I often have authors ask me this question: “Can I sell books through my author website?” The answer is a resounding yes.
In fact, there are a multitude of ways to do it. Here are your options.
1. Sell the book yourself through an online shopping cart. An online shopping cart allows you to sell your book (and possibly other products) right there on your own website. You collect payment, process the order and basically handle everything yourself. The biggest benefit of such a system is the fact that you get to control the price — and profit. It’s also a good experience for visitors, since they never have to leave your site to complete their purchase. But there is a downside: setting up a system like this takes a fair amount of time and effort. There’s also a cost involved — both a set-up cost and a monthly cost — so there’s always the potential of such a venture not being profitable.
2. Sell the book yourself via PayPal. If you’re not ready to go all-in and set up an integrated shopping cart, a PayPal cart is the next best thing. For no set-up cost, you can create a PayPal account, sync it up with your bank account, and create a product page for your book. You can set the price, a tax percentage and shipping costs. PayPal will then give you a simple widget of embed code. Simply paste it on your site and when someone clicks that “buy” link, they will get taken to your product page on PayPal. In addition, PayPal only collects a small amount of the total. So what’s the drawback? Well, this option takes people off your site to make a payment, which can be jarring for a visitor. In addition, this option only works if you’re prepared to do the processing and shipping of books yourself.
3. Link to Amazon and/or B&N. This is the most common method that most of our author clients use to sell books. It’s pretty darn simple: create a “Buy the Book” area and include links to both Amazon and B&N. Unless you self-published with CreateSpace — a division of Amazon — I highly recommend including links to both (or else you risk being blackballed by one or the other). It’s easy peasy.
4. Link to your publisher site (if you have a publisher). If you were published through any of the major publishing houses, your book is likely for sale through their website. It’s quite easy to add a “Buy the Book” link on your site and simply link there for people to make the purchase in one click. Much like linking to Amazon or B&N, there’s little to no work involved in the process.
5. Let your publisher sell through your website. If you’re lucky enough to be published through Harper Collins, you’ll want to know that they recently made the selling process even easier, offering a new e-commerce platform that allows authors to easily integrate the HarperCollins shopping cart directly into their website. In other words, they’ll do all the work, and you can collect a 35% net royalty on e-books sold through the HarperCollins platform on your site. Now that’s a good deal.
See what I mean? Allowing people to buy the book through your website is easy. The hard part is figuring out which of the options above works best for you.