This week I’m starting a 4-video series on how authors can sell their books directly to customers through different platforms. I’m going to cover 4 different methods, there are dozens and dozens out there, but I am going to only focus on those that I have actually tried so I can share first hand knowledge of set up, pros, and cons.

So this week I’m starting with the one that is the easiest to set up, but in my opinion, it has the most cons.

How to set it up
Go to forms.google.com and select a template you like and start creating.
I actually found some other online forms as a template. Like I need the person’s name, their email address, which book they want to purchase, what autograph message they want if any. Do they want multiple books? Other people who sell their books online have forms that you can look to for inspiration.

Pros
Super easy to set up. Who doesn’t have a google account? For serious
You can add as much or as little detail as you want
You can get this started in like 5 minutes.

Cons
No point of sale, so I had to set up a Zapier automation to notify me when someone completed the form. Then I logged into PayPal, set up the invoice, sent it to the customer, once they paid I could get their order started.
So this is a very manual process. Now if you aren’t getting a lot of volume this is fine, but it adds an extra step. And if someone fills out the form on Friday and you don’t have that automation set up to notify you and you see the order on Monday, well in that time the customer could forget, they could spend that money elsewhere. When you have a customer who is ready to buy, you need to be able to take their money.
Taxes are another thing here to consider. So you have to pay sales tax or the customer needs to pay it. Somehow, someway, taxes need to be sent to the city and or state, maybe both. It depends on where you are doing business and where the order came from.
The shipping you have to handle all manually. So you have to be able to set an inventory limit and know how many copies of your books you have in stock and then list them as sold out or order more. You have to get to the post office or FedEx to mail out the books. It’s a lot of extra work. So if you are selling maybe a handful of books by this method each month it could be feasible, but once that goes up, it will become more difficult.

If you have found this information helpful please let me know if the comments and be sure to give this video a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe and ring the bell. This helps YouTube know that this video was helpful and can get it in front of more authors like us, it will also help make sure you are notified every time I have a new video go live.
Now you can get back to writing your book!

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