I wrote this blog post after reading the Alec Leach article in the January 2024 newsletter (Freelance Writer’s Report [FWR]). An email exchange with Dana also informed me that many members don’t have their own websites even. If you are creating books to sell you really need one of those. Currently I use GeekStorage. I’ve tried dozens of them and found that most of the “companies” you see being advertised are all owned by the same company that owns HostGator. That’s why you hear so many horror stories about web hosting and site creation; the same horrible company has a lot of different names. I’ve been happy with GeekStorage for a few years now. They have hosting plans for under $4/month. You can have your own website and blog for not much money.
Yes, I’m an IT person, but I don’t do web development, at least not by trade. For the past decade I’ve helped develop medical devices. The two decades prior to that were spent working on big computer systems for “Fortunate 500” corporations as well as little companies. Web development used to be ugly. I know I paid for a few iterations of my book website all those decades ago. Today I maintain it myself. The tools that come with your GeekStorage account are pretty great. Some day I may take the time to learn more than two of them. Honestly, free WYSIWYG website editors have gotten very good. BlueGriffon is the one many people use.
You can work completely in the word processor view if you want, never (or rarely) switching to the HTML tab. It saves the file in HTML. There are always the site builder tools that come with the hosting arrangement as well. I’ve not tried them so I know not what they are like.
This part of the newsletter article is what prompted the post.
Most of you don’t sell “direct” online because you think it is a hassle. You don’t want to go through the pain of getting a merchant account to process credit cards. The “commerce” plug-ins for websites are confusing and seem to take quite a fee.
As a software geek for years I had been buying various software products through vendor websites and seeing my payment going through BMTmicro. Didn’t know much about it other than everything I bought as a digital download seemed to be sold through it. When it came time to sell my own so I could both eat and live indoors I looked into it.
I do not remember setting up an account as being much of a hassle, but it was many years ago. Technically they are a digital delivery retailer. They take a small percentage. They are the seller of record in all transactions! You are just a supplier/vendor, even if you ship directly to the customer.
For my physically printed books I had to create multiple entries, one for U.S. domestically shipped and another for international shipping.
Notice how little they take in royalties.
I have one technical book for a niche market with a $90 price tag. Their cut for handling the transaction is very acceptable though.
How does something sell through them? Well, they do have their own online sales catalog, but you get a shopping cart code sent to you for every item. They also have tutorials on how to do this. You just need to add a button to your website.
That blue string in the following basically came from them once I set the item up.
My e-books and audiobook had to be uploaded to their server when I created the items for them. When someone purchases the customer is sent an email with a download link good for N days to a one-off copy they can download. After that the temporary directory with the copy is deleted on their servers. They have some kind of protection from scammers trying to have 5,000 bots download from the same link at once like they try to do with Windows 10 ISO files and other pricey commercial software.
While I paid quite a bit of money for voice actors with my audiobooks, many of the authors I encounter via my Interesting Authors site and blog simply record their own. Audio recording applications like Audacity are available for free. The pandemic got people comfortable talking into a computer. If you don’t already have them you can pick up microphone head sets with a USB connection to your computer for under $30 if you shop around. Staples has some listed for $15 so the cost of creating an audiobook version of your book comes down to are you willing to put in the time? I wasn’t, but you might find it enjoyable. With editing tools like Audacity you can record it a few pages or a chapter at a time and paste it all together.
Am I worried about showing you the full link to one of my items on their secure server like I did with the code snippet? Nope. Go ahead, put it on your own site. When someone clicks it and makes a purchase the sale comes to me. Thank you very much!
Most of my non-geek book sales seem to come from people reading something on either that Interesting Authors blog or my geek blog and clicking on one of my books as a thank you. Does everybody do that? No. The internet is made up of Freetards.
Despite what the Urban Dictionary says, that is not the definition of a freetard.
The proper definition of a Freetard:
Someone who believes everything on the internet should be free for them.
The Internet Archive is a Freetard.
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