June 09, 2004

Reasons NOT to Sell Your Own Book
printable version

Is customer service devouring your writing and marketing time? At Booklocker.com, we are frequently approached by authors who are weary of all the problems they've encountered while trying to sell their books themselves. While they started out wanting to write for a living, they now find they're spending most of their time on website repairs and upgrades, customer service, troubleshooting, fulfillment, and even dealing with credit card fraud and bounced checks.

If you list your book with a reputable epublisher that pays high royalties, you can avoid hours of administrative headaches each week. And those hours can be spent on tasks that are a lot more fulfilling and fun, like writing more books and concocting creative marketing ideas!

Top 10 Reasons to List Your Book With A Reputable Epublisher

10. You won't need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to build and maintain a website with a shopping cart system and database. You can have a simple one-page website if you choose and simply refer buyers to the epublisher via a link.

9. No need to apply for a merchant account, which is more difficult than applying for a credit card.

8. You won't need to give your bank account information to processing firms like paypal. (Paypal has a bad reputation - http://www.paypalsucks.com - for security.

7. No more manually emailing ebooks and packaging and mailing print books to customers! Reputable epublishers allow customers to instantly download their ebooks and arrange for all print book orders to be drop-shipped directly to the customer.

6. No more chargebacks! When a crook orders a book from you, finding him or her is almost impossible. You lose not only the product you sold, but the transaction processing fees (averaging 3%-4%) as well. And...

5. No more chargeback fees! Visa, Mastercard and the others may charge you around $25 or more for every fraudulent credit card order that you process. Yes, that's PER TRANSACTION.

4. No more troubleshooting when your website or merchant account system goes down. If your shopping cart or database breaks, you lose 100% of your business until you get it back up. Reputable epublishers have technicians maintaining their sites 24 hours/day. Backup systems are in place and downtimes are rare and brief.

3. No more troubleshooting with customers who are new to computers. You'll never again need to walk a reader through the steps of your shopping cart system, downloads, email attachments, zipped files that won't open, pdf comprehension, and the list go on, and on, and on. Reputable epublishers handle this entire mess for you.

2. Reputable epublishers generally have a site with a higher-profile in the search engines. Even though you have just a page on their site, the epublisher's pages get indexed by the search engines regularly. This means information about your book will get into the search engines faster than if you create a brand new site.

1. And the #1 reason to list your book with a reputable epublisher - You can spend all the time you've saved above on writing a new book and marketing your current books to the masses!

Comparing the Top ePublishing Companies

Booklocker.com - Free Listings for Non-Fiction Ebooks! - 70% royalties for ebooks priced $8.95 or higher (Fiction titles must be part of the POD program, which requires a $217 setup fee.)

Amazon.com Advantage - $29.95/year membership fee - Pays 45% commission on list price.

AuthorHouse - Setup fee $598+ - 40% royalties on ebooks

Xlibris - Setup fee $500+ - 25%-50% royalties on ebooks

iUniverse - Setup fee - $459+ - 50% royalties (based on NET, not on list price) on ebooks