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.)
Ten years ago when I first experimented with publishing a magazine called Lawino, I spent about $10 a year on a domain name and then tweaked the features of blogspot to make it feel like a website, and not just a blog. I created a static landing page and customized different pages to mimic actual websites. I think this is still possible and if a writer is stuck, there must be a plethora of tutorials out there on how to make blogger look like a website. I’m not sure if you can add a shopping cart to automate sales, but at least you can have a page where you can provide shopping links to your books, perhaps even add things like sample chapters and reviews. And so if, say, Barnes and Noble deletes your book, then you can update the link on our site to direct readers to the new shop. It should also be possible to include a newsletter signup on such a site. I didn’t do it while running Lawino because I didn’t know better. For a domain name, I use dynadot because they don’t have hidden fees, and their prices remain the same as at signup. Other places will give you a cheap signup fee, but the price will increase tremendously upon renewal.
Please note, I’m sharing from my experiences, and these are honest recommendations. There are no affiliate links on this page at all!
You of course get more control if you host your site on a platform like WordPress (which I use, and I’ll share tips to keep costs at a minimum. There are other platforms that are perhaps better than WordPress, though, but I haven’t explored them yet because of time). You’ll need to pay a host (I use Bluehost and it is a pain. I’d love to switch to a new one, but I’m limited because many platforms, like Siteground, limit their customers geographically and my country is excluded from a lot of these places). The costs can be from anywhere from $3 to $20 per month, depending on if you want a single site or unlimited sites. They normally charge in a lumpsum, so you pay for 36 months or 24 months, and I think that makes it easier to manage rather than paying every single month.
The goal is to avoid a very huge monthly or annual bill, and so after the hosting fee, go for plugins that charge either a one-off, or are free. Many recommend WooCommerce claiming it is a free and open-source plugin, and of course that was the first plugin I jumped at. I got disillusioned very quickly. I was particularly frustrated that I could not use any of the official payment gateways. I was at first excited that MTN had a plugin, Payment Gateway for MTN MoMo on WooCommerce,
to use mobile money, but installing it requires technical knowledge and someone told me that even if I installed it, I needed to register for MoMo pay in all the thirteen countries that MTN operates in before collecting payments.
For people outside Africa, this might not be a problem for there are many payment gateways that make WooCommerce work for you. However, for it to deliver efficiently, or for you to customise it to suit your needs, WooCommerce needs other plugins, most of which are very expensive with exorbitant subscription fees. Unless you are selling thousands of copies of books, they are not worth it. So I searched for an alternative, and at first landed upon a free plugin called WP Simple Shopping Cart. It was just that, a simple, free, and it does just the job effectively. The one downside is that it’s only payment gateway is PayPal.
The people behind this plugin have a paid product that is a perfect alternative to WooCommerce. This is WP eStore Plugin. It’s been around for many years, though I wondered why it was not on the official WordPress plugin lists. What convinced me to go for it is that you pay a one-time fee, only about $40, and you can use it in multiple sites. For WordPress plugins, this seemed like a dream and I can’t understand why it is not very well known. It certainly never came up in search results for me, so I can’t find other people talking about it.
The one downside is that it does not focus on eBooks, which needs things like chapter samples, reviews, descriptions, etc, and it was hard for me to make the product page look like an online book store. But it’s a feature rich plugin and has digital download options that sold me to it. So I built an ordinary post to imitate what I see on online bookshops, and then added one of their ‘add to cart’ templates. You can look at one of the pages here. The other downside is that exclusive use of PayPal as a gateway, but they have a manual payment option, through which customers can pay you in whatever other way you want. This enables me to handle mobile money payments with encrypted downloads. This was better than other platforms built in Uganda, who would take a percentage off each transaction, and yet our goal is to keep the maintenance costs as low as possible.
One big plus for WP eStore Plugin is that it integrates well with mailpoet, which means that every time someone makes a purchase, or if they download a file through their Stylish Squeeze Form Add on, mailpoet sends an email urging the customer to subscribe to a newsletter, which I find useful. I’m on the fence about having people subscribe to a newsletter just to get a free ebook, but a feature like this means whoever signs up for the newsletter did it on their own volition, not to get a freebie. Also, writers use services like BookFunnel to get newsletter subscribers, but this comes at a cost, starting at $2.5 per month, or $30 a year. And I thought, well, the WP eStore Plugin plus the Stylish Squeeze Form AddOn could do the same job, with the advantage of having a shopping cart as well. And it’s a great thing that you don’t have to pay a recurring fee!
I’m sure there are other ways and plugins that enable you to set up an online bookstore in a very cost effective manner, and if you know of any, do leave a comment below, even to a link on your site that talks about such tips. I want to keep exploring, and perhaps other writers might find such tips useful. Perhaps if many writers have their own stores on their own websites we’ll reach a point in the future where readers actively buy books direct from the writers, rather than depending on platforms who can change at any time.
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