Have a plan for your customer emails

The emails that you send out to your customers will be a huge driver of more revenue. In other words, if you know someone has bought from you before, they are your best bet for buying from you again. Plus, you already have their details and haven’t got to go out and try and find new readers.

Whenever you buy something online these days, you’ll notice that you start getting regular emails from the company you bought from. These can be more or less useful, more or less annoying. The fact is though, they work. We’re more likely to buy from someone that’s fresh in our minds, or from the timely email that lands in our inbox that we just have to click on, rather than go searching for the thing we want.

This is the reason we authors send out regular newsletters to our mailing lists – it’s a crowded marketplace and we need to remind our readers that we exist.

Once you have your own store for direct selling, you have much more data about your customers, which means you can send them pertinent emails on an individual basis. However, you don’t have to do this by sitting down and crafting individual emails every time someone buys from you. Instead, you can set up pre-written emails that will be sent to people when they meet certain criteria.

The most popular system for doing this with Shopify customers is Klaviyo. I’m going to use the Klaviyo terminology of ‘Flows’, because that’s what I’m familiar with. Other email marketing automation platforms may vary.

Can I use Mailerlite, Active Campaign, Convertkit, or Mailchimp, as I already use them?

Your usual email provider that you use to send out your email newsletters will give you the ability to tag customers/readers depending on things like their location, or whether they click on certain links. However, Klaviyo is set up for ecommerce and allows you to track your customers’ behaviour on your store. It knows what products someone has looked at, what they bought, whether they have bought anything before, and when they bought it. This level of detail is what allows you to set up really personalised email flows. You can’t get this information into Mailerlite or Mailchimp without manually entering the information – they do integrate with Shopify/WooCommerce, but not to the level you need.

Here’s just a small section showing my own profile from one of my author’s Klaviyo accounts, to demonstrate what I mean by the level of detail captured:

I’ve got some experience with Convertkit, and you can integrate Convertkit with Shopify to automatically add customers to your Convertkit list, and also tag them depending on the product they buy, so for example, if you have two genres that you write in and you send different newsletters from Convertkit to the two separate groups of readers, you can use the integration with Shopify to ensure that new customers get put in the right genre tag in Convertkit. However, Convertkit still doesn’t give you the functionality that Klaviyo does.

What can I do with Klaviyo that I can’t with my normal email provider?

With Klaviyo, you can send out certain information to people who bought an ebook – say you want to remind them that they only have one day left to download their ebook from BookFunnel. You can set up a flow that emails only people who have bought an ebook, 13 days after their purchase.

You can email someone who bought the first book in a series, but not the second, to tell them about book 2. You can exclude anyone who has already bought book 2.

You can email someone with a special offer who last bought something from you three months ago, but not anyone who bought something more recently than that.

Here is a list from Klaviyo of what can trigger an email:

Here’s what a post-purchase flow could look like, so you can see the level of detail you can have:

In this flow, you can see how it splits and sends different emails, depending on what the customer does. In this case, it’s whether they have bought more products from you or not. (Don’t copy this flow, it is only an example and not a recommendation!)

What else could I email my customers about?

Brainstorm as many ideas as possible for your post-purchase flows. Here are some suggestions to get you started:

• Thank you note. Set up an email to go out on the day after purchase, thanking the customer for their purchase. It’s recommended that you make this as personal as possible, so send it as a text email, rather than a flashy HTML one. Make it look like you have taken the time to personally sit down and write to your customer. You can have different versions for if they have bought from you for the first time, or are a repeat customer.
• Cross sell recommendations – as you like X, you might like Y.
• Next in series recommendations
• Bundle recommendations – if you liked book 1, you might like to buy the whole series at a discount.
• Upsell recommendations – if you like the ebooks, you might like to buy the paperbacks.
• Special events – Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Halloween, Christmas, summer holidays. Offer a special discount, promote a new product.
• Customer’s birthday – offer discount code
• Getting to know you or your series – the story behind the book(s), who you are, about your writing process, what inspires you.
• Related things like recipes, tips, fun facts.
• Community – do you have a Facebook group or Patreon? Where can your readers meet online?
• Requests for reviews (though you may already have a review app to do this.)
• Share photos, testimonials from other readers.
• Collaborations with other authors.
• Challenges or competitions for your readers.
• Refer a friend discounts.
• Back in stock notification for signed paperbacks/merchandise.
• Charitable causes you support. Maybe you give a percentage of your profits to a charity?

