Where to sell your books

Every platform's pricing page is written to make that platform look like the answer. This one isn't, because I don't sell any of them.

• The one number that decides most of this
• Start here: which one are you?
• What the storefronts actually cost
• The storefronts, one by one
• Beventi, the one built for this job
• Print on demand
• Social isn't a storefront
• Marketplaces
• Where the website fits

The one number that decides most of this

Card processing is about 2.9% + 30¢, and it's nearly identical everywhere. At the volumes most authors actually do, that single line is 65–85% of what selling costs you. The monthly subscription, the number everyone shops on, is the smaller half, and it shrinks further as you sell more.

Which means the difference between the cheapest storefront and the most expensive one is usually a hundred or two a year. Real money, worth having, but not worth reorganising your business over. Pick on fit, not on price.

It also means you should be suspicious of anyone selling you a storefront on the promise of savings. There aren't enough savings there to be a promise.

Start here: which one are you?

What the storefronts actually cost

All-in annual cost, subscription plus processing, at three levels. Quiet is 5 orders a month at $35. Steady is 15 at $40. Busy is 40 at $45, which is a working author with a real direct-sales habit.

The storefronts, one by one

Big Cartel

Built for artists selling a modest number of things, which describes most authors precisely. $15/mo, or $12 on annual billing, for up to 50 products. It takes no percentage of your sales: you pay Stripe directly at the normal rate, and that's it. The free tier caps at five products, which sounds fine until you count paperbacks, bundles, and a sticker sheet.

Good for: a signed shop with real stock and no ambition to sell anywhere else.
Watch for: no marketplace connectors, so it's a shop, full stop.

Square Online

No monthly fee at any volume, unlimited products. The trade is the card rate: 3.3% + 30¢ instead of 2.9% + 30¢. That extra 0.4% overtakes Big Cartel's subscription somewhere around $36,000 a year in sales, so below that Square is cheaper and above it Big Cartel is.

Good for: anyone who wants a shop without a subscription.
Watch for: "free" is a card-rate decision, not a gift.

Shopify

The most expensive option here and sometimes the right one. $39/mo, $29 on annual billing. Card processing is the standard 2.9% + 30¢ through Shopify Payments, but using any other processor adds a 2% platform fee on top, so plan to use theirs.

What the money buys is connectors. Shopify syncs stock with TikTok Shop, and it feeds Instagram's product catalog for free. If you sell in more than one place from one pile of books, this is the platform that keeps the count honest.

Good for: multi-channel sellers, limited editions, anyone whose stock lives in two places.
Watch for: paying for connectors you never switch on.

Payhip

Free to start, but the free tier takes 5% of every sale on top of Stripe, and that compounds fast: at busy volume it's the second most expensive option on the table. The paid tiers ($29 and $99 a month) drop that to 2% and 0%.

Good for: digital products, which it handles better than most.
Watch for: the 5% once you're selling steadily.

Wix Stores

The same shape as GoDaddy below, and reached the same way: you were already on Wix for the website, selling appeared as a switch, and you flipped it. Selling isn't available on the Light plan at all, so turning it on moves you to Core at $29/mo, which is Shopify money. Processing runs through Wix Payments at the usual 2.9% + 30¢.

It is a perfectly decent shop. What it isn't is a cheaper one, and a lot of authors on it believe they're still paying the ˜$204 Light price.

Good for: people already on Wix who want one login and one bill.
Watch for: the jump from Light to Core, and no marketplace connectors. If TikTok Shop sync is the goal, this isn't the platform for it.

GoDaddy Commerce

$26.99/mo, discounted in year one and renewing higher. A lot of authors end up here without ever choosing it, because it was bundled with the domain they bought first, and that's the problem with it: it's a website builder with a shop attached, sold as a package. No marketplace connectors, and the site half is a template. If this is you, nothing went wrong; the bundle is designed to be the path of least resistance.

Good for: people already on it who don't want to move.
Watch for: the renewal price, and the fact that you're paying store prices for a website.

