Selling Books Direct with Ingram Spark Share and Sell Program

Selling your books direct to your reader from your website is something that many authors want to do and it can be a little tricky, especially when you're selling a print book. I mean, are you going to turn into a shipping department? And how many books should you have in your closet or your garage to handle this? And where's the nearest post office? Of course there are ways to handle this. But one of the newest ways to sell a book on your website and have it sent out for you is through IngramSpark. If you're looking for another option to sell direct, one that is really easy to set up, well, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad. I'm founder of the fantastic full service self publishing company Book Launchers. And one of the things we're doing a lot of these days is providing support not only to help a nonfiction author create a top quality book that is positioned to sell, but we're also helping them to sell that book and sell it direct to their reader. Now I've been talking with my friends at ingramspark for a while asking for this feature and late in 2023 they delivered IngramSpark. Customers now can get their books directly into readers hands by selling from your author website, social media and more. What does this mean? Well, you can increase the amount of money you're making on every book sold by cutting out the middleman. So here's an opportunity for you to earn more by selling direct. This is all happening through the IngramSpark share and sell program. So check it out. Just log into your IngramSpark account and voila, you'll see this pop up and you can go ahead and click it and create a link. Or if you don't have this pop up, just look at this left menu and you should see E Commerce, which is brand spanking new. It's really straightforward because your book is already set up in ingramspark. So now all you have to do is choose which book of your eligible books you want to sell, set the purchase price. It'll calculate your compensation for you and show you what the minimum price that is required in order to cover your print costs plus your shipping. You can see for self, promote and succeed, the minimum is $9.01. You decide if you want to limit the number of orders per link. Right now it maxes at 25 books per order and then you create a link that you can start immediately sharing. So what's the cost of all this? Well, your wholesale print cost plus a $3.50 service fee and that's it. It's so simple. And that's what I love about this. You get a QR code, a link or an HTML code right after you create the link and you're ready to go. If you just want an easy way to sell books from your website, have the printing and distribution done in a timely manner for you and not have to hire someone to do it, well, you can just go ahead and set this up. If for some reason you don't have this in your account because it is still in beta, reach out to the fabulous folks at IngramSpark because they might be able to add it to your account. But real soon, hopefully it comes out of beta and everybody has it. Now, who is this not right for? Well, if you're running paid promotions and want to track conversions or the reason you want to sell direct is to gather contact information, this is not an ideal scene because IngramSpark is not giving you that information. You don't get to find out that this action caused this sale and you're not finding out who made the purchase. When you look at this order form, it's really nice and it's likely to be credible to a buyer, which is what you want on your website, but you're not getting any of that information that's going straight to ingramspark. You will just see another sale on your dashboard and not whether the ad you ran on Facebook sold it or whether the person clicked on your website and bought it or they bought it from a post you did on LinkedIn. I think it's great if you want to just sell your book on your website and that's it. It's going to be a fantastic option for you, but for me, I'm still going a different route to sell my books direct because one of the big reasons for me to sell direct isn't to make a few more dollars per sale. It's to get the data that allows me to make better and better decisions for my marketing and for me to collect information about who is buying my book so I can get to know you and build a relationship. Speaking of that, if you have purchased any of my books, I would love to get to know you. Post in the comments below. Or even better, head to the site where you bought the book and post a review and then tell me you did that in the comments below. That's a fast track to bestie status where you can join the oh so elite folks of Rachel Robertson, Efren Delgado, Damian Andrews, Mike Cook and Joyce Robinson. Thank you to all my besties for your comments, likes and shares. All right. Huge thanks to IngramSpark for adding this feature for authors. It is another great tool for authors to sell more books and make more money doing it, and frankly, do it with a lot more ease. Now, if you're wanting to learn more about why you should sell direct, well, this video is definitely the next one to watch. If you're curious about giving books away for free versus selling them and how to make that work, well, that video is right here. Plus please click the like button on your way by to watch the next video. I look forward to spending a bit more time with you. See you there.