Some of these suggestions you might already do through your normal email newsletter.

Should you keep your existing newsletter or move everyone on your list over to Klaviyo?

Don’t move over everyone to Klaviyo! Klaviyo is only for people who buy from your Shopify store. I’m guessing that you’ve already built up a mailing list made up of readers who have bought your books elsewhere – keep these people separate and continue to email them at your normal rate. You can export your Klaviyo subscribers to your newsletter list, if they give consent to be added to your newsletter list.

Tips for post-purchase emails:

1. Keep each email focussed. One topic, one call to action.
2. Make product-specific flows. You could have different flows depending on the format people buy, or the series they buy from. If you have one standout bestseller, this could have its own flow, which will lead readers to find out about your other books or products.
3. Separate flows for different things – 1 flow for post-purchase thank you, 1 flow for next in series recommendations. Don’t try and make one mega flow including all the emails.
4. Don’t worry about sending too many emails!
5. You will have to put time into content creation for all these emails – don’t leave it to an afterthought.
6. You don’t have to have everything set up for the launch day of your store, but you will need to have the most important ones set up.

How much does Klaviyo cost?

At the time of writing, Klaviyo is free for the first 250 contacts, and then scales from there. You can send 500 emails maximum to up to 250 contacts. It costs more if you include SMS as well as email. The next tier (for email only) is $20 a month for up to 500 contacts, then $30 a month for up to 1000 contacts. And so on.

How do I get it?

For Shopify, just search for it in the Shopify app store. It’s free to install. You can also get Klaviyo for WooCommerce, Wix, or Square Online.

Do I have to use Klaviyo?

No, of course not. I’m not a Klaviyo affiliate, and at the time of writing this, I don’t even have my own Klaviyo account! However, I’ve used it for several other authors and I can certainly see the benefits of having really decent email automation for your store. Setting up a Shopify store is a big investment of time, and there’s money involved too. You want to make a profit, and so being able to target your existing customer base seems like a no-brainer to me.

It’s not about being some spammy ecommerce business that’s trying to squeeze every last penny out of your customers. It’s much more about being able to send your readers the information that will benefit them the most and building the best possible relationship between you and them. You don’t have to use Klaviyo to do it – check out other options. But do have a think about how you can give your readers the best experience in buying from you.

As I’ve mentioned in another article, it’s all about the personal touch. How can you set yourself apart from the faceless giant retailers? How can you encourage your readers to remember you and enjoy the whole process of buying books from you?

I see this question come up a lot, which is why I think it merits an article of its own.

In an ideal world, you would create your own Shopify store so that you know all the ins and outs, every setting and every checkbox. However, building a Shopify site from scratch is time consuming, especially if you have a hefty back catalogue of books. It also requires learning a whole new system, and if you’ve never built your own website before, that’s pretty daunting.

I believe that for you to make your Shopify store a success, you have to know the basics of how it works, what is on your site, and where everything is. You also need to be able to produce your own email marketing that links into the products your customers buy (or don’t buy). (See here for more on post-purchase emails.)

However, if you have no eye for design, or are terrible at finickity details, you’re going to struggle. You might also choose to prioritise your time elsewhere than fiddling about with websites. In which case, if you’re keen to have your own store, you’ll want to think about hiring someone to do all or part of the set up for you.

What should you consider when hiring someone to build your store?

Firstly, is this someone you feel comfortable working with? You are going to want someone you feel happy to contact with all manner of questions and not be worried that they are going to make you feel like you’re wasting their time.

Are they responsive to your questions and will they build your site in the way you want it? You don’t want a one-size-fits-all solution.

Are they experienced in building Shopify sites? Do they come recommended by other authors? Ask around and see who other people have used.

Will they help you to understand how to manage your own store and add your own books in the future? Do you suspect they are hoping that you’ll have to keep coming back to them every time you want something changed in your store?

