5 Ways To Sell Your Book On Your Own Author Website

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From Kindlepreneur:

You’ve been working hard to put your ebook together. Every last detail is fine-tuned, from the editing to the formatting.

Now, the only thing left to do is get it out there to your audience.

Except… what’s the best way to sell your ebook?

One option is offering your book on your own website, and I’m about to show you exactly how to do that!

. . . .

Selling ebooks directly from your own site comes with several advantages.

The biggest is you get to keep your profits.

Sure, most marketplaces have a built-in audience, which may help you sell to more customers, but they also take a portion of your royalties (between 65 and 30% per sale).

The other benefit of selling your ebooks directly to your customers is you can manage your customer relationship and customer experience from A to Z, which can help you differentiate your book from competitors.

. . . .

Option #1 Podia

Podia is an all-in-one platform that lets you manage, create, and sell your ebooks and digital products in one place.

Other features include email marketing, a site builder, a product page builder, a landing page builder, and the ability to sell online courses, digital downloads, webinars, and memberships. You can even provide an excellent user experience by using the proprietary built-in live chat tool.

  • How to implement Podia: To sell ebooks from your own author website, you simply log into your Podia dashboard and upload your ebook under the “Products” tab. Then, price your ebook and sync up to PayPal or Stripe payment gates. You can create and manage sales pages and product pages from the same streamlined dashboard and sell your ebooks directly to your customers — without any coding. If you have your own site already built, just add a product page and/or sales page to your site to start selling your ebook. If you don’t have a site yet, use the homepage builder in the dashboard editor to arrange your site’s content.
  • Pricing: Pricing ranges from $39 monthly for the Mover plan and $79 monthly for the Shaker plan.
  • Who Podia is best for: For authors who want to sell ebooks or any other digital product directly from their site and get a bunch of other features in the process.

If you like the idea of elements of your site being pre-built for you — but not everything — you’ll want to explore our next option.

Link to the rest at Kindlepreneur and thanks to Nate at The Digital Reader for the tip.

1 thought on “5 Ways To Sell Your Book On Your Own Author Website”

  1. I’m helping a Friends of the Library group set up an online bookstore to replace their in-library used book sales that have been halted by covid-19. We’re using the wildly popular Shopify platform. I’m finding setting up the on-line store the easy part. Organizing the people and process to work safely is a challenge, but I expect it to work out.

    I think an author could set up a Shopify store for their books quite easily. Selling printed physical copies should be a slam dunk. Shopify integrates smoothly with a number of shipping platforms, although the Friends bookstore can use the libary system for distribution, so we don’t use them. I have not gotten around to looking into downloading eBooks, but I don’t expect much trouble.

    Of course, it doesn’t hurt that I designed, coded, and managed development of enterprise service management applications for forty years. Still, I haven’t done much that I would call technical to get this going. With a few suggestions from me, my teenage grandson handles nicely what little code there is to write.

    That being said, I’m thinking of building out book sales on my own web site, and I don’t expect to use Shopify. Although I have a few reservations about the WordPress architecture, it has worked out satisfactorily for my web sites and I am looking at using the WooCommerce opensource WordPress plugin mentioned in the OP. I suspect it will be easier for me to work with than Shopify. The Shopify team works very hard to be easy and foolproof, at the expense of being somewhat rigid and the kind of documentation I want is not as easy to find as I would like.

    WordPress also feels a bit rigid and overbuilt to me, but its technology is less proprietary and the documentation is better for me. There also seems to be a stronger community of YouTube tutorials for WordPress, which can be a great time-saver.

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