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tag writes: by Ryan Orr

Selling Your Book Online
Bookwired.com Tutorial

You are not happy with your publishers efforts to sell your book. If you are a using a print on demand company (POD), you are even in worse shape. Most of the cost of the book, which is less than 50% of what they charge you, goes back to them in profits. You are left with a book to sell, and you do not make any money doing it. You can make money if you charge way over the amount they charge you, and make it inaccessible for the average person.

Lulu.com and Xlibris.com are just two of many POD printers that offer you a home page and sales for your book, but a page you cannot edit. Neither do they seem to care if anyone else sells your book, they and others like them have no affiliate program to get other sites to directly sell your book - or other's books.

Booksurge.com does have an affiliate program but no way to customize your page. Without being able to customize your pages, most will not link to you, unless they are your friends... Unless of course there is an affiliate program where they stand a chance of making something.

Because of this most webmasters go to Amazon.com and use their affiliate program to link to your book, if you are in fact on amazon... if you can believe it, about half the authors out there are not.

1. Your Homepage

One fact is, whoever prints your book, you need an easy to use commercial homepage. Two of the greatest of these is Os-Commerce at http://oscommerce.com and Php-Nuke at http://am-nuke.net Both are free, but there are some differences in the programs.

Os-Commerce cannot be fully customized by the average person, and they do not have many support forums, but the ones they do have are good. Php-Nuke can be completely customized, and being the largest of the php sites used worldwide, it has hundreds of forums in different languages, with thousands of different themes to choose from (a theme is the general look of your site) Os-Commerce does not have many add-ons available at the time of this writing, however php-nuke has several hundreds to customize your site even more.

Os-Commerce has everything built in to sell products, however with phpnuke, you need to get an ad-on from http://nukeroyal.com $63.00 USD, $49.95 Euro. In the near future this add on will include a built in affiliate program and with a little messing about you can actually sell hard goods instead of waiting for the upgrade for the storefront, upgrades are free. Paypal is the easiest to use on either, but both support many types of Internet selling services.

Am-Nuke.net http://am-nuke.net actually offers complete setup of these programs and others, as add ons for many php programs for near nothing. Am-Nuke cannot however set-up your administration without asking questions you don't want others to know about, such as your Internet paypal, i-card etc. That will be up to you as well as setting up your products, pricing shipping and tax or Vat.

Am-nuke also offers basic support services in case your site goes down for about $20.00 per month paid for by the year. This is great because if you do by chance mess up your site, Am-Nuke is there to fix it up for you. Am-nuke net is a free site, and all programs they have for download are free.

2. Your Affiliate Program

You are not selling a hot item like George Forman's Grill, so telling people they will have to wait for months or even weeks to get $25.00 is not going to work selling your book. You probably cannot afford to pay much over 15%. So first decide to pay directly after you ship the book, say 7 days from the time of sale. It may only be $2.00 or less you are sending out, but the home page that supports your site needs to see results for their space.

Be sure you have plenty of nice banners for those pages to choose from as well as good *.png, *.gif and .*jpg photos of your book. Do not refuse anyone... some sites have few members, but they are visited by thousands of people each month that use their links, advice and help files - those are the places they will see your book.

3. Web-Links

Your site should have a web links section. When a site links to you, offer them a return link - this gets your site noticed even more, how much more is a matter for theory but the more link backs you have the better off you will be.

Sites like http://bookwired.com have several banners to choose from, some are just for standard links, some are used if you have them review your book. Make sure you put your link backs on the proper pages. A seller of your books should be in general links, and those that are showing their review of your book should actually be on the book(s) page.

4. What To Do Next

Your site and linking are just the first steps to selling your book, and getting the most out of it. Try to spend the least amount you can, but do not use cut-rate domain hosts, you could be limited in bandwidth or features. Try to stay away from C-panel sites, the auto setup features they have are usually 6-months to a year behind what is available. The C-panel is great for many other things though, so use it for those things.

Bookwired.com is a free site for publishers and authors to promote their book(s), the site features Professional Reviews, and user reviews of books. Bookwired.com features RSS newsfeeds via http://bookwired.com/backend.php or a free module from their downloads section for php-nuke style sites. Their forums send out news feeds for upcoming events, author and publisher events, Book Chapter examples, and tutorials for authors and writers as well as the general public. Membership and services are all free.

Keywords: Bookwired.com Tutorial Selling Your Book Online

About the Author

Ryan Orr, Carlsbad, NM USA

ryanorr@rwpbooks.com

Learn more about book publishing

Ryan Orr resides in the Southwestern United States. The father of five boys, he started writing action adventures with moral lessons his sons would enjoy. His homepage is http://rwpbooks.com

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