You are here Home Blogs The profits from publishing: a publisher’s perspective. One key thing to sell your book is to create an attention-grabbing page for your Amazon self-publishing listing. Mistakes are a big turn-off to readers. In reality we have to decide on the campaign, buy the media slots and send the party invitations before we have any idea how many books we will sell. An advance is an up-front payment made before any book sales occur, but in essence this payment is made in expectation of future royalties.