If you’re self-publishing (and even if you’re not), chances are that you want to make sure people can buy your book from your website.  It only makes sense to convert visitors into sales.  Although you never sell your book to your audience you always want to offer your product up for sale.  You’ll want to start by providing purchasing options for the most popular online book retailers: Amazon.com & BarnesandNoble.com.  Unsuprisingly, they’ll take a big cut of the price of the book, but will bring you a huge audience.  If you want to take your sales to the next level, there’s the Amazon.com Associates Program – through this free service, you can earn up to 15% in referrals for products sold on Amazon.com… namely, your book.

But what if you want to sell your book yourself? You don’t need to make a big investment in a shopping cart service, or even spend your days waiting in line at the USPS -  you can easily set yourself up with a PayPal Merchant account, create a quick button for purchasing your book to put on your website, set your shipping preferences, and off you go!  100% of the sales of books sold on your website is profit to you (minus any printing costs of course) — so even if you can’t compete with Amazon.com on convenience, you can beat them on price.  If you sell your book yourself, offer a discount (say, 10%) off of Amazon’s cost & offer free shipping, you’re providing a huge incentive to your audience while still making much more money per sale than books sold through Amazon.com.  You can setup a channel for shipping through your distributor, or, if you’re willing to do the shipping yourself, you can also offer the incentive of a signed copy.

So, how do you bring people to this page where you’re offering your book for sale? You tell as many people as you can about it!  You can provide a link as part of a promotion for a social organization, a club, a team, an event…  you can participate in affiliate marketing (especially with those who enjoy great success), or buy ad-space on popular blogs that target your readership. Additionally, you can offer your book as a give-away in a contest for a popular podcast related to your genre, or as part of a blog-promotion.   Each of these gives you the chance to link back to your book purchase page.

So get out there and get selling!

Related posts:

1. Are you leaving money on the table?
2. Social Networks for Authors
3. Harnessing modern media: audio & video promotion for books and authors
4. Client Spotlight: Book Shepherd & Marketing Specialist
5. Don’t be modest, submit yourself to win online awards!