This last question is really important. However much you are not keen on doing it, you need to be able to make changes to your site yourself. If you decide to run a sale, or if you are going to launch a new book, do you really want to be paying someone every time you want to make a tiny change? Part of the point of selling direct is having control – which you don’t have on the big retailers who could close your account seemingly on the whim of an algorithm. Also, you are responsible for your sales taxes, and you are responsible to your customers. You can’t hide from this, so if you don’t want this kind of responsibility, don’t sell direct. Anyone you hire to build your site for you will leave this stuff in your hands, so it’s sensible to know how your store actually works.

Just like if you employed a builder to build you a house, you wouldn’t expect your only contact with them to be when they throw you the keys as they drive off in their van – you would want to be involved throughout the whole process to make sure everything is where you want it and designed to your taste. You also need to know that the electricity and other services are connected up properly and how everything works! Continuing with the metaphor, you might not be fussed about placing every brick yourself, but once you move in, your house is your responsibility and it helps to be capable of doing a bit of DIY!

1. All my ebooks are in KU. Should I take them out and sell them direct instead?

Are you making money in KU? If you are, leave them in KU! I know direct selling is the big thing of the moment, but this is your income we are talking about. If KU ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Get your paperbacks and anything you sell wide on your Shopify site first, and once your Shopify site is making money, then think about what you want to do about KU. You could trial moving one series or a few books over, but don’t pull the whole lot at once if you have a big catalogue in KU. Please don’t throw away all the time and effort you have put into making KU work for you.

2. Should I replace my current author website with my Shopify site?

There are pros and cons of replacing your current author website with your Shopify store.

Advantages of keeping your current website:

Does your current website have Pretty Links or other pages that are linked to from within your books? Perhaps you have secret areas set up for readers. Is it a big part of your current author business? Do you have a custom-built website with features that could not be recreated in Shopify?

Advantages of moving everything to Shopify:

If your author website is solely there to tell people about your books and about yourself, it is possible to recreate these features on Shopify, including your blog and pages that link to books on other retailers such as KU. Your Shopify site can be made to look indistinguishable from a standard author website.

You might prefer to only have one site, so that each time you launch a new book you only need to put the information about it on one website.

It is better from an SEO perspective to have all your traffic going to one place, rather than splitting people off between two different sites. The more visits you get, the higher your search engine ranking, so it makes sense to send everyone to one place.

Once you have a Shopify site up and running, what purpose does your original author website serve, and can it all be done in Shopify? 

3. Can I make a whole load of merch and sell it on my site?

You can… and some of it can be print-on-demand. T-shirts, bags, mugs, etc. can be printed through companies that will ship straight to the customer. However, if you have other things in mind, like bookmarks, branded knitting needles, sticker packs, even signed paperbacks, who is going to print them? Where are you going to keep the stock? Are you prepared to go to the post office a lot, or have you got a lovely assistant to do that for you? (Don’t look at me!) Will you ship internationally? Are you aware of the sales tax implications of selling different types of products?

I stick to print-on-demand books and digital products for a reason, but I am aware that for many authors, being able to sell beautiful products that complement their books is one of the main drivers behind setting up their own store. It’s very doable, and Shopify is set up to manage the selling of products with an inventory. After all, that’s what most online shops do. Just remember that it is more involved than whacking a few ebooks on BookFunnel and letting them do the rest. You will be creating more work for yourself, but it might be exactly what your readers want, and it’s another outlet for your creativity!

4. Who do you recommend for printing books?

If you are planning to sell print-on-demand paperbacks/hardbacks through your Shopify store, you will need to use a printer that integrates with Shopify. Currently there are two to choose from, BookVault and Lulu.

You can’t use Amazon or IngramSpark for selling print-on-demand books through Shopify, though you could use either of these if you wanted to print books yourself, store them, sign them, package them beautifully, and then post them to the customer.

All the authors I have worked with use BookVault for their print-on-demand books. The reason people use BookVault is because it is cheaper than Lulu, the printing times are good and so is the print quality.

BookVault have recently added the ability to create bundles, which you can sell through your store, so you can sell a whole series as a bundle in paperback or hardback.

I like BookVault because they are a small British company who have been very responsive to the demands of authors. They have set up US printing, and the app integrates with Shopify very smoothly.

