How to sell ebooks from your own website, end to end

Every guide to selling ebooks direct starts with a shopping cart, which is the least interesting part of the problem and the only part that is genuinely solved. The four decisions that actually determine whether this works are made before a cart is chosen, and three of them are irreversible enough to be worth an afternoon.

Decision one: where the money lands

There are two arrangements and they are not variations of one thing.

In the first, the platform collects. A reader pays them, they hold the funds, and some number of days later a payout arrives minus a percentage. They are the merchant of record: it is their name on the buyer's statement, their liability for chargebacks, and — the part that matters most — their obligation to collect and remit VAT and sales tax in every jurisdiction the buyer might live in.

In the second, you collect. The charge is created on your own payment account, the funds land in your balance in the ordinary settlement window, and the platform never touches the money. You are the merchant of record, with everything that implies in both directions.

The percentage difference is what gets advertised. The obligation difference is what people discover in year two. If you are the merchant, the tax is yours to collect — which is doable, because Stripe Tax and its equivalents will apply the right rate at checkout and file where you have registered, but registering where you cross a threshold is a thing no platform can do on your behalf. That is the honest trade for keeping the whole price: nobody is standing between you and the money, in either direction.

Pick the second arrangement if your sales are meaningful and the first if you would genuinely rather pay a fifth of everything than think about this. Both are defensible. What is not defensible is choosing one without knowing which you chose.

Decision two: what the reader actually gets

An EPUB, DRM-free, is the correct answer, and the reasoning is unglamorous: it is the only file that reflows properly on a phone, opens in every reader your buyer might already use, and can be sent to a Kindle. A PDF is a picture of a page. It is the right format for a workbook with a fixed layout and the wrong one for anything that is mostly prose.

DRM is the other half of this, and the argument against it is not philosophical. DRM on a direct sale protects nothing — the buyer already has the file — while breaking exactly one thing, which is the reader's ability to open their purchase in five years on a device that does not exist yet. What does work is watermarking: writing the buyer's name and a licence code into the file itself. Nothing is locked, nothing expires, and a copy posted publicly leads back to one purchase. It is the version of this that costs the honest reader nothing.

Give away a real sample. Not a preview pane, not a PDF of the first ten pages — a genuine shortened EPUB containing the first chapter or three and not containing the rest of the book. If your sample is the full file with a flag on it, someone will find that out, and the person who finds it out is not the person who was going to buy anyway.

Decision three: the checkout, which is mostly about what you remove

The single largest conversion leak in direct book sales is the account.

A reader arrives from your newsletter, warm, holding a card, ready to give you $9.99 for something they already want. Then a form asks them to choose a password. A meaningful fraction of them do not come back, and you will never know which fraction, because they did not do anything that could be measured.

The checkout that works is an email address and a card. The email address is not an obstacle — it is where the book goes, so the reader understands why they are typing it. Everything past that point is a field you added for your own convenience.

Two consequences worth planning for. First, if there is no account, the download link is the receipt, and it has to be permanent — see the next decision. Second, you now have the buyer's email address, which is the entire reason for doing any of this. That address is the difference between a list you own and an audience you are renting from a retailer who will not give you the names.

Decision four: what happens eighteen months later

Here is the moment that breaks most direct-sales setups, and it is never discussed in the setup guides because it happens long after the guide was followed.

A reader opens a new laptop. They want the book they bought from you in 2026. The email is gone — deleted, in a defunct account, in a mail app they no longer use. What they do next is email you, and what you do next is search a dashboard by hand and re-send a link. That is a small tax and you will pay it forever, at a rate proportional to your success.

The fix is a recovery page: the reader puts in the address they paid with, and a fresh link for every purchase is mailed to it. Re-issuing should invalidate the old link at the same moment, which is what makes it safe to hand out. If whatever you set up cannot do this, you have not built a bookshop — you have built a payment link with a file attached, and the difference shows up in your inbox two years from now.

And then: your domain

The last piece is where all of this happens. A shop at yourname.com and a shop on a platform's URL do the same job today and diverge completely over the next decade: one accumulates links, search rankings and recognition to your name, and the other accumulates them to somebody else's. If a platform's own sitemap lists its authors' storefronts, be aware what that means — the platform is competing with you in search results for your own title.

The setup is a DNS record and a certificate, both of which should be handled for you. It is the cheapest decision on this list and the one that compounds.

What this looks like assembled

Your own domain, pointing at a shop that carries your whole catalogue. Checkout that takes an email address and a card, with the charge created on your own payment account. Delivery of a watermarked, DRM-free EPUB to a permanent page with an in-browser reader and a send-to-Kindle button. A recovery page for the reader who lost the email. Nothing exclusive, so the book stays on every retailer at the same time.

That is the whole job. Inkwharf does it as one subscription with no cut of any sale, and if you would rather see what the arithmetic looks like against a platform taking a percentage, the take-rate calculator will do it on your numbers.

Open a shop — free to start, no listing fee, and you keep selling everywhere else the same afternoon.