In today’s Journal
* Quotes of the Day
* Shopify?
* PayHip?
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Shopify?
Do any of you have direct experience with Shopify or with PayHip or other similar storefronts? I encourage you to check them out for yourself, but I’ve written my personal thoughts, for my personal situation, below.
In Dean Wesley Smith’s previous post (Fiction Branding… Part 6) he touted the benefits of Shopify. Over the years, I’ve come to trust him on almost every matter about writing and marketing.
(He also wrote a second post on this topic. See Of Interest.)
But I’m a little unique in that I’ve long had a publisher site and I recently added direct-buy links to it for every novel and every short-fiction collection.
***
Post Interrupted for an important UPDATE
Yesterday I sold my first one-click copy of a book from StoneThread Publishing. Great. But when PayPal notified me, despite my having put a code in the button, it didn’t say which book it was.
I figured it out from the price, but that was a little frightening. What if someone bought a novel for $4 or $5? I would have no way of knowing which novel they wanted. The process should be smoother than that.
So as a stop-gap, I went to every book page and placed a short line of instructions:
Note: Please indicate “[book code]” and epub, mobi, or PDF in “instructions to merchant.”
But it should be smoother than that too. I hate clunky websites. The harder you make it for the reader to buy your work, the fewer sales you’ll have.
***
This is an excerpt from a comment I left on Dean’s post:
“I suppose my only question is about the overriding benefit of a Shopify store. Will it, simply by virtue of being a Shopify store, expand my reach? [In other words, would I get significantly more traffic at Shopify by virtue of it being a Shopify store?] I couldn’t find an answer to this at Shopify.
“Moving everything over from StoneThread to Shopify will be a LOT of work. Would it be worth the time when I already have a publisher site?”
He responded yesterday morning, but to me at least, his response was a bit vague:
“Direct buy links are fine. Customers are slowly moving to buying direct and fans love it far more than giving Amazon their money. Plus you can get merchandise for more sales without any costs to you, and great advertising for your series.”
The first sentence seemed to say I should keep doing what I’m doing.
But the third sentence seemed to indicate Shopify would be better (the bit about merchandise and advertising). Or that perhaps I could do both: set up a Shopify store and keep the publisher site as-is. But I just don’t know.
- Can we have both a Shopify store and our own separate publisher site?
- Does Shopify provide “merchandise without cost and great advertising for series” as Dean seemed to say?
If you aren’t aware, a Shopify store at the lowest level costs $29 per month, billed annually (so $348).
PayHip?
Another commenter (James Palmer) mentioned PayHip. I’d never heard of them, so I looked at them as well.
A comparison between PayHip and Shopify pointed out that Shopify does not enable sales of digital content. (I later found out they DO enable digital sales with an app you can get through Shopify.)
For me, digital sales are important, but that’s something I already have through my own publisher site.
PayHip also enables users to sell online courses (like Teachable does), something I might be interested in. Shopify does not.
So as I asked about Shopify earlier, would I get significantly more traffic at PayHip by virtue of it being a PayHip store? As was the case with Shopify, I couldn’t find any information on the site that answers that question. So I suspect not.
Finally, I can imbed PayHip directly on my existing website. However, linking to and selling through PayHip will cost me a 5% transaction fee, whereas selling direct through my own site costs me nothing.
Neither offers me extra “reach,” so it’s a wash in that way.
Note: PayHip does offer a Forever Free plan for which they charge a 5% transaction fee, so if you’re new to the world of direct sales—and especially if you don’t already have an existing publisher site—PayHip might be the better alternative for you. It’s by far the less costly.
The Bottom Line—
In my personal situation, I won’t go with Shopify.
I’m considering going with PayHip so I can at least use their “online courses” feature. But after encountering the problem on my site in the update above, I’m considering imbedding their sales buttons in my site too, although it will cost me a 5% transaction fee on top of the fee PayPal already takes out.
I do have an email out to PayHip asking whether I can sell epub and mobi files through them as well as PDF. If I can’t, I might have to stay with the clunky thing I have now.
2ND UPDATE: PayHip replied in only a few hours. (I could find no direct link for support at Shopify.) The rep said the customer can buy ANY format of efile! Great news! I’ll have a lot more work to do, setting up PayHip on my site, uploading files, etc. but it will be worth it once the smoke clears. First I’ll finish the current novel. I didn’t write fiction at all yesterday.
I also emailed PayPal for a solution to the problem of identifying what the reader bought. As of this writing, they hadn’t responded. If I find a solution, I’ll let you know here in the Journal.
The online courses
are something that would interest only other writers, which basically means all of you.
So if you would be interested in seeing some online courses from me, please leave a comment or drop me a line via email.
Maybe I’ll set up a series of courses, in each of which I will do a deep dive on the topics I covered in Writing Better Fiction.
Of Interest
Publishing Masters Program At Western Colorado
The Numbers
The Journal……………………………… 1030
Writing of TJ Blackwell: The Origin Story
Day 1…… 6139 words. To date…… 6139
Day 2…… 1781 words. To date…… 7920
Day 3…… 2692 words. To date…… 10612
Day 4…… 3383 words. To date…… 13995
Day 5…… 2575 words. To date…… 16570
Day 6…… 1563 words. To date…… 18133
Day 7…… 2817 words. To date…… 20950
Fiction for March…………………….…. 53716
Fiction for 2024…………………………. 218308
Fiction since October 1………………… 521364
Nonfiction for March…………………… 26700
Nonfiction for 2024……………………… 125800
2024 consumable words……………… 344198
2024 Novels to Date……………………… 5
2024 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2024 Short Stories to Date……………… 1
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………… 87
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 9
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)…… 239
Short story collections………………… 31
Disclaimer: I am a prolific professional fiction writer. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Unreasoning fear and the myths of writing will slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
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