If you are a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors, you can get codes for free uploads to use with BookVault.

Your print books will never be able to complete with Amazon for shipping costs, sale prices, and delivery times (especially if your customer is outside of the US/UK) but if your customers want to support you and buy your books from the place that gets the most royalties directly to you, they will make the switch to your store.

Another advantage of BookVault is that you can sell paperback pre-orders, which you can’t do on Amazon at the moment.

5. Why do you recommend BookFunnel for ebook and audiobook delivery?

BookFunnel are brilliant for the delivery of ebooks and audiobooks. 

The beauty of BookFunnel is that they will help your readers load their books onto their device if they are having difficulties, and it’s very easy to add your ebooks to your Kindle or other e-reader.

You can create bundles of ebooks and audiobooks in BookFunnel, and you can set up pre-orders. You can also produce ebook samples for your readers to “look inside the book”. (All of this is detailed in the quick guides and video walkthrough.)

And finally…Something no one asks, so I will:

How are you going to manage your site in the future?

It’s all very well building your lovely new site, but don’t forget that it is going to need ongoing action on your part to attract and retain your customers.

Marketing

Just as you can’t just put a book on Amazon and expect thousands of people to stumble upon it, the same applies to your Shopify store. You will need some sort of marketing strategy to keep readers coming to your store.

Is there anything you need to change in your books’ backmatter now you are selling direct?

You will need to advertise your store, which you can do through linking up Facebook/Instagram and Pinterest, for example.

Make sure that when you send out a newsletter to your readers that you send them to your Shopify store! They can go find your books on Apple or B&N by themselves. It’s a different mindset: still publishing wide but focusing your customers’ attention on your own site.

You will need to set up email sequences for new customers. (See my article on post-purchase flows for more info.) Think about the emails you get from any online retailer when you buy something – you buy a pair of shoes and the seller emails you every so often offering you a discount or a similar pair that you might like. You can do this too.  

Site maintenance

You will need to add new books as you publish them, and think about any other products you would like to sell.

Very importantly, you will need to keep track of your sales tax obligations (if you haven’t set up an app to do this for you.)

You will need to keep an eye on your orders, to make sure that everything is working smoothly, especially with the shipping of print books.

As your back catalogue grows and you add more books, you’ll need to check how easy your store is to navigate. A site with ten books on it can be laid out very differently to a site with one hundred books. There will be an ongoing process of reorganisation, redesigning and general housekeeping.

Sales tax. Two little words that strike fear into the hearts of most authors venturing into direct selling. Sales tax is not optional, and you can’t ignore it.

I am not a tax professional or an accountant and cannot advise you on how to meet your tax liabilities. This page is for information purposes only from what I’ve learned doing my own research and will cover the basics around sales tax and where to go to find out more. Please consult your accountant or a local tax specialist for advice.

Sales tax can be pretty scary, especially if you’ve never had to think about it before. I hadn’t even considered that there were different rules around sales tax in different countries before I started doing this, and I know it’s something that puts many authors off doing direct sales.

The first thing to say is that if sales tax is the thing from stopping you from selling direct… I shouldn’t say this, but you don’t have to do it. Stick with other ways of selling your books where the sales tax is dealt with before you get your royalties. This applies to the whole business of selling your books direct, not just the taxes. If becoming an e-commerce business as well as an author is too much stress and deep down you know it’s not for you, no one is forcing you. Yes, there is potential to make more money and even have some fun selling from your own Shopify store, but it is a whole other thing to take away time from being creative and writing books.

Having said that, there are huge benefits to having control over your own book sales and your own site, which I’m not going to go into here. Also, sales tax does not need to be frightening. Remember, it’s your site and you control where you sell your books.

Let’s take it step by step.

Firstly, what is sales tax?

