How to sell self published books

There are 300 copies in the hallway and your partner has stopped mentioning it.

Selling your own book direct is mostly three decisions. Print a run small enough that you can sell it, price it around what postage actually costs rather than what you wish it cost, and give people a reason to buy from you instead of from a giant retailer, which in practice means you sign it. A 200-page paperback might land somewhere near £3.90 a copy on a short digital run, and the postage on it can easily be a third of that again. Get those two numbers before you choose a cover price.

Everything after that is the part where the boxes leave your hallway.

Print short, reprint often

The single most expensive mistake in self-publishing is a run of 1,000 because the unit price looked good.

There are broadly three ways to get physical copies, and the right one depends entirely on how many you can realistically move in a year:

Print on demand. No run, no boxes, a copy is made when someone orders. Highest unit cost, zero risk, and you don't hold stock. The catch is that you don't hold stock, which means you can't sign it, can't sell it at a reading, and can't put anything in the parcel.

Short digital run. A hundred, two hundred, five hundred copies from a digital press. Middling unit cost, boxes in your hallway, and you can sign every one. This is where almost every serious self-publisher lives.

Litho. The big traditional press. The unit cost drops properly, but the setup cost means it only makes sense somewhere north of about a thousand copies, and the exact crossover moves with paper prices and page count.

Get three quotes for the same book and you'll see the curve for yourself. Don't take a number from an article, including this one. Ask each printer to quote 100, 250 and 500 of the identical specification, and ask what a reprint of the same file costs, because that last number is the one that lets you print small without fear.

The rule of thumb worth following: print what you can sell in six months, not what you can sell in five years. A reprint costs more per copy than a big first run. It costs a great deal less than 700 unsold books that you eventually pay someone to take away, and it costs less again than the slow demoralisation of walking past them every day.

Postage decides your price, so measure the book first

This is the part that separates people who make money from people who make sales.

Royal Mail prices post in bands, and the cheapest bands for anything book-shaped depend on size, weight and thickness, with thickness measured including your packaging. The limits change, so check the current ones on Royal Mail's own site rather than trusting a number you read somewhere. But the shape of the thing matters enormously: there's a threshold where a slim book goes in a cheap letter-sized band, and a slightly thicker one doesn't, and the gap between those two bands is often more than a pound. On every copy. Forever.

So do this before you sign off the print file. Ask your printer to quote the same book on two different paper stocks, one lighter and one heavier, and ask for the spine width of each. On a 240-page paperback that's a few millimetres of difference, and a few millimetres can be the difference between two postage bands on every copy you ever sell. That's a bigger number than your first six reviews are worth.

Then pack a dummy. Take a copy, put it in the envelope you'll actually use, and take it to a post office counter. Ask them to price it. You'll learn in ninety seconds what a spreadsheet won't tell you, which is that the padded envelope you liked added four millimetres and pushed you into the next band.

A workable structure for a UK seller:

Cover price	Postage charged	What it's for
£9.99	£2.20 UK	Single copy, cheapest band, no padding
£9.99	Free over £25	Pushes people to two or three copies
£9.99	£9 to £14 international	Quote it properly, it's brutal, don't absorb it

Charge postage separately and visibly. Baking it into the cover price makes your book look expensive next to a retailer's, and it punishes the person who buys three. If you want to work out the bands properly rather than guessing, how to work out delivery charges goes through the method.

One packing note specific to books: books arrive damaged at the corners, always the corners, and a bent corner turns a new book into a second-hand one in the buyer's mind. A stiff card wrap or a book-shaped mailer that folds around the spine beats a padded bag for the same money. There's more on what survives a sorting office in packaging that survives the courier.

Signed is the reason to buy from you

You cannot beat a large online retailer on price, delivery speed or convenience. Stop trying. What you have that they don't is your hand.

A signed copy isn't a bonus. It's the entire reason the order came to you instead of somewhere cheaper.

Make it the default, not an option. Every copy sold direct is signed, it says so on the product page, and the price is the same as everywhere else. That's a stronger offer than a discount and it costs you nothing but ink.

Some practical detail that people learn slowly:

• Sign the title page, the one with the full title and the publisher's name, not the blank flyleaf and not the inside cover. That's where a bookseller expects it.
• Test the pen on a spoiled copy first. Some inks bleed through thin book paper and show on the next page. A fine-tipped permanent pen is usually safe; a gel pen often isn't.
• Sign in batches of thirty. Your signature at copy 150 in one sitting is not your signature at copy 1, and someone will notice.
• Offer personalisation as a checkout option, a free-text field where they type the name. Then say clearly that personalised copies can't be returned, because they can't be resold. Take the spelling exactly as they typed it and don't correct it.
• Buy bookplates for the times you sell through someone else's shop or run out of stock. A signed, numbered sticker posted separately still works.
• Number a limited edition in pencil, not pen, and only if you actually limit it.

The numbers matter here too. Signing 200 copies takes most of an evening, roughly ninety minutes of actual signing plus the setup, and your hand will complain. Build that into your launch week rather than discovering it the night before a fair.

ISBNs, and when you actually need one

You do not need an ISBN to sell your own book from your own link, at a reading, or at a table. You need one to be listed properly in the book trade: shops that order through wholesalers, libraries, and most retail systems that expect a barcode.