Beventi, the one built for this job

Everything above was built for shops in general and adapted to books. Beventi was built for authors selling books, and at this point it does considerably more than the signing-table preorders it started with. It is worth its own section because it is the only platform here that treats a signing, a special edition and a bookstore order as three views of the same catalog.

There are four things in the box, and most authors will use two or three of them:

• Direct sales. A custom storefront with unlimited products, inventory management, flat-rate shipping and coupons. Signed copies, special editions, restocks, and the lightly damaged pile you want to move at half price.
• Event preorders. Orders and payment collected in advance, pickup handled at the table. This is the original product and the reason authors know the name.
• Virtual signings. Online signings for readers who can't travel, with international shipping calculated for you.
• Wholesale. Verified indie bookstores browse a directory and order signed stock and special editions directly from you, with no distributor in the middle.

The money is simple and unusually easy to read: 2.99% per transaction, no setup fee and no monthly fee, plus whatever your payment gateway charges. You connect your own Stripe or PayPal, so the money is yours from the moment it lands rather than sitting in a balance somewhere waiting to be paid out. Readers pay a 2% service charge on event preorders; they are not charged that on direct sales, which is a distinction a lot of write-ups get wrong.

It's worth knowing how that 2% actually lands, because it changes what the reader sees rather than what you earn. On a $100 preorder Beventi adds $2 at checkout, so the reader pays $102; Beventi then deducts $4.99, being 2.99% of your $100 plus the $2 it collected, and you net $97.01. Your take is your list price minus 2.99%, exactly as it would be on a direct sale. What moves is the number on the reader's screen, which is 2% above your sticker price. Worth remembering if you're keeping prices level across channels, or if you price things at $34.99 for a reason.

Add the card rate and you are at roughly 5.9% + 30¢ all in. That is more per order than Square or Big Cartel and less than Etsy, and it behaves like every other percentage-only price on this page: excellent when you are quiet, expensive when you are busy, because nothing caps it. Against Big Cartel's subscription the crossover is around $4,800 a year in direct sales. Below that Beventi is cheaper; above it, it isn't.

Which is not the reason to use it. The reason is that Beventi has readers on it. Their own figures are 75,000+ books sold, 40,000+ monthly readers and 350+ events, with reader apps on iOS and Android where people follow authors and track what they've preordered. Every other storefront on this page is a room you have to bring your own audience to. Nobody has ever browsed Big Cartel for something to read.

The wholesale part is the genuinely new thing

If you have ever wanted signed editions on indie bookstore shelves without going through a distributor, this is the most direct route currently available. You set your own wholesale prices, recommended retail prices, minimum order quantities and tiered discounts. Buyers are reviewed before they can see any of it, so your wholesale pricing stays away from retail customers, and you can put up private link-only listings for a specific shop. Fulfilment stays with you.

The pricing has a launch offer with a tail worth understanding before you plan around it: a flat 2.99% on every wholesale order through 31 December 2026. From 1 January 2027, the first order from a bookstore that found you through Beventi is 4.99%, and every order from that shop after it drops back to 2.99%. Any bookstore you introduce yourself is 2.99% from the start. So the higher rate is a one-off finder's fee for an introduction you didn't have to make, which is a fair way to charge for it, and it costs the bookstore nothing either way.

Good for: convention regulars, preorder drops, virtual signings, and getting signed stock onto indie bookstore shelves.
Watch for: the percentage never caps as you grow, and an event form link dies on its closing date, so permanent buttons belong on your profile or store.

Print on demand

IngramSpark prints and ships each order as it comes in. No stock, no packing, no post office run, no money tied up in a garage full of paperbacks. The feature is called Share & Sell: you generate a purchase link per title, set your own price, and point at it from anywhere. Worth knowing that Ingram closed an earlier direct-sales product (Aer.io) in 2022, so if you have read that this can't be done, that advice is out of date.

The cost is not a subscription but it is not nothing: you earn your list price minus the print cost and a $3.50-per-book fulfilment fee. The reader pays shipping and sales tax. Ingram has fee changes moving through 2026, so check the current figure against your own compensation calculator before you price anything around it.

The catch is the obvious one: you can't sign a book you never touch. In practice a lot of authors run both, POD for the standard hardcover and a small signed shop for the special editions, and that's a sensible arrangement rather than a compromise.