Here are some things to be aware of:

• Your sales tax obligations depend on where you live, where your customers live, what you are selling, and whether you are selling to an individual or a business.
• Sales tax is nothing to do with income tax.
• If you are doing this yourself, you will need to know:
  • Whether what you are selling is taxable. For example, physical books and e-books are exempt in the UK, but not in some US states.
  • What categories of products you are selling. The rate of tax payable differs by product. Print books, ebooks/digital products, audiobooks, and other merchandise, are all subject to different rates of tax in different locations.
  • What the sales thresholds are. Many countries/US states have a threshold. Until you reach that threshold, you don’t need to register for tax. In Australia, it’s A$75,000, so you pay no sales tax in Australia until you’ve sold A$75,000 in one year. However, lots of places have no threshold, so all sales are taxable. For e-books in the EU the threshold is one sale, so you have to pay sales tax on all e-books sold in the EU.
  • Whether you have a physical nexus. The country you live in (or where you have a warehouse) affects your tax liabilities.
  • What counts as “annual sales”. It could be a calendar year, the previous 12 months, or the last four quarters. Whether you pay, or how much you pay, will depend on your sales in the period, so you need to know how to calculate the period correctly.

Has reading the above bullet points left you feeling overwhelmed? Yes, it’s complicated, but that’s because we’re thinking about the whole world here, and you don’t have to do that. Take a breath, it’s all doable.

Step one: Where do you live?

Because Shopify lets you control where you sell your products, you can start with just one or two countries.

The first step is to find out what you need to do where you live, by checking with your accountant or looking at your government’s website.

Your home country or US state is where you have physical nexus. Do you need to register for sales tax here? If yes, get that sorted. If no, you can start selling your books here. For example, I live in the UK, so I don’t need to register for VAT (sales tax) until my total taxable turnover reaches £85,000 in a year. I can start selling my books and other products in the UK without registering for VAT because my business is registered here and my turnover is lower than the threshold.

Where else do you need to sell to?

Next, in which other countries do you want to sell your books initially? If you’re American, you might want to only sell to the US for now. You can restrict your market to the US only.

On that note, if you are selling in the US, Shopify will set you up with Shopify Tax, which will monitor your liabilities state by state and tell you when you are getting close to needing to pay sales tax in a state.

Assuming your books are in English, you can find out the rules for the other major English-speaking markets, and get set up for these. This might mean finding out the rules for the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. That’s only 5 places to worry about, and one of these is likely to be your home country anyway. (Sorry for being so Anglo-centric!)

If you have books in other European languages, you’ll want to get set up for selling in Europe. It sounds tricky, as registering for VAT in Europe involves going through a One Stop Shop to cover you for all EU countries. But there is an app who will help you do this (for a monthly fee). Check out EAS Project. They can get you set up for EU and/or UK sales tax and make sure your products are configured correctly within Shopify.

Finding out what you owe

Shopify produces reports which show you where you owe tax and how much. In Analytics > Reports there is a Taxes report which breaks down any sales you have made which are liable for tax. They show the sales channel, country, region, name of the tax, whether it has been filed already, the rate of tax and the amount payable. You can then export this report to help you file your taxes (or get someone else to do it for you).

Who can help

Apart from EAS who I mentioned above, who will help with your EU and UK taxes, there are other apps to help you with your taxes worldwide. You might feel it’s unfair to restrict your books to the countries you find easiest to deal with and want your products to be available everywhere. In this case I would recommend getting an app to do it for you. Quaderno and TaxJar are two I know people use. Alternatively, find yourself an accountant who knows about international e-commerce.

Further reading

Have a look at this guide from Quaderno about Shopify and tax: https://quaderno.io/guides/shopify-sales-tax/.

Definitely have a look at Shopify’s own help pages on taxes: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/taxes.

Here’s a guide from TaxJar on taxes for booksellers (in the US): https://www.taxjar.com/blog/07-21-sales-tax-guide-for-book-sellers

There is a bewildering array of apps you can add to your Shopify store – anything you want, there’s an app for that. Check out the app store: https://apps.shopify.com/ Many of them will cost you money, and potentially clog up your store and slow it down. I’m an advocate for simplicity, and for saving money. You can always upgrade to expensive apps later on, if you find that the free versions aren’t giving you what you need.