In the UK they're bought from the national agency, and they're not free. They're much cheaper per unit in blocks of ten or a hundred than singly, which is why almost everyone who plans a second book buys ten. Prices change, so check the current ones directly rather than budgeting from a forum post.

The rule that saves money: get an ISBN when a shop asks you for one, or when you're about to approach shops. Not before. A first-time poet selling forty pamphlets by hand does not need a barcode, and buying one is a small tax on enthusiasm.

If you do buy one, note that each format is its own ISBN. Paperback, hardback and ebook are three numbers, not one. And a second edition with changed content is another.

Zines are a different economy entirely

A zine is not a small book. It's a different business with different arithmetic, and it's a much friendlier one to start with.

Twenty A5 zines made from folded A4, photocopied double-sided and stapled with a long-arm stapler, might cost you 30 to 50 pence each in toner and paper. You sell them for £4 or £5. The margin percentage is enormous and the absolute money is small, which is exactly the right shape for testing whether anyone wants what you make.

The three things that make zines work:

They're thin enough to post cheaply. A zine sails into the cheapest postal band with room to spare, which is why a £5 zine can be genuinely profitable when a £5 book cannot.

They can be made in an afternoon. No printer lead time, no minimum order, no proof cycle. You can respond to something that happened last week.

They trade. Zine culture runs on swaps and distros. A distro will typically take copies on consignment or buy them outright at around half your cover price, and both are normal and neither is an insult.

Print twenty. Sell them. Print twenty more. That's the whole model, and it's a much better first move than a novel.

Selling to bookshops without losing your shirt

At some point an independent bookshop will say yes, and you'll want to know what's normal.

Expect to be asked for a trade discount of around a third or more off the cover price, and expect it to be sale or return, meaning they pay for what sells and send back what doesn't. That's not a shop being difficult. That's how the trade works, and the alternative is that they take no risk on an unknown author, which means they take no copies.

What that means for you: a £9.99 book sold to a shop at a 35% discount brings you £6.49, out of which comes your £3.90 print cost. You're making about £2.60 a copy instead of the £6 you make direct. Fine, as long as you know it, and as long as you're not doing all your selling that way.

Two operational things. Take a proper invoice with payment terms, because a shop pays on an invoice and not on a payment link. And write down what you delivered and when, because in six months you will not remember whether the shop in Hebden Bridge has four copies or nine. The method for billing a business rather than a person is in getting paid by a business, not a person.

Readings, fairs and the table at the back

Most self-published books are sold by hand. The table at the back of a reading, a zine fair, a market stall, a launch in a pub.

Which means the thing to solve isn't a website, it's taking money standing up. Cash works, and a card reader works, and for a lot of UK sellers a bank transfer done on the spot works fine because both phones are out anyway. Keep a small sign with the price and your payment details on the table so nobody has to ask.

The bit that gets missed: the people at the fair who don't buy today. Have a card, a QR code, something with your link on it, so the person who's out of cash at 4pm can order on the train. Running the stall and the shop as one operation rather than two is worked through in selling offline and online at once.

Here's the honest limitation, and it's the one that saves you money. Taking card payments through Sailo needs a Stripe account cleared for charges, and Sailo takes 1–3% of the goods on top of Stripe's own fee. On a £9.99 book that 1–3% is 10p to 30p, which is nothing. A subscription is not nothing, and you don't need one — the free plan settles cards at 3%. If you're selling fifteen books a month, that's roughly £150 of revenue against a $49 monthly cost for Business, and you should not be paying it. Take bank transfer, take cash at readings, and revisit cards when the volume makes them boring. You do not need card payments to start selling a book.

Worked example: Tom, Sheffield

Tom writes poetry. His first pamphlet was 44 pages, A5, saddle-stitched, and he printed 150 copies at a local digital printer for £310, so about £2.07 each.

He priced it at £8 with £1.60 postage. He sold 62 copies direct in the first three months, mostly through his own link off Instagram, all signed. That's £496 in book money, £99 in postage collected against roughly £105 in actual postage and packaging, so postage came out slightly negative and he stopped worrying about it.

Four independent shops took 10 copies each on sale or return at a 35% discount. Nineteen of those forty sold in six months, bringing £98.80, and the rest came back a bit shelf-worn. He now sends 6 copies to a shop instead of 10, which sounds like less ambition and is actually the same number of sales with fewer damaged returns.

He sold 34 copies at three readings and two zine fairs, all cash or transfer, at the full £8 with no postage. That's £272 for five evenings and a Saturday, and those evenings also sold the shops on stocking him.

Total: 115 of 150 copies gone in nine months, roughly £867 in, £310 of print cost, maybe £60 in fair pitches and travel. Call it £490 clear on his first book.

The thing he changed for the second pamphlet: he asked the printer for a quote on lighter paper, and the spine came in slim enough to drop a postage band. On a print run of 200 that one question was worth more than every social media post he made that year. He also stopped offering personalisation after a customer named Siobhán received a book signed to Shivorn.

What to do next

Get three print quotes for the same file at 100, 250 and 500 copies, and ask each printer for the spine width. Then take a dummy copy in its actual envelope to a post office counter and get it priced.

Those two numbers give you your cover price. Set it, add postage separately, and write "every copy signed" on the product page in the same size as the price.

Then print the smaller run. You can always print again, and you can't unprint.