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Selling Your Own Ebooks

iRiver Story eBook Reader ReviewCreative Commons License Andrew Mason via Compfight

The one area I have not testing in this whole do-it-yourself aspect of self-publishing is selling ebooks myself. Cutting out the middle man and selling them directly to the reader. This is the ideal way to go, because it results in a higher profit margin for the seller.

Up until now, I have not dabbled in this area for two reasons. First, it has always been cost prohibitive to set up transaction tendering on the web and second, I have not had enough traffic on my website to justify the effort. But both of those reasons are now starting to become mute. Setting up a digital shop has become super easy and traffic to my site has picked up enough to where some folks might want to buy direct and get more options for the same cost.

I’ve started testing a new service called Gumroad which lets you sell just about any ditigal file you can upload to their servers. They take a small processing fee per sale and you get spared the hassle of setting up a digital store front. All you need is a Paypal account to get set up.

This weekend I have just one .epub of my novel Starforgers for sale. As I get more familiar with the store and the process, I will have all my books for sale this way and offer many more formats. From Kindle’s .mobi to plain old PDF. You can find the link to the right in the side bar. If you have an ereader that uses epub, give it a try and let me know how the process went. I’d really appreciate both the business and the report.

I’ll come back and tell you more about the setup in a week or so, when I get it all figured out and set up. In the mean time, anyone else have any experience using Gumroad or similar services?

 

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