These are my top 11 apps that I have added to stores I’ve worked on, in no particular order:

1. Geolocation (free)
2. A review app (free or paid)
3. Search and Discovery (free)
4. Bookvault (free)
5. Bundles (free)
6. Upsell app (from free)
7. EAS EU Compliance / Quaderno – for sales taxes (paid)
8. GDPR Compliance (free or paid)
9. Klaviyo (from free)
10. King Linked Options (paid)
11. Print-on-demand apps for merch (free)

Note: I don’t have any affiliate links with any app I recommend. It’s simply from my own experience of using them. Also, this is not an exclusive list of all the apps available, so please do your own research when considering which apps to get.  

This is what each one does and why you might want to add it:

 

A review app

I used to always go for judge.me as they have a free tier, but they have recently downgraded what you can get on the free plan. It’s still ok for a very basic review app, and looks fine, but you now can’t choose to not send review requests for some products, which is an issue if you’ve got a pre-order on sale. (You don’t want review requests sent out for a pre-order which your customer hasn’t received yet.) There is a workaround, but it’s clunky. Another popular app is Loox.

Both judge.me and Loox give you star ratings on your product pages and the ability for the customer to write a review on the product. They will also email customers with review requests after a time that you determine.

Shopify Search and Discovery

This is another free, Shopify-own app which I love. It’s a useful little app that I use for adding filters to collections using metafields. If you’ve got a View All collection, you can add these nifty filters so readers can search by genre, trope, format, etc.

The app also gives you the ability to create product recommendations on the product page, like this:

 

BookVault

You’ll need the BookVault app if you’re going to use them to print and distribute your print books. It makes the process of adding your books to Shopify extremely easy.

Shopify Bundles

This is a Shopify-own app that is useful if you want to create bundles of products you are shipping yourself, for example, signed paperbacks.

This is not for creating bundles of ebooks/audiobooks, as you do that within BookFunnel. And it’s not for bundles of print-on-demand books shipped through BookVault, as you make the bundle within BookVault.

The Shopify Bundles app is used if you are tracking your own inventory. So if you have three books in a series that you ship from home – maybe they are signed copies and you include a bookmark with the bundle – then by using the bundle app, it will manage the stock for you. If someone buys 10 copies of book 1, and you only have 10 in stock, Shopify will know that the series bundle is also out of stock.

 

Upsell app

You can get apps to set up frequently-bought-together options, cart upsells, product page upsells, and thank you page upsells. You can choose whether to add discounts or not to these. You will have seen frequently-bought-togethers on retailers such as Amazon.

I’ve used Selleasy as it’s free to start with, but there are other apps that have more functionality if you want it.

 

Sales tax apps

If you are selling books to the EU you might want to consider getting an app to sort out the sales tax for you. EAS will get you set up for EU and UK compliance, and they will make sure your VAT is correct. If you want a worldwide solution, have a look at Quaderno. Both have a cost, unsurprisingly, but will give you peace of mind.

For US sellers, there is Shopify Tax, which is already included and free (up to a point). It will help you work out what US taxes you need to pay and in which jurisdictions.

 

GDPR Compliance

You’ll want one of those cookie banners. I’ve used Pandectes, which is free for the basics, and there is also Consentmo GDPR which has a free plan too.

 

Klaviyo

See my separate article on post-purchase emails which explains in detail why you would want to consider integrating some sort of marketing automation emails.

 

King Linked Options

This one has been a revelation to me! It’s $9.99 a month, but if you sell the same book in multiple formats, have a look at this.

You mustn’t set up the different formats of your books as variants of the same product, as it’ll mess up your sales taxes horribly. Ebooks and print books have different tax categories so you have to set them up separately.

When you look at a t-shirt for sale online, you can flip through the different colour options, because the options are different variants of the same product. King Linked Options allows you to link the formats of your books together as if they are variants. It adds buttons (which you can customise) to the product page like this:

Shopify has now added this function for its Shopify Plus customers, but those of us on the normal plan can’t use this yet, so we have to use the paid app for now. For a tenner a month, I think it’s worth the cost if you have several formats of the same book.

 

Print-on-demand apps for merch

The main ones are Printify, Printful and Gelato. Authors use these to sell t-shirts, bags, mugs, and other items that can have their designs printed on. They print the products on demand and ship them to the customer directly, similarly to BookVault for print books. Have a search for different companies if you have particular products in mind. 

They are pretty easy to set up.

