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    Turn Your Blog Into A Bookstore
    Turn Your Blog Into A Bookstore
    Turn Your Blog Into A Bookstore
    Ebook120 pages1 hour

    Turn Your Blog Into A Bookstore

    By Mary Caelsto

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Tired of relying on paid services to deliver your free book? Thinking there has to be a way to sell books to avoid costly vendor discounts and hassles with returns?

    When you sell your books directly from your website, you take control of the distribution process. Sure, you won't be able to eliminate outside vendors like Amazon, and you don't want to! What you do want is an easy to set up, simple to maintain system for selling books direct to your readers and offering free downloads and gifts.

    Your own webstore provides this. This book discusses the ins and outs of setting up your own webstore complete with step-by-step tutorials. Written by an author who has worked in IT for over a decade, you'll find rock solid, real-world proven knowledge to start selling your books directly. Today!

    Best of all, it's cheaper than you think to set up your webstore, and with the information provided in this book, you can be up and running for just a few dollars and a bit of time. Why place yourself at the whims of vendors who don't care about you and your book? Take control of your career by serving your readers directly from your website. You'll earn more per book and have more marketing tools at your disposal.

    This book comes with extra bonuses including tutorial videos, downloadable worksheets and more! I put everything at your fingertips to get started today!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCharmed Chicken Media
    Release dateFeb 18, 2017
    ISBN9781938257407
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      Book preview

      Turn Your Blog Into A Bookstore - Mary Caelsto

      To receive notification of online events, gain access to bonus book content, and more, sign up for Mary’s newsletter at http://unscramblet.com/newsletter/.

      Other books by Mary Caelsto

      Author Information Guides

      Basic Email Marketing Skills

      Newsletters Your Readers Can’t Ignore

      Use Your Muse: Writing Prompts for Romance Writers

      Author Prosperity Challenge Vol 1: Marketing Myths Debunked

      Other Books

      Animal Reiki

      Dashboard Kitten (contemporary romance)

      MaryMuse’s Book of Parrotlets

      MaryMuse’s Book of Parakeets & Lovebirds

      MaryMuse’s Big Book of Bird Care

      Labor of Love: How To Start and Run a Pet Organization

      Spiritual Companions: Our Pets, Our Spirituality

      From Blog to Bookstore:

      The Ultimate Guide To Selling Direct To Readers From Your Website

      By

      Mary Caelsto

      A Charmed Chicken Media Production

      The information in this book is current as of the book’s publication date. While the processes and systems described in this book have remained stable over the last several years, technology does change. If you discover information that could be in need of updating, please email me at support@unscramblet.zendesk.com.

      I and my readers appreciate it.

      Please know that every effort is made to keep this book updated, and any new editions will be noted as such.

      Thank you!

      Part 1: Let’s Talk Online Stores

      Chapter One: The Theory of Everything (You Need To Know About Having An Author Bookstore)

      In today’s publishing environment, control is the name of the game. The author deserves--and wants--control over everything.

      You want control over the price.

      You want control over the distribution.

      You want control over the cover.

      Finally, you want control over the editing and inside matter, including making sure all your books are listed.

      This is why many authors are self-publishing. Instead of giving up a hefty percentage (as much as 65% of the book’s cover price) to a publisher who may or may not do any of these things for you, you can keep all the money for yourself. It does cost money to self-publish. Good cover art takes either time and skills or an outside artist. Editing also costs money. It may cost money to publish the book, but when you take control, there’s a good chance you can earn a faster return on your investment.

      Having a webstore on your site is just one part of the strategy to recover your investment. There has been a lot of talk (for a while now) about how on-site sales for publishers aren’t doing well, and this is a trend that I’ve witnessed personally. However, on-site sales do happen. They’re hardly nonexistent, and with the right marketing and the right incentives in place, they can work.

      The economics are there as well. Let’s look at two eBooks. One is priced at $0.99, and one is priced at $2.99.

      * This assumes an average payment processing cost of $0.30+3% of the sale price per transaction.

      ** This follows the 35% royalty for books under $2.99, and assumes a 2% file size cost for books priced above $2.99 that receive 70% royalties. (The royalties in this case usually end up being roughly 68%.)

      *** These figures were rounded to the nearest hundredth for ease of use and clarity.

      Now, imagine you were publishing through a publisher and earned only 35 or 40% of that amount. It’s easy to see the numbers, and why having on-site sales would net you more money. The trick is to make the store easy for you to build, and easy to manage. Plus you’ll want to entice you readers to visit (and spend their money).

      To do this, you need a few things:

      1)            a website (obviously!)

      2)           shopping cart software

      3)           payment processing

      4)           security measures

      5)           a way to deliver the eBooks

      6)           ways to entice your readers to come to your site

      We’ll be covering these six items throughout the course of this book. I encourage you to go to http://unscramblet.com/bookbonuses and sign up to receive the additional guides and helpful tools available with this book.

      Before we dive into what could be very technical content, I want to encourage you to do two things. First, breathe. You may not feel as if you’re technical. You may not feel like you can work with websites. However, trust me. You can do this. You can set up your author bookstore and begin offering books direct from your site. You can have even more control over your publishing career. And if you don’t want to do this work, this is something I love to do and would be happy to help you. In fact, My Author Home (http://myauthorhome.com) offers free website hosting with these features built in. You could simply use this platform as your webstore, linking to it from your regular website.

      Secondly, I want you to be gentle with yourself. You may feel as if what you’re reading is difficult to understand. You might not think that you can do this. You can. Be gentle with yourself. You’re stepping a bit out of your comfort zone--especially if you’ve only worked with publishers before--and you may get frustrated. My hope is that this book and the resources you’ll find at my website (http://unscramblet.com/bookbonuses) will ease your mind and make things easy for you.

      Can I sell my books on my own site?

      If your books are currently published with a publisher, then you most likely can’t sell them on your own site. Part of most publishing agreements is the transfer of distribution rights to the publisher for a predetermined amount of time. It’s important to read the contracts to make sure, but with all of the publishing contracts I’ve ever signed, it’s been that way.

      So, to find out if you can sell books on your own site, ask yourself the following questions:

      1)            Do I have control over my books? Have I given rights to anyone else?

      2)           If I have assigned rights, is that an exclusive contract? (Such as with Kindle Select or publisher contracts.)

      If you’re unsure of the answers to those questions, ask yourself these questions:

      a)           Am I working with a publisher? If you are, then there’s a nearly 99% chance that you do not have the rights to set up your own storefront. When in doubt, ask.

      b)           Do I have the ability to upload books to other sites right now? If you are able to, then there’s a very good chance you can sell your books on your own site.

      c)           Am I restricted in any way with what I can do with the book? For example, enrolling in Kindle Select, where you give Amazon exclusive rights to the book for 90 days, definitely restricts what you can do. In that case, you could not upload the book to your own site without technically being afoul of Amazon’s Kindle Select agreement.

      Bottom line: if you currently self-publish, then you have control over your book. When you have control over your book, then you can sell it where you want, and that includes your own site.

      Why would I want to sell direct to readers? That seems like a hassle.

      It does take time and a bit of know-how to set up your own webstore; however, I feel the benefits are well worth any trouble. Selling direct to readers gives you several benefits.

      You can use coupon codes to get metrics.  That sounds very jargon-y, but the bottom line is, are you doing guest blogs? Set up a coupon code, and

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