Yeah, I've got something that's beginning to look like a website now. I'm not sure how it happened either. Now I'm wondering if I might sell my book through it, but I'm not sure how to go about that. Obviously, I'll still sell through established platforms as well, but I've got the site. Why not? I'm assuming I'm not the only one here, so I was hoping for tips, experiences, pitfalls. I'm sure I can manage to get some e-book action going, but I would like to offer print. Is POD an option for 'the little guy'?
Depends on what kind of traffic you're seeing on your website. Possible, but unlikely, that you're getting enough visitors to make setting up a shopping cart, with shipping and payment modules, worthwhile.
Honestly, this thing is gonna be dead on arrival, but for now traffic doesn't factor in for me yet. For now I'm purely looking at the logistics of it. Like ways to get around the whole shipping and handling thing if I make an overseas sale, or if I need to free up a room to stock physical inventory. Stuff like that. Soon as I understand the whole thing better I'll see if I find it worth the hassle.
FWIW, I have a lot of experience with a shopping cart program called Zencart (25,000+ posts on their support forum) and can recommend them highly. Not the easiest software to install and configure, but very powerful, with all sorts of shipping and payment options. Links to your books on Amazon (or wherever) on your website would probably be more effective.
The delivery of ebooks is going to be challenging... you'll need to use something like bookfunnel because people expect to get the book on their device not to mess about sideloading. PoD is possible from Ingram spark, as is short run printing from someone like Clays