A word of warning! If you use EAS to manage your UK/EU VAT, the people at EAS will not support you using these print-on-demand apps in the EU/UK as they allege their tax situation is not what it should be. (I’m being diplomatic here, the chap at EAS used much stronger wording than this.) EAS do have some other printers they say are fine, who are UK-based, but that’s not ideal for your US customers. You will have to proceed with caution if you use EAS and also want to use one of these merchandise print-on-demand apps in the EU/UK. Talk to EAS before doing anything.

Just to confirm, this problem does NOT apply to BookVault.  

P.S. Thank you to Guy at swordschool.shop for the majority of the screenshots I’ve used in this article. If you want to have a look at anything in more detail, visit https://swordschool.shop/ 

Click here to download my checklist for uploading a book to Shopify.

There’s a list for ebooks, audiobooks, and paperbacks/hardbacks. I’ve assumed the print books are with BookVault and the ebook/audiobook are with BookFunnel. 

Please note, this checklist doesn’t explain every step in detail. You need to already know how to add books. The checklist is just a handy reminder for you to ensure you don’t miss any steps. 

Shopify doesn’t create store backups for you, so this is something you’ll need to do yourself. Also, you’re responsible for keeping accurate records of your business.

It is vital to save your site’s information in case of some sort of catastrophic error within Shopify (unlikely), an app screwing up your site (also unlikely if you use decent apps) or user error where you accidentally delete something you shouldn’t have (likely??)

If you want to create a backup of your store’s information, then you can use an app from the Shopify App Store or you can save information yourself.

I found a free backup app called TinyBackup in the app store.

You can and should create regular backups of your:

• products
• customers
• orders
• gift card codes (if used)
• discount codes
• financial data

(The links go to the relevant help pages on Shopify. These pages also tell you how to import data back into Shopify.)

And you can also back up your theme file, which is useful in case of some sort of error in which you need to recover how your site looks.  

How to download the data

Shopify will export the data either as csv or zip files. In all likelihood, you’ll be able to save these files and never need them, so create a folder to save your backups and make sure they have today’s date in the title, so you can find the most recent ones if you need them.

What you need to do is go down the menu on the left-hand side of the dashboard. It’s the same process for all the items in the bullet points above.

When you click “Export”, a box like this pops up:

Make sure you select all products/customers/orders/etc.

Shopify will then send you an email with a link to download the file.

When you have saved files for all of these, you can also save the theme file. You find this in Online Store. Click the three dots next to “Customize” and you can download the theme file here.

If you don’t want to go through this process, then check out the available apps. I haven’t looked at them so can’t recommend any.

How often to back up?

If I were uploading new products or receiving lots of orders I would back up these areas with lots of activity frequently.

Before making any changes to the design of the site I’d back up the theme file.

You’d be in trouble if you lost all your financial data, so don’t hesitate to back this up on a regular basis.  

Other things to think about backing up

If you have a blog on your site, make sure you save your posts somewhere. Shopify’s blog is basic, and I haven’t found a way to export posts from Shopify, so I’d recommend writing any blog posts in Word (or whatever you use). You can save the post which you then copy and paste into Shopify. I’ve had an issue in the past where I lost an entire blog (not on Shopify, not my fault, and in a previous career) so I know how painful it is to lose absolutely loads of work. That’s why I save all blog posts as Word files.

Your site’s images should be saved on your computer anyway before you upload them to Shopify, but just make sure you have a good filing system! The same applies to videos you post on your site.

Check your pages. Have you got FAQ pages, an About Me page, and any other pages it would take time to recreate? Just copy and paste them into Word and save them with your other backups. You probably won’t be editing this stuff much, so backing up pages won’t be something you need to do very often.

It’s quite a tedious job, but I have everything from my website saved one way or another, and I have screenshots saved of what pages I have and my site’s menus. If a disaster happened and the whole lot disappeared, I should be able to recreate the site, though it’s something I hope I never have to do.

Further reading

I found these two articles helpful:

Shopify: Backup your store in 6 easy steps

https://www.ilanadavis.com/blogs/articles/do-yourself-a-favor-and-backup-your-shopify-store

And also the Shopify help page on backups:

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/shopify-admin/duplicate-store

Why having your own store is a good idea

In my experience, it’s best not to think of your own store as being a rival to any of the big retailers.

