Can Customers Buy My Book Directly From CreateSpace, Learn How

UPDATE: November 25, 2018:
The answer now is no you can not buy your book from CreateSpace. Earlier this year CreateSpace merged into KDP.Amazon and the site and that feature no longer exists. All books are now bought through Amazon. Authors can still buy their own books at discount author prices through the KDP.Amazon site. All the other features of CreateSpace are now under the umbrella of KDP.Amazon and the Kindle site. They publish both paperback and e-books.



Question today on the Facebook How to Publish Your Book Group page.  Is there a way to sell books right from the CreateSpace website. Yes there is and the answer is worthy of a video

"Hello Bruce, happy Monday. I just saw someone sell their book using CreateSpace checkout platform and wondered how they were able to do that. I thought we could only sell our books via amazon or we use a platform like Gumroad. What do you know about this? I can't seem to find how to do it. This will save me purchasing my books and selling it to clients, if I can just direct client to CreateSpace checkout link and they purchase the books and CreateSpace delivers it. I appreciate any thoughts on the subject." Thank you for the great question.

A great question. They are right, most people just assume you can sell your books on Amazon. I would always say that's the preferred way too go, because people trust Amazon and it's global, it works everywhere. When we're talking about books Like this book. Our regular sort of book that we do, this is my latest book Marketing Checklist for Self-Publishing. CreateSpace is the place that you upload everything, but let's go over and take a look and I'll show you there are other alternatives to selling and you can do them through CreateSpace.

This is the CreateSpace dashboard page or the homepage that we're used to. CreateSpace, for those of you who don't know, is the print on demand site of Amazon. If you are self-publishing your book and you're making a print book like this, then the site you use is CreateSpace.com, that's where you upload the files, they manage the book process, they manage all the money, the royalties, all that kind of stuff, the book description and they move the book over to Amazon. CreateSpace is part of Amazon, it's a division of Amazon, but they are the ones that manage all your book process.

CreateSpace Member Dashboard Page.

Let's just go into the CreateSpace Member Dashboard page. This is where you can see what you are selling each month. There are two ways that you can sell books out of this. One is directly to customers and the other one is you can order books and sell them at an event or store or personally. I want to show you both of them because they're both really cool. This is my dashboard. Everybody has a dashboard with their one book or a bunch of books. Right here on the right of each book you can Order Copies.

Buying Books from CreateSpace for Yourself to Sell
If you click on Order Copies, you can order your own books from CreateSpace. You can order one or you can order hundreds, it doesn't matter. In this example the unit price that sells on Amazon $9.95. Through your account you can buy the same book for $2.41. That's a fantastic price discount, especially to get a printed book for a quantity of one. The CreateSpace prices are really, really good. If you had to go out and print book, you're going to have to buy minimum quantities of at least 100 copies, so that's going to be a lot more money. Being able to buy just a few or even one for such a low price is outstanding.

What you can do, though this site is, let's say, you're speaking at an event or a conference, maybe you're selling to a school or to businesses, you're selling bulk books or you're going out on the road and you want to be able to sell books. This is where you go to order them. Don't order them from the Amazon sales page because you are going to have to pay list price. Don't go to the Amazon page and order 25 copies of your book, you're going to spend a lot more money, just go to your CreateSpace account and order them this way.

CreateSpace Shopping Cart.

You can put in the quantity, let's just say we we're going to order 20 books, at $2.41 you are going to pay $48.20. From CreateSpace you can ship them where you want, you can use your credit card or other people's credit cards and then you can ship them.

I've done this when I've sold books to a festival or to the music camp I go to in the summer. I just went to CreateSpace, they gave me a credit card, so they pre-paid the order, and then shipped it to their address, I was completely hands-off. I can say if you're not going to mark up the price, you can just use it right straight in here, if you are, then you can put it through your own credit card processing. A lot of us have access to being able to process credit cards these days using Stripe or Square or all kinds of sites now that are available to take orders. You can buy bulk, the prices are great and it is the same book that's coming out on Amazon.

Sending Customers to CreateSpace to Buy Books
The other way is ... You may not have known this, but every book on CreateSpace has its own sales page. It isn't a great looking sales page, but it's there and it works. Let's go to the left hand side of the member dashboard. You click on the name of the book and you'll be taken to the normal book dashboard page you see whenever you uploaded your to CreateSpace. This is where we enter and keep track of all our book's info. We see links to the cover or the insides, the ISBN, the description, all that stuff is right here.

Click on your book's name on the Member Dashboard to get to the Book's Dashboard

Once you click on the title you will go to a page where you'll see the cover of your book and its description. This is book central for this particular book. Right down here at the bottom below the description you will see a little web address. If you grab that address by dragging over it with your mouse you can copy it. Bring up a new web page and drop the address in and you will come to a sales page for this book. It's not a real fancy page, it's not like Amazon with lots of branding around it and lots of social media and stuff, it's just a basic sales page. But you can direct people to this page to buy your book.

At the bottom of the book's dashboard you will fine the book's CreateSpace sales page.

Let's say you're running a little wholesale operation and you want people to buy your books. You can send them right here to go get your book. We can click on Add to Cart, and it will bring up an order form for that particular book.

Each book has its own sales page that people can order from.

What you'll notice here is that if you are in your account the orderform comes up with your price. If you are not checked into your account, you'll notice it comes up with the list price for the book. This is what customers will see, the list price. But this is the address you give customers, this is the page that comes up. They go to the add to cart. When I was signed it, it was $2.41, a customer sees $9.95. You can also give them codes for discounts off the book.

You can give them the price that you want, they can order the number they want, put in their shipping information, put in their billing information and just buy the book direct. Somebody who's doing a wholesale order for the book is used to going to pages like this. If you're selling somebody one book,  send them to Amazon, but if you're selling them a quanty of books, you can send them to this page. You say, "Hey, I have a wholesale page where you can get my book in bulk at a better price." This is the page they go to. It's a cool thing to have two different ways to sell your book, sell the book Amazon or this page.

Hope that was helpful. A great question. I love those questions, keep sending those questions over to the Facebook page How to Publish your Book. If you're watching us on YouTube or someplace else, make sure you give us a like or subscribe to the channel to get more videos like this. Love comments, likes and questions. We will see you next time. All right, talk to you soon, bye bye!

Author: Bruce Jones
Bruce is the international bestselling author of over 40 books. His latest book is Book Marketing Checklist for Self-Publishers. Bruce also runs the Facebook group How to Publish Your Book with over 1,300 members.