Your bookshop should be on your own domain, and here is the unglamorous reason

"Use your own domain" is usually filed under branding, which makes it sound optional and slightly vain. The actual reasons are mechanical, and one of them is a genuine conflict of interest that nobody discloses.

Everything accrues to a hostname

When a podcast links your book, when a reader bookmarks it, when a blogger mentions it in a roundup, the value of that link is credited to the hostname it points at. Not to you — to the string before the first slash.

If that string is someplatform.com/authors/your-name, you have spent a decade of publicity building the authority of a domain you do not own, cannot move, and will lose access to entirely if the company is acquired, pivots, or simply decides that storefront URLs should look different now. The redirect they promise on that day, if there is one, passes on some of the value and not all of it.

If it is yourname.com, the same decade builds an asset that moves with you. The books can change platforms; the address does not.

The part that is a conflict of interest

Here is the thing worth checking about whatever platform you sell on: open its sitemap and see whether your storefront is in it.

A sitemap is the list of pages a site asks search engines to index and rank. If a platform lists its authors' shop pages in its own, it has entered the search results for your book title, competing against you, using your title, on a page it controls and monetises. Sometimes it wins. When it does, the reader who was searching for your name arrives on a page that also shows them other people's books.

This is not usually malice. A platform's growth team is measured on the platform's traffic, and every author storefront is free content that ranks. The incentive points that way on its own, which is exactly why it is worth checking rather than assuming.

The arrangement that does not have this problem: the platform's sitemap lists only the platform's own pages, and each shop gets its own sitemap served from the shop's own address. Then there is one canonical home for your book and it is yours. That is how this site is built: the sitemap at /sitemap.xml lists this site's own pages and no author storefronts, and every shop gets its own sitemap served from the origin that shop actually lives on.

What the setup actually involves

Less than the reputation of the task suggests.

1. Own the domain. Any registrar. About $12 a year. Prefer your author name or your series name over anything clever — it is going in the back of printed books, where it cannot be corrected later.
2. Point two DNS records at wherever the shop lives. Usually one CNAME and one verification record, both copy-and-paste.
3. Wait for the certificate. Modern hosts issue and renew it automatically. If yours asks you to buy or upload one, that is a signal about the rest of the product.
4. Check the canonical tag. View source on a book page and confirm the <link rel="canonical"> points at your domain and not the platform's. If it points at theirs, everything above was decorative.

Step four is the one people skip and the only one that determines whether any of it worked.

Keep the old address alive

Whatever address your shop had before, keep it resolving.

The reason is specific to books: your back matter is printed. A link in the last pages of a paperback sold in 2024 cannot be edited, and it will be clicked in 2031 by someone who just finished the book. The same applies to the pen name in a URL if you ever change it — a handle is not an internal identifier, it is a string printed in objects you no longer control.

Any shop worth using keeps old handles and old addresses redirecting permanently, forever, rather than treating a rename as a clean break. Ask before you rename anything.

The one honest argument against

You do not need a domain to start, and being blocked on choosing one is worse than not having one. A free subdomain sells books perfectly well, and the switch later costs nothing if the platform keeps the old address working.

So: start without one, and add it in the week you notice yourself typing the address out loud. Do not spend a fortnight on a name — that failure mode is real and it has stopped more books being sold than any URL ever did.

Related: how to sell ebooks from your own website walks the other three decisions, and the pricing page says which plan the certificate is included on.

Open a shop — a free address to start with, your own domain when you want it.