What you are creating through your store is your own special corner of the internet, where your readers should want to come and buy from you.

There are several things you can do to really give your readers the personal touch and an experience they couldn’t get from any of the other book sellers.

When creating your own site:

You will know exactly who your customers are and what they are buying.

Say you follow the accepted route of writing multiple books, setting your first-in-series to free, and then promoting the free book through paid ads, BookBub deals and the like. You should get plenty of downloads of your free book, and ideally, a good readthrough rate so people buy the rest of your series. This is a great approach and generally works well. However, once you’ve sent a reader to, say, Amazon, and they have downloaded your free book, what are they being shown on your book’s sales page? A whole raft of adverts for other authors’ books! You pay to bring people to the retailer, who then shows them other people’s stuff that they might like more.

In addition to this, you don’t really know whether anyone who views your books actually buys them. If J. Smith buys book 1 in the series, do they go on to buy books 2, 3, 4 and 5? You’ve no idea. And you don’t even know if they bought book 1.

Yes, you’ve got a reader magnet in the back of your books asking people to sign up to your newsletter, and some certainly do, but you don’t really have any sure-fire way of knowing who buys your books, what they actually buy, and whether they come back for more.

If you sell books through your own website, you know exactly who buys what because you have that data. It’s yours, not the retailer’s. You can email a customer directly to suggest they might like to purchase the next book in the series, and you could even send them a discount code as a sweetener.

You can thank your readers for buying from you and keep in touch with them. You don’t want to be spammy, but you can email people who you know are your customers on a regular basis.

You can design your site however you like.

On the big retailers, your books’ covers are what will make them stand out from the crowd, but you need your covers to fit your genre so readers know at a glance what sort of book it is. Your options for standing out mostly depend on how much you are willing to spend on advertising.

With your own website, you can go so much further than the book cover, with colours, fonts and images. Even videos, if that’s your thing. You can add your social media feeds. Make your site your own and make it beautiful.

You can arrange your site however you like, so if you have loads of books, you can make it really clear to the reader which is next in the series. You can make it easy to choose the different formats if you have ebooks, paperbacks, hardbacks and audiobooks.

You can sell paperbacks in series bundles. You can sell print books, ebooks or audiobooks from different series in the same bundle, such as a “Series Starters” bundle, or a bundle based on a genre. And you can charge whatever you like for these. You could make a bundle of 20 books and charge £200 for it if you wanted!

You can sell things other than standard print-on-demand books

You can sell merch through your site. What you sell will depend on whether you want to get involved with managing inventory and shipping yourself, or whether you want to stick to print on demand.

Why not ask your readers whether they would like to buy merch from you? Depending on your readership, you might find that they would love to buy t-shirts, journals, mugs, or tote bags.

T-shirts and things might not be for you, but what about special, signed editions of your books, maybe with a bookmark included, or a fancy hardback version with gold foil? You would have to be prepared to do the work involved, but the higher profit margins might make it worth your time. It also gives your store something to really set it apart from other places that your books are available.

If you are not churning out multiple books a year, limited releases of merchandise could bring readers to your store at times other than when you have a new book out.

Finally, and this is a REALLY IMPORTANT point that I see authors missing.

If you have your own store, do NOT send your readers anywhere else to buy your books. If you send out an email to your mailing list about a new book* ONLY give them the link to your site. Don’t give them all the options of the big 5 retailers, like you are used to doing.

The more people who visit your site, and the more links you have out there on the internet going to your site, the better it is for SEO and the higher up the search engine ranking your site will get. I’ll add a separate article about SEO, but for now, bear in mind that if you go to the time and effort of setting up your own store, make sure that your readers know about it, and make sure they have an incentive to go there. That incentive absolutely does not have to mean that your books are cheaper on your website. Not at all. The incentive can be that they can buy things there that they can’t elsewhere, or that it is just a lovely experience, or it can be that you have hammered home the message that if they buy from your site, you get all of the money, straight away. Your loyal readers will want to support you!

* If you’ve got ebooks in KU then you’ll have to send readers to KU, but if you can sell something through your store, make that the priority.