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https://www.dilmandila.com/cheap-and-easy-online-bookstore-with-wordpress-plugins/>
"The platforms that writers and small press publishers rely on to sell books
change their policies on a whim, leaving them stranded, and so I thought I’d
write this article based on my recent experiences in setting up a publishing
house, to share options that independent writers could explore on hosting books
on their own websites. I host mine on wordpress and so these tips will mostly
look at the best and most affordable plugins to use.
The immediate prompt for this articles was two bits of news that came on the
same day. Draft2Digital will start charging a $20 signup fee, as well as an
annual fee of $12 for any account that doesn’t make $100 in sales in a year.
That means a writer might be in a situation where they make sales, but all
profits for that year go to Draft2Digital. Barnes and Noble, too, is changing
some rules, limiting titles per account to a hundred, and deleting titles that
don’t reach a minimum sales requirement. Some writers have more titles than
that, like Susan Kaye Quin said she has 140 and that reducing that might mean
lowering sales, which would prompt them to delete titles that don’t meet the
minimum sales requirement.
These big platforms are vital. I don’t know if a writer can survive purely on
sales through their websites. Perhaps not. But how do you protect yourself from
the vagaries of policy changes? Some writers and small press use sites like
Payhip, others use ko-fi, Gumroad, patreon. There’s a lot of platforms, but I
think it’s vital to also have a personal website, one with a simple shopping
cart to sell books on your own terms, but the trick is to keep costs of
maintaining the site very low, to avoid monthly fees and to use plugins that
are cheap and efficient.
And, if you build a mailing list, perhaps you’ll end up with a sizeable reader
base that your site might be a major source of income. In theory, this is
possible. Practically, it is difficult because big platforms dominate the book
market. Readers are not used to seeking out personal websites of authors, or
there is no infrastructure (that I’m aware of) for readers to discover authors
websites. Maybe we should think of making something. Perhaps adding links to
buy from your site could help? I know, if readers buy from the big platforms it
helps more with visibility than if they buy from your site, but well, we need
options! (I recently signed up for an initiative called Indie Ad Network that
promises free adverts for writers, and where you can place adverts of other
authors on your site, and they place adverts of yours on theirs, and I think
this is one way of moving beyond the big platforms.)"
Via Susan ****
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
