So, you’re a published author—time to sell your book!
You’ve gone through all the trouble of writing, formatting, editing, printing and publishing your book. Now what? Well, if you published your book, it’s probably safe to assume you want people to buy and read it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t just happen spontaneously; unless you’re already famous, of course (please tell us if you are, we could use the PR). For a lot of regular mortal authors, however, this is the hard part. In addition to being a writer, you’ll have to start dabbling in marketing and sales as well.
While we can’t take these tasks off your plate, we do strive to make it as easy as possible for you to sell your book. That’s why we’ve made our publishing platform a one-stop shop by gathering all major online bookshops and enabling you to access them from a single interface. This lets you maximise your book’s exposure with minimal hassle.
On this page you’ll find an overview of all the different ways you can use Bookmundo to sell your book. If you want to know more about marketing your book, you can check our introduction to book marketing, or alternatively, you can create an account and check out the marketing functionalities on our platform!
Sales Channels for Print Books
When selling a print book, you’ve got three options. Each method has its own strengths and weaknesses. As such, there really isn’t a good reason not to use all of them. This way, you’ll be making sure you’re not missing out on potential book sales. Nevertheless, it’s good to be aware of which niche is filled by which sales channel.
Amazon
There’s not much of an introduction needed here. Amazon is the go-to sales channel for self-published authors in the Anglophone world. In terms of reach, it’s pretty much unrivalled, and because it’s so ubiquitous will also grant you legitimacy as an author. People trust Amazon, and by extension, they’ll trust your book if it’s available there.
There’s a downside to this popularity, however. There are thousands of self-published authors on Amazon, and you’ll have to compete with all of them for readership and attention. The chance of people finding you while browsing books on Amazon is very slim.
Additionally, whenever you sell a book in their store, Amazon takes a cut of your profit, as any retailer would. This means you’ll have to sell more books to make the same amount of money that you’d get by selling books directly, for example via the author webshop
On the other hand, the more people get their hands on your book, the higher the chance that ever-elusive word-of-mouth marketing. So, even if you don’t make as much money on Amazon, the increased visibility can make it a decent trade-off.
Keep in mind that Amazon checks all the book uploads to their platform manually, which means it’ll take longer for your book to appear there.
Bookmundo
Direct selling is where it’s at folks. It’s always a good idea to have your book available in major stores like Amazon, but as a self-published author, you should endeavour to sell your books directly to your readers whenever possible. Why? Profit.
Generally speaking, for every book you sell directly, you’d have to sell two or even three books on Amazon or other third-party sales channels to make the same amount of money. The reason for this is that Amazon and other retailers will keep a large chunk of the sales price for themselves, usually somewhere between 30 and 50%. Another thing to note is that your published book will appear in the Bookmundo webshop within 24 hours, which is much faster than at Amazon, for example.
Author webshop
There are two options for direct selling on Bookmundo. The first is the free author webshop that you can create in your account. The author webshop comes with its own URL and gives you a sort of digital storefront where people can read a bit about you, buy your books, and access your social media pages.
Bookmundo webshop
You can also sell your book directly in our general webshop. Naturally, it’s harder for people to stumble upon your book there (or on your author webshop) than on Amazon while Googling. Therefore, you’ll probably have to personally encourage users to buy your books on our site, and provide them with the links to do so. People are usually happy to oblige if you let them know that you get to keep more of the profit yourself this way. For your customers it won’t make much of a difference, since your book will cost the same wherever they buy it.
Selling from Stock
This method is a bit more old-school but can be extremely effective. By ordering printed copies of your own book, you get a bulk discount that scales with the size of your order. While this does require you to actually sell your books in person (at a book fair, for example), the aforementioned bulk discounts will guarantee you margins that are practically unbeatable. Of course, this approach will probably require some sales acumen, which will make it more effective for some authors than others.
Sales Channels for Ebooks
Generally speaking, you’re not going to be making as much money with ebooks as you are with print books. While they cost nothing to produce, people aren’t willing to pay as much for them, and as such, you’re going to have to set lower prices, which means lower margins. However, these lower prices mean that people who are on the fence might be more likely to take the leap and buy your book. If they like it, they might even go so far as to purchase the print version as well. Therefore, you’ll probably want to publish your book in both print and electronic versions.
Furthermore, there are more sales channels available to ebooks, which means you can potentially reach a larger audience. Once sales start trickling from all these different channels, they’ll start making up for a lower sales price.
Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, and Google Books
Wouldn’t it be cool to see your book directly in the Kindle, Apple, and Google bookstores? Well, with the tick of a box, you can do just that. What’s great about these digital bookstores is that people already have their bank cards connected to them, meaning that purchases can be made instantly and are much less of a hassle. With the help of a good blurb, decent marketing, and a reasonable price, you can maximize the chances of people making a spontaneous purchase once they come across your book in their favourite digital bookshop.
Kobo
As one of the world’s biggest ebook companies, Kobo is a solid choice for any author looking to sell their work, especially in Canada, which is the company’s home turf. Kobo has the additional benefit of providing higher margins than Amazon, Apple, and Google, which is particularly nice when selling ebooks.
Bookmundo
Just like with print books, selling your ebooks in our own store will net you the highest profit margin. Everything we mentioned above with regards to selling your books in the Bookmundo store applies here as well, including the need to guide your readers and the availability of sales widgets. With a little bit of extra effort, you can increase your profit per book significantly.
How to Sell Your Book Using Our Widgets
If you’re looking to sell books in the Bookmundo store for that juicy profit margin, then you’ll probably want to make it as easy as possible for people to get within clicking range of the “Add to cart” button. While sharing direct links in email blasts, social media updates, and other digital environments is a good start, you’ll often have more urgent things on your plate. That’s where our sales widgets come in.
The widgets are fully customizable, so you don’t have to worry about them clashing with the aesthetic of your site. To add a widget to your website or social media profile, simply go to your MBS account, click on the book you want to create a widget for, select “Sales Tools” in the pop-up window, and customize the widget to your liking. You can switch between creating a widget for your website and your social media by using the two tabs at the top of the screen.
Once you’re happy with your widget, you’ll need to copy the snippet of code and paste it into the appropriate section of your website, which can vary depending on which content management system you’re using. For social media widgets, simply click the “Share” button under the desired social network.
If you have more questions regarding sales channels, feel free to drop us an email. If you don’t have an account but are interested in using our retail channels to sell your book, you can create one for free and get started right away!
