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Author Topic: Pay what you want host for books?  (Read 757 times)

Sappho

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Pay what you want host for books?
« on: March 13, 2015, 05:20:18 pm »

I'm looking for something like Bandcamp, but for books. I'm making progress on finalizing my novels, and I'm starting to think about how to sell them. I want to do a pay-what-you-want system with a low minimum, $1 or maybe even less. I don't plan on getting famous or making loads of money, but it would be nice to earn some small amount of money after all the hundreds of hours I've put into the writing. But I don't have the resources to create my own site (or pay someone to create them) - Bandcamp is a pretty awesome resource for musicians and bands. Is there something like that for books, too? Or will I have to create a system from scratch if I want to sell this way?

gimlet

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Re: Pay what you want host for books?
« Reply #1 on: March 13, 2015, 06:50:02 pm »

Why not just put it up through amazon?  You can still sell it for .99 if you want.  And there are a lot of promotion days where it's beneficial to make it free, so anyone who *really* doesn't want to pay a buck can get it.  Then you can just link to the amazon page for it from whatever websites you have or might be promoting it on.  For bonus cash, get an amazon affiliate account and add that to the links, and link other stuff you recommend or review.   It will be small change (unless you make it a major project to expand, of course), but hey, might pay for coffee a few times a month and it's fun to track your stuff selling.

Lots of alternative ways to structure it too - put up a couple chapters for free and set a higher price for the full book(s), etc.

Duplicating even part of that functionality yourself is gonna be a huge pain in the ass for very little reward...
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LordBucket

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Re: Pay what you want host for books?
« Reply #2 on: March 14, 2015, 08:03:13 pm »

Relevant post with lots of information

tl;dr:
Amazon is suitable for selling ebooks. It will probably be a losing proposition if you sell hardcopy. But i also recommend you don't sell hardcopy. If you do choose to sell harcdopy, expect to attend a lot of faires and farmer's markets and book signings and don't be surprised if it takes you a long time to break even on printing costs. If you sell ebooks on amazon, be sure you sign up with the 30% payment rate not the 65% rate. There's no particular  benefit to paying the higher rate.