Drewer @207–774–9322

The FBI believes the people behind the impersonation accounts showing up, are relatives of the woman who murdered my son.




 | Index |



How did you build your audience?
Not online, that's for sure.
aka How to sell ten million books
aka How I sold ten million books.



The Park Bench Method of Writing

(just the article)

or

The Park Bench Method of Writing

(with the list of 10k writing prompts - takes a LONG TIME to load - SEVERAL MINUTES!)



Why I am not proud of Disability Pride Month.
In fact, I think it’s deplorable and downright offensive.



Crazy Woman Just Attacked - No Clue Why or Who She Is

(August 14, 2025)







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Wendy Christine Allen 🌸💖🦄 aka EelKat 🧿💛🔮👻
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