Website: Setting up a web store
Books are expensive for many reasons. Paper and printing have significant costs. The printer also wants a profit. If it’s being sold through a reseller, over half of the price is eaten up covering the reseller’s costs and profit objective. All this leaves precious little royalty for the author. For a run of the mill author, not a superstar with a hit novel, assume $1 per book and you won’t be too far off. But the cost of multiple rounds of editing, cover art, interior formatting (book design), and marketing can be many thousands of dollars. So if you don’t sell many thousands of copies, you lose money on each novel you publish.
Is there any way to break even by selling only, say, five hundred to a thousand books? That level of sales is still a monumental achievement for the average author. But if you could raise your average profit margin from $1 per book to somewhere in the $6–10 range, you might be able to pay all your costs and still afford to celebrate with a Frosty at Wendy’s.
So how do you get that extra $5–9? Looking at the broad categories of cost I listed above, there’s one big one that’s especially vulnerable to competition in today’s internet age: the reseller. Since the author is doing all or most of the marketing for nearly every book these days, no matter the publisher, they should already have a website and an active newsletter—which means they have a list of buyers with high potential. If enough of those buyers are willing to buy directly via the author’s own website store (a big “if”), breaking even becomes a realistic possibility.
Unfortunately, setting up your own online store isn’t nearly as easy as you might imagine. In fact, it’s nowhere near as easy as the companies who make the software for it would have you believe. They’ll tell you their software is easily integrated with a long list of complementary software products. Don’t believe it. It’s a mess—always.
I am using SquareSpace to host my website. In recent years they have moved into all sorts of adjacent services, such as list maintenance, customer-facing email (newsletters, etc.), e-commerce, payment processing, and order fulfillment. They really want to be a one-stop shop for people’s business presence and commerce on the internet. My problem with them is that I have been using their web hosting service for eight years and I feel it has been significantly degraded over that time. I no longer trust them enough to put all my eggs in their basket.
I decided to create a store in my website. SquareSpace can handle that. People can put items in a cart and check out. But SquareSpace is not going to handle my payment processing. I’m using Stripe for that. Payment processing is their specialty. So when someone checks out on my store, SquareSpace contacts Stripe with the relevant information, Stripe checks the credit card and processes the transaction, and then Stripe tells SquareSpace the outcome.
If the payment has gone through, then SquareSpace contacts BookFunnel, a company that specializes in digital product fulfillment, in case any of the purchased products are ebooks (or eventually, audiobooks as well). If there are ebooks, BookFunnel sends the customer a custom link they can use to download the file, and BookFunnel then tells SquareSpace that fulfillment has been handled.
Finally, if there are physical books in the order, SquareSpace sends me an email. I fulfill the paperbacks and hardcovers myself. (I have a postal scale and lots of book-size boxes and cases of books, as well as labels and tape and all the rest.)
It’s interesting, though, that SquareSpace and BookFunnel are not truly integrated. I am using a service named Zapier to do the communication between the two. It takes the SquareSpace order, checks each item to see if it is a digital product, and tells BookFunnel to fulfill those. It also tells SquareSpace when BookFunnel has done the fulfillment.
I believe my computer savvy is better than average. I did significant programming in my time in academia. Still, I was unable to put the parts together that I have just described. I had to get my son, Clifton, a genuine computer whiz, to do it for me. It took him a few tries to decide how best to set it all up. That’s the problem: everyone wants to spread into adjacent services, so there are dozens or hundreds of ways you could piece it all together, and none of them are satisfactorily documented, if they are documented at all. You can go to YouTube for tutorials and how-to videos, but even if you are only using a handful of software programs, the versions change so fast that whatever you find on YouTube will almost surely be out of date for at least one of the softwares, even if the video is fairly recent.
But even with all that trouble, Clifton and my wife and I got a store working.
We hope.