Self-publishing 101: How to sell books from your blog

June 12, 2015 at 1:35 pm

I received a lovely e-mail this week from Paula, a woman I’ve known for some time online from the comments section at ChrisWeigant.com. I found out Paula is an Ohioan like me who has her own blog at Ec-Ohio – The Ohio-based Green Directory.

She recently read my book and is currently searching for a publisher for her own. She follows SP 101 as well and had a few questions about self-publishing.

In the process, she gave me some feedback on my website (as she is a web designer by trade). One thing she wrote was:

One of the standard WP widgets is the “Subscribe” widget, where people can sign-up to be notified when you put up a new post. I would happily subscribe to that. Any reason why you didn’t implement it?

Yes, indeed, I wrote her back. The reason I didn’t implement it was simply because I’m relatively new to book selling and promotion and didn’t know about it.

I’m almost ashamed to admit it.

So I beat myself up for a couple minutes then went online and started looking for how to do it. It wasn’t long before I came upon the Email Subscribers plugin. 10 minutes later, I had it up on my website (highlighted in red).

e-mail_subs_akadjian_550

Because of Paula’s excellent feedback, I thought how to sell books from your blog would make a good topic for this week.