Selling books on your Web site

Offering your book for sale directly on your Web site can provide the highest profit margin since you don't have to cough up discounts to wholesalers and distributors.

For those who sell downloadable books from their own site, the purchase price is nearly 100 percent profit, the only other direct costs are those of collecting payment, such as credit-card merchant fees or PayPal fees.

But many authors who sell directly on their Web site also offer a range of other options, like buying links to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Some people are just more comfortable buying from a "big name" like Amazon. Some customers want to buy multiple books and get a shipping discount, or may have a loyalty membership with one of the retailers.

You can improve your sales by giving customers several choices. Authors who want to encourage sales through their own Web site can do so by offering something a bit extra –- like signed books or free shipping -– available only on orders placed directly on their Web sites.

Google Checkout

PayPal has been a popular tool among Internet merchants for years, but in 2006 Google launch its own payment service, Google Checkout.

Checkout has the potential for revolutionizing sales of books and other items over the Internet, since purchases can be made from any participating vendor using a single Google login. Google Checkout payments are fairly easy to add to any Web site or blog, using cut-and-paste buy buttons. Google Checkout also works with Google's search advertising program, AdWords, giving advertisers an easy solution for attracting customers and processing the resulting sales.

Google Checkout could also undermine one of Amazon's key advantages, checkout convenience. Amazon gets many sales simply because buyers are already registered with their shipping address and payment information. If Google's checkout system is widely adopted, suddenly there could be 10,000 more Internet bookstores, all of them supporting the same one-click checkout system.

eBay Stores

An eBay Store can serve as an effective storefront for booksellers. Although it's best known as an auction marketplace, is 2006 eBay launched a fixed-price marketplace called eBay Express, which focuses particularly on new books, music and video. It remains to be seen if eBay will capture some of the market share Amazon has with books.

If you have an eBay Store, you can insert a link back to your Web site, which can boost your site’s authority with Google and other search engines.