I’ve done a thing and got a shop!

I’ve done a thing I’ve long wanted to do but dreaded and part of me is still dreading this because like many people when you start something, you wait for it all to go pear-shaped. This little update is not so much about the writing aspect of my life but more about self-publishing. Others have no doubt done more, gone further, but it’s a giant step for me, the person who prefers to hide!

So here’s my shop! https://payhip.com/StephanieEllis

A little while ago, I set up a BookFunnel account – finally – and uploaded my Darklings ebooks there. From there I signed up to payhip and created my own store. The latter is free, they take a small % of a sale but that combined with the Paypal % is still much smaller than amazon would take. Books are still available via KDP but not KU. Any that remain in KU are being withdrawn. Why? Because the amount I receive is pretty negligible and it’s not worth it. Taking some sales away from KDP may hit possibility of achieving certain rankings, but I’ve decided those, too, are not important to me. (Fun if I got them, yes, but I don’t so I won’t miss them!)

I did look at Shopify and a few others but an advantage of payhip is that it sorts VAT out for you as well. Physical books are exempt, but ebooks carry a certain level in the EU etc. Simply tagging the product as an ebook in its record page gets this aspect sorted!

If you buy an ebook via payhip, you get sent a Bookfunnel link and go from there. It was all much more straightforward than I imagined and I’m wondering why I didn’t do it sooner. The answer actually is that I couldn’t afford the subscription for the year prior to this. That makes it sound expensive, but it’s not in the great scheme of things, it was just circumstances and necessary budgeting at the time.

Today I put up physical books on payhip – the signed author copies that have been lurking on my shelves. These are set at UK only and p&p is added at the end. I followed the purchase flow through as far as I was able to test and it worked. Integrating payhip and Bookfunnel was also relatively painless and Bookfunnel provided info and some video links which were a great help talking me through it. But as with all things this is early days so if anything does go wrong just get in touch and I will look into it and get it sorted! If you are not UK but would like the books, then send me a message and we can sort something out.

I realise I’m going to have to look at advertising and promotion more – but that is next steps. I wanted this aspect done. I didn’t want to be beholden to online stores who could decide to take my work down for whatever reason. More ebooks and perhaps other things will be added along the way.

This is me wanting to control my own self-published work as far as I can. It is also something I regard as a learning exercise – another reason I did it was simply to see if I could. And if I can, then anyone can.

I would also love to see more turn their backs on amazon and the like now that we have more tools at our disposal to create our own futures.