Quote:
Originally Posted by xendula
I always thought it would be a good idea if authors would set up a way to send money via Paypal on their websites, and I'm not just talking self-published authors (is that being used synonymously to "indie authors" here, or is there a diffence between self-published and indie?).
I've read a lot of books from my library after which I was thinking that I could purchase the next book they publish, but that I'd much rather get the book from the library and donate the full purchase price to them directly. The same goes for great audiobook narrators.
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Traditional published authors are usually not allowed to sell the ebooks directly. They can sell print copies in most cases, but it can be a hassle given the whole post office thing. They also have to order and pay for them upfront, another hassle.
Yes, indies and self-pub'd are used interchangeably (at least by me).
It is time-consuming and requires some technical expertise to set up a storefront and most buyers seem to prefer the bigger retailers. Only a handful of people who have purchased my earlier books tend to buy from my storefront. Most of them are in countries other than the US as well. I've had a few Kindle owners write and say they would buy from my site, but don't know how to transfer the file. I actually get this a lot because I pre-release titles first from my own store sometimes. That results in some people getting impatient because they don't want to try to side load.
For a lot of authors I think they have to weigh the pros and cons of spending time on a storefront versus writing the next book, versus marketing the current one, versus a day job, etc. It's hard to be all places!