Finally found a way to sell ebooks from website

[Brian Clegg]

I've always sold my books from my website - presumably one of the main points of having an author website - but I've struggled for years to find a way to easily and reliably serve up ebooks to be downloaded direct from the site.

You might wonder why there's any point, as I can sell an ebook with a link to Amazon etc just as easily as a physical book. This is because I've got a few specialist ebooks where it's useful for the buyer to be able to print some pages, and (as far as I'm aware) you can't do that with Kindle etc.

The classic example is a book of 12 mystery games called Organizing a Murder. The whole idea is that the user can print off clues, evidence etc. to place around the location - which means it really has to be a PDF.

I'm sure there are lots of ways to provide automated downloads effectively, but I've struggled with the tools I use. Since moving to Macs, I use a website editor called RapidWeaver. For those familiar with RapidWeaver, I use the Paysnap stack to take Paypal payments, which works fine - but doesn't provide downloads when the person pays. Now, though I've added the RapidLink plugin, which isn't designed to work with Paysnap, but I've found it fairly easy to get them to talk to each other. And it seems to work.

To celebrate, I've reduced Organizing a Murder from £9.99 to £2.99 to the end of August if anyone wants to take a look! The page is here.

 

[Jason Byrne]

I've always sold my books from my website - presumably one of the main points of having an author website - but I've struggled for years to find a way to easily and reliably serve up ebooks to be downloaded direct from the site.

You might wonder why there's any point, as I can sell an ebook with a link to Amazon etc just as easily as a physical book. This is because I've got a few specialist ebooks where it's useful for the buyer to be able to print some pages, and (as far as I'm aware) you can't do that with Kindle etc.

The classic example is a book of 12 mystery games called Organizing a Murder. The whole idea is that the user can print off clues, evidence etc. to place around the location - which means it really has to be a PDF.

I'm sure there are lots of ways to provide automated downloads effectively, but I've struggled with the tools I use. Since moving to Macs, I use a website editor called RapidWeaver. For those familiar with RapidWeaver, I use the Paysnap stack to take Paypal payments, which works fine - but doesn't provide downloads when the person pays. Now, though I've added the RapidLink plugin, which isn't designed to work with Paysnap, but I've found it fairly easy to get them to talk to each other. And it seems to work.

To celebrate, I've reduced Organizing a Murder from £9.99 to £2.99 to the end of August if anyone wants to take a look! The page is here.

I really like the how-to element, prevalent in a lot of your work. That's a concept I've never thought of before — having the reader set up their own scene, to try to see if they can figure it out.

 

[Jennifer Stone]

Well done Brian, it's an interesting concept for a book. Great to hear you got it to work how you wanted it.

 

[K.J. Simmill]

Brilliant, well done.