1. Should I set up a Shopify store at all?
There has been a bit of a craze for authors to create their own stores and sell directly to readers, for very good reasons. Shopify is a great platform for doing this. However, I need to give a word of caution: setting up a Shopify site does not guarantee you are going to make a profit. You’ve got the set up costs and ongoing costs, plus an investment of time.
I can’t give firm guidelines on what will make it worth your while setting up a Shopify store. As a rule of thumb, I’d say you need to already be either: earning a good steady income from Amazon, or have at least ten published books. Most importantly, you need to be at a stage where you have gathered a mailing list of several thousand readers. If you have this, you still need to be prepared for several months of very little income from Shopify. You will need to be adding new products to your store on a regular basis, whether these are books or merch, and you will need to be committed to encouraging your readers to buy directly from you.
If you have fewer published books or a smaller following, consider Payhip instead. It’s free to set up and easy to embed into your existing website. You can sell both print books (using Bookvault) and ebooks through Payhip. And Payhip deal with UK/EU VAT for you. Payhip also allow you to create memberships and online courses.
2. All my ebooks are in KU. Should I take them out and sell them direct instead?
Are you making money in KU? If you are, leave them in KU! I know direct selling is the big thing of the moment, but this is your income we are talking about. If KU ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Get your paperbacks and anything you sell wide on your Shopify site first, and once your Shopify site is making money, then think about what you want to do about KU. You could trial moving one series or a few books over, but don’t pull the whole lot at once if you have a big catalogue in KU. Please don’t throw away all the time and effort you have put into making KU work for you.
3. Should I replace my current author website with my Shopify site?
There are pros and cons of replacing your current author website with your Shopify store.
Advantages of keeping your current website:
Does your current website have Pretty Links or other pages that are linked to from within your books? Perhaps you have secret areas set up for readers. Is it a big part of your current author business? Do you have a custom-built website with features that could not be recreated in Shopify?
If you are risk-averse, you might prefer to keep two sites running. With an author website and a Shopify store, if something goes wrong with one, you’ve still got the other as backup.
Advantages of moving everything to Shopify:
If your author website is solely there to tell people about your books and about yourself, it is possible to recreate these features on Shopify, including your blog and pages that link to books on other retailers such as KU. Your Shopify site can be made to look indistinguishable from a standard author website.
You might prefer to only have one site, so that each time you launch a new book you only need to put the information about it on one website.
It is better from an SEO perspective to have all your traffic going to one place, rather than splitting people off between two different sites. The more visits you get, the higher your search engine ranking, so it makes sense to send everyone to one place.
Once you have a Shopify site up and running, what purpose does your original author website serve, and can it all be done in Shopify?
4. What are some successful strategies for selling on Shopify?
Here are some things that authors I’ve worked with do that make their Shopify sites successful:
- Publish on Shopify before Amazon/wide. You can do this even if you are going to put your ebook into KU. Just make sure the ebook is not for sale on your Shopify site before you put it into KU. You can release your ebook/print book on Shopify anywhere from a week to several months early on your own shop. If your readers want the new book, they either buy it directly from you, or they have to wait.
- Sell special editions – signed copies, hardbacks, book boxes. Anything that’s more fancy than the standard stuff on Amazon.
- Bundles at a discount. Audiobook/ebook bundles using Bookfunnel are brilliant as they cost you basically nothing to sell, so even with a hefty discount you can still make money. Selling paperback bundles of whole series through Bookvault can also be surprisingly successful. If the series is popular on KU, for example, readers might decide they want to own the whole series in paperback.
- Don’t try and undercut Amazon. Sell something unique instead. See points 1-3 above. You need to give people a reason to move away from what they are used to.
- Marketing, marketing, marketing. A decent email list of your fans is essential, and your social media of choice. Assume that no-one is going to stumble across your store. You have to build the relationship with your readers.
- If you have already built a loyal following, write in a genre and have much-loved characters, then merch can be a good seller. T-shirts, bags, mugs, notebooks. But this only works with the right kind of fanbase.
- Don’t make assumptions about how much money readers are willing to spend. You might balk at spending £150 on a bundle of paperbacks, but some readers won’t. Don’t underestimate what people will pay, and don’t undervalue your art. It’s tempting to go cheap in the hope of making more sales, but I haven’t seen this working in practice. Price your products sensibly so that you make a profit. People are willing to pay a fair price to avoid certain multinational corporations and buy something where they know the author is being paid properly.
