How to Sell Your Book Direct to Readers with BookVault and Shopify #bookpublishing #bookselling

Selling your ebook and audiobook to readers has never been easier than it is today. But selling a print book direct without being the shipping house has been a challenge. In the past, we've used Lulu for this, but their prices just kept going up and up and up, making it completely cost prohibitive to use and even recommend them. Their print quality is good, but it's too expensive. So what do we do now? Well, if you're wondering how to sell your book direct without being the shipping house, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julia the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers. At Book Launchers, we have courses, books, membership groups, full service support to help you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book to grow your brand and your business. One thing we have shifted our focus to in a big way in 2024 is helping our clients sell books direct to their reader. Amazon has become a lot more challenging to deal with and the profits are getting squeezed. And if you're running ads to sell book, well, you can't track conversion if you're running ads from Facebook to a store like Amazon. So it's tricky. One thing I talked about a while ago was the exciting new feature from Ingram called the Direct Sell and Share program. If you want a simple way to sell direct to a reader, that is it. It takes seconds to set up and they handle taxes, printing, shipping, and any issues that may arise. The challenge is they aren't giving you the buyer information. And if you want to run ads to sell books and, and grow your database or set up things like an upsell or some sort of an offer after purchase, well, you can't do that with them. I still love that option though. And if you want a super simple way to sell direct and make more money per book sold, I'll link to that video at the end. Now, if you want to sell print books but not be packaging them up and shipping them, we are doing it through Book Vault, Boom. And Shopify. This setup isn't super simple. It does take a bit of work. But once it's set up, it works in a really, really straightforward, easy, hands off way for you. So first things first, you need to set yourself up with a Shopify and Book Vault account. If you don't already have these, then you'll go to the Shopify app store and search for Book Vault to install it into your Shopify store. Now, if you're like me and just seeing this makes you go, oh no, no, no, no, no, I don't want to do any of this. I get it. And I'm always so, so grateful. My team does this stuff for, for me so I don't have to. So if you are like me, you can hire my team using the link right belowbook launchers.com direct sales. Or you can watch Shane, our digital marketing expert at Book Launchers, explain the next couple of steps so you can go do it yourself. Take it away, Shane.

