How to set up your Bookshop.org author page
I am really REALLY excited to be able to shout about this because it’s such an amazingly awesome initiative and I’m kind of stunned that it hasn’t already been done before. But it hasn’t! And it’s great! Hurrah for all new bookish things.
What is bookshop.org?
In case you haven’t heard of it yet, bookshop.org is an online bookshop that aims to financially support local, independent bookshops.
Here’s how they describe themselves:
We believe that bookshops are essential to a healthy culture. They’re where authors can connect with readers, where we discover new writers, where children get hooked on the thrill of reading that can last a lifetime. They’re also anchors for our high streets and communities.
As more and more people buy their books online, we wanted to create an easy, convenient way for you to get your books and support bookshops at the same time.
If you want to find a specific local bookshop to support, find them on our map and they’ll receive the full profit from your order. Otherwise, your order will contribute to an earnings pool that will be evenly distributed among independent bookshops.
More simply – Bookshop.org is a genuine challenger to Amazon, and therefore is quite frankly brilliant.
Books are offered to readers at a small discount and delivered within two to three days with all customer service and shipping handled by the site and Gardners.
Bookshop.org allows your local bookshop to have their own online book store (as many do not have the ability to sell books through their websites – if they even have websites).
Any books sold through their Bookshop.org store nets them a 30% cut of the sale.
So it’s a similar scheme to Amazon’s Affiliate programme (which I blogged about here), but much more generous.
And better still, as an author, you can get in on the action and set up your very own ‘bookshop’ through the platform. Any sales you make from your own bookshop will also net you 10% of the sale (and another 10% will go towards that earnings pool for the independent bookshops mentioned above).
You can see my bookshop.org page here. On your page you can list your own books, and also create lists of other books you recommend – a great way to champion your writing friends and your favourite recent reads.
My agent had a meeting with one of the guys working for Bookshop.org, and he recommended when compiling your lists that less is often more. So it’s a better idea to just share a few books here, but to revisit your page and update these books regularly.
Setting up your bookshop.org
It’s super easy to set up your own shop on bookshop.org. All you need to do is go to this page: https://uk.bookshop.org/affiliate_profile/introduction
And click on the button: ‘Join the affiliate programme’
Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be sent an email to verify your address. Make sure you do this (if you don’t, you won’t be able to set up a shop).
After that’s all sorted you’ll be taken to this page, where you can start to build your shop.
You can give it a name – I suggest just using your author name here, and then also choose the URL your shop will be hosted at. I’ve gone with charduck as that’s what I use for all my social media platforms (as my name is so long!). But you can of course pick anything you fancy.
Then, there’s space to write a little introduction for visitors to your shop. I think it’s nice here to explain a bit about yourself, your writing and also to thank people for visiting your page – much like you would on your website.
You can also add links to your social media platforms, which is a great way to encourage people to follow you after browsing.
There’s space to add images too – you can add a cover to your main page, as well as your profile picture.
I suggest adding your author headshot as your profile picture, but for your cover image, you can use something your publisher has created, or mock something up in Canva if you’re feeling creative. Just make sure you use the dimensions suggested: 2048px by 600px, so that it displays nicely.
Once that’s all sorted, it’s time to create your book lists!
Creating your book lists
Click on ‘Manage’ by My Book Lists and create a new list. I suggest doing your own books first (and calling it something straightforward and obvious) before going on to create other ones.
You can add books to the lists using the ISBN numbers for each book, but I found this didn’t work that well. I think as the site is quite new, they are still ironing out some bugs.
So instead, I searched for the books I wanted to add then scrolled down on their listing to where it says Your Affiliate Link and then clicked on ‘Add to my book lists’, then selected the list I wanted to add it too.
This was a much easier and quicker way of adding books than manually entering the ISBNs each time.
You’ll also see a unique affiliate link next to each book, which you can use whenever you want to chat about or promote a particular book (for example on social media). If people click on your link and then go on to buy it, you’ll earn some affiliate income for that purchase.
Making the most of your shop
Once you’re happy with your lists, it’s time to promote your shop page.
Make sure you share it on social media, and encourage others to spread the word. You can also add a link from your author website to your Bookshop.org shop, to encourage readers to buy from there.
On my author website I’ve gone one step further and actually added a ‘Shop’ link to my main navigation that links directly to my Bookshop.org page.
NB: remember though that whenever you use affiliate links you must disclose that you are doing so to people. A simple statement on the footer of your website will do, so long as it appears on every page of your website.
If you’re tech-savvy and don’t mind getting to grips with a bit of code, there are also embeddable widgets that you can add to your website to create Bookshop buttons.
And if you have an author newsletter, make sure you share your shop there too!
Hope that all makes sense and that you agree this is a really powerful, important way we can all help support indie bookshops. If you have any questions at all, please do leave me a comment, or give me a shout on Twitter!.
Happy bookshopping!