5. Can I make a whole load of merch and sell it on my site?
You can… and some of it can be print-on-demand. T-shirts, bags, mugs, etc. can be printed through companies that will ship straight to the customer. However, if you have other things in mind, like bookmarks, branded knitting needles, sticker packs, even signed paperbacks, who is going to print them? Where are you going to keep the stock? Are you prepared to go to the post office a lot, or have you got a lovely assistant to do that for you? (Don’t look at me!) Will you ship internationally? Are you aware of the sales tax implications of selling different types of products?
I stick to print-on-demand books and digital products for a reason, but I am aware that for many authors, being able to sell beautiful products that complement their books is one of the main drivers behind setting up their own store. Just remember that it is more involved than whacking a few ebooks on BookFunnel. You will be creating more work for yourself, but it might be exactly what your readers want, and it’s another outlet for your creativity!
6. Who do you recommend for printing books?
If you are planning to sell print-on-demand paperbacks/hardbacks through your Shopify store, you will need to use a printer that integrates with Shopify. Currently there are two to choose from, BookVault and Lulu.
You can’t use Amazon or IngramSpark for selling print-on-demand books through Shopify, though you could use either of these if you wanted to print books yourself, store them, sign them, package them beautifully, and then post them to the customer.
All the authors I have worked with use BookVault for their print-on-demand books. The reason people use BookVault is because it is cheaper than Lulu, the printing times are good and so is the print quality. The other huge advantage of BookVault is that they create the shipping profiles for you, so you don’t have to manually add any shipping costs.
BookVault have the ability to create bundles, which you can sell through your store, so you can sell a whole series as a bundle in paperback or hardback.
I like BookVault because they are a small British company who have been very responsive to the demands of authors. They have set up US, Canadian and Australian printing, and the app integrates with Shopify easily. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but is the best solution for printing on demand out there at the moment.
If you are a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors, you can get codes for free uploads to use with BookVault.
Your print books will never be able to complete with Amazon for shipping costs, sale prices, and delivery times (especially if your customer is outside of the US/UK) but if your customers want to support you and buy your books from the place that gets the most royalties directly to you, they will make the switch to your store.
Another advantage of BookVault is that you can sell paperback pre-orders, which you can’t do on Amazon at the moment.
7. Why do you recommend BookFunnel for ebook and audiobook delivery?
BookFunnel are brilliant for the delivery of ebooks and audiobooks. I have not yet had a single issue using BookFunnel.
The beauty of BookFunnel is that they will help your readers load their books onto their device if they are having difficulties, and it’s very easy to add your ebooks to your Kindle or other e-reader.
You can create bundles of ebooks and audiobooks in BookFunnel, and you can set up pre-orders. You can also produce ebook samples for your readers to “look inside the book”.
And finally…Something no one asks, so I will:
How are you going to manage your site in the future?
It’s all very well building your lovely new site, but don’t forget that it is going to need ongoing action on your part to attract and retain your customers.
Marketing
Just as you can’t just put a book on Amazon and expect thousands of people to stumble upon it, the same applies to your Shopify store. You will need some sort of marketing strategy to keep readers coming to your store.
Is there anything you need to change in your books’ backmatter now you are selling direct?
You will need to advertise your store, which you can do through linking up Facebook/Instagram and Pinterest, for example.
Make sure that when you send out a newsletter to your readers that you send them to your Shopify store! They can go find your books on Apple or B&N by themselves. It’s a different mindset: still publishing wide but focusing your customers’ attention on your own site.
You will need to set up email sequences for new customers. (See my article on post-purchase flows for more info.) Think about the emails you get from any online retailer when you buy something – you buy a pair of shoes and the seller emails you every so often offering you a discount or a similar pair that you might like. You can do this too.
Site maintenance
You will need to add new books as you publish them.
Very importantly, you will need to keep track of your sales tax obligations (if you haven’t set up an app to do this for you.)
You will need to keep an eye on your orders, to make sure that everything is working smoothly, especially with the shipping of print books. You will also need to keep an eye on possible fraudulent orders.
As your back catalogue grows and you add more books, you’ll need to check how easy your store is to navigate. A site with ten books on it will be laid out differently to a site with one hundred books. There will be an ongoing process of reorganisation, redesigning and general housekeeping.