Hey there. I'm Shane from Book Launchers and I will walk you through how to set up your Book Vault account and Shopify account so that you can sell your book directly to readers. The two accounts set up. First thing that you want to do is add a title to your Book Vault account. So this is where you'd add your paperback and your hardcover version of your book. And the way to do that is you just go to Book Vault, log into your account and then go over on the left side menu here and hit view your titles or I'm sorry, hit add a title. And then you're going to either add a print book or a bundle. A bundle only works if you already have books in here, so you probably want to start off with just a print book. Here's all the options for the bindings that we have and it's basically going to walk you through all of these steps. It'll ask you to select the type of binding. It'll ask you to select the type of lamination, the size of the book itself, the text stock, so what the inside design is going to look like. Also you select the COVID stock as well. It's usually just this one option. Sometimes there may be some, a couple other options right here, but that's usually what I see how many color pages you have and how many mono pages. So just black and white pages. So let's put 250 for now. And then you want to put the title in there and then Also add your ISBN number in there. There's also a $24.95 setup fee for all titles on this service as well. And then it also gives you the pricing for the, the printing of each book itself. So that's a good thing to know right there. And there's two different locations that these books get sent from, which is why you're able to distribute these books globally. You can send books from the the Book Vaults UK location and then also from their printing location in the United States. And then once you have added all of your titles that you want to sell on there, if you have one book, great. If you have 10 books, that's also fine. As well. You'll just have to pay for each one. You'll go over to the left menu and hit View your titles. And then here you'll be able to see all of the active titles that are currently available for sale on your store. And then this is, this is the end of step one. So once we've uploaded everything to Book Vaults, then we're going to need to connect it to Shopify. Book Vault is the service that will print and ship your books, but Shopify is the actual storefront where people will go online, view your books on the store, and then actually make a purchase. So I'll show you how to do that to connect it to Shopify. Connect Book Vault to Shopify. So you can make this integration here. You want to go to your Shopify account and then make sure that you have the Book Vault app downloaded from the Shopify bookstore. And when you actually click into this app in your store, I'm already logged in currently. However, if you aren't already, it'll just show a login screen right here. You log in with your username and password, the same stuff that you use to log in a Book Vault. And what that's going to do is it's going to connect the two services together and then you can go over to your Book Vault account, go down to Apps, and here you will see the list of all of your titles that you've added to your Book Vault account. And then over here it says listed products in the beginning. You won't have anything here because this is showing me that these two products are available on the Shopify store. So to add products to your Shopify store, you want to make sure that you have your Shopify account linked using the app that I showed you over here. And whenever you want to add a, a new title or a bundle or whatever to your store from your Book Vault, you'll see the list of titles right here. And you just want to hit this little cart icon with the plus button right there. And you click this. You're going to do create product, you're going to name it, put the variant type, you know this, in this case, this is a, it's a bundle of books. So I'll just do bundle and we'll do this self publishing bundle and you can put the product description if you'd like. You can note, you can mark here if it's a pre sale book. So if your book is scheduled to be released in the future, this would be something that you want to do and then set the release date so that anybody who buys the book from your store, it won't be shipped until that date. And then also you can put the variant name because Shopify allows you to put different variants. So you can choose different options for your books. Usually not super important if you're just selling, you know, a singular version of a book, paperback, hardcover, so nothing really need to do there. But you know, since this is a bundle, I'll just leave it a bundle. The variant price, you know, we'll put this at $40. And then you want to make sure that both of these items are checked. The Book Vault UK and Book Vault US that allows you to print and ship your books from both of those locations. And then once you have all that set up, you would just hit upload now and it's gonna make that connection, it's gonna send that product to the Shopify store. And now you can see that before it had the little car icon with a little plus button there. Now it actually shows that the title is listed on the Shopify store. Here's the list price, here's the bundle. If we go over into Shopify, so if you go over into your Shopify store into products, you'll be able to see that this bundle has now been added into the actual list of products. And yeah, that's how you make that connection. There are a few other steps we can include, you know, in some further tutorials, but this is essentially the whole setup and that's kind of how these two, two softwares talk to each other and how you can sell books directly to your readers.

Thank you, Shane. Go ahead, click that thumbs up button if you liked that tutorial from Shane, because I'm going to hit it myself because I'm just so glad that Shane set up my books for me Now. Book Vault, just an FYI, is a UK company, but they have a printing operation in the US now, it's not as elaborate as their UK operation yet, but I'm sure it's going to expand. We have tested their integrations that aren't Shopify. And I can tell you there is a reason we only offer our direct sales setup with Shopify. And that's because Shopify is the only one that is smooth to set up. And the Shopify storefront is really, really awesome. So if you want to work with us, we'll create an Author website on WordPress and then we'll create a Shopify store with Book Vault as your print on demand supplier when you have a sale again. You can learn more about this at our website and I'll put the links below. Now, a couple of things here. You do need to set up a payment method inside of Book Vault so they can charge you when a book sells. You'll get paid when somebody buys your book through Shopify, but then you're going to be paying Book Vault direct when they print and ship your book. So you aren't going to have a straight through transaction like what happens with Ingram when somebody buys your book. They subtract their fees and the print fees and then just give you the net. It's different here. You're paying Book Vault for this and you're getting the money from Shopify. Which leads me to my second point. Make sure you've set up a bank account inside of Shopify. Because at one point Shane said, hey, you've got $700 within inside of Shopify. You might want to set up a payment method so they can put money into your bank account. It was a nice surprise to have, but I had, I'd forgotten to set up my bank account so they had nowhere to deposit the money, so it just stayed inside of Shopify. So number one, make sure you've got a credit card in Book Vault so they can print your books. And number two, make sure you've set up your banking inside of Shopify so you can get paid. All right, so now this is the video on the Ingram share and sell program. Or if you want to know how to sell your ebooks direct really easily, well, this is a video on using Story origin for that. Go ahead, click on over. Or if you have Another question about DirectBooks, go ahead and comment in the comments below. See you there.