Print on demand is also the only option here with no inventory risk at all, which makes it the least stressful way to offer a hardcover you're not sure will sell.

Social isn't a storefront

TikTok Shop

On paper it looks like the cheapest thing here: no subscription, no listing fee, and a flat 6% referral fee that already includes payment processing for most US categories. No separate card charge at all.

The 6% is not why anyone is there, and it's not what the channel actually costs. TikTok Shop runs on creator affiliate commissions that you set, typically 10–30%. An author doing affiliate-driven sales at 15% is paying around 21% all in: roughly $1,500 a year at steady volume, against Big Cartel's $407. That's a marketing budget, and it may well be a good one, but it isn't a subscription and shouldn't be compared to one.

Three other things worth knowing before you commit:

• Independent shipping ended for US sellers on 31 March 2026. You now fulfil through Fulfilled by TikTok, Upgraded TikTok Shipping, or Collections by TikTok. You can still ship signed books from your kitchen table, but on TikTok's labels rather than your own carrier account.
• Payouts are slow, around 15 days for standard sellers and longer if your account gets flagged. Stripe and Big Cartel pay in about two.
• Checkout stays inside TikTok. There's no embed, no widget, and no way to complete a TikTok Shop sale on your own website. If you sell there, you sell there.

None of that is a reason to avoid it. It's where the discovery happens, and nothing on your website competes with a For You page. It's a reason to treat it as a channel you rent rather than a shop you own.

Instagram

This one changed and a lot of advice hasn't caught up. Meta retired in-app checkout on Facebook and Instagram Shops in 2025. US sellers moved off it through the summer and the native purchase flow was fully gone by that September. The Shop tab on profiles had already disappeared for most US sellers back in 2023.

What still works is product tagging in posts, Reels and Stories. But when a reader taps buy, Instagram sends them to your website to finish. Which has three consequences:

• Instagram costs you nothing. The transaction fees went with the in-app checkout. Orders completed on your own site carry no Meta cut.
• You need a real product page to send them to. Setting up a shop means giving Meta a checkout URL on a single domain you own and can verify. A book page living at a URL your site builder auto-generated is a problem the day you tag a product in a Reel.
• Everything after the tap is your site's job. Page speed, the product page, whether the buy button still works. Instagram hands you the reader at the exact moment of intent and then steps out of the way.

Two eligibility points that catch authors out: Instagram Shopping is for physical goods only, so signed paperbacks qualify and ebooks don't; and you'll need a domain you own and can verify, which rules out anyone on a free yourname.wixsite.com or a default *.myshopify.com address. Reviews run from about a day to four weeks, and the most common rejection is a website with no visible checkout, privacy policy or return policy.

The short version: TikTok keeps your buyers inside TikTok. Instagram sends them to you. One is a channel you rent and one is traffic you own.

Marketplaces

Etsy

6.5% transaction fee, a 20¢ listing fee per item, plus about 3% processing. At busy volume that's the most expensive row on the table by a wide margin. What you're buying is Etsy's own shoppers, which is a real thing and worth something. Just know that it's advertising you're paying for, priced as a commission.

Etsy listings deep-link cleanly, so pointing at individual products from your own site works well.

Where the website fits

Notice what almost every recommendation above has in common: the shop lives somewhere else. Inventory, postage, tax and refunds are a genuine job, and the platforms above have spent years getting them right. Use one of them. You will get a better shop than anyone could build you from scratch, for less, and you will have it this week.

What your website should do is send readers to whichever of these you chose, and keep doing it correctly without you maintaining it. That means buy links that live on the book rather than in a page somebody typed, a sold-out switch you can flip in two taps, links that get checked every week so you hear about a dead one before a reader does, and dated links that can expire on their own and fall back to somewhere that still works.

Already on Shopify, Wix Stores or Big Cartel and it's working? Keep it. But notice what it isn't doing. A store is very good at selling your newest book to somebody who already wants it. It cannot hand a new reader your reading order, and it has nowhere sensible to put a series page, a content-warnings page or a press kit, because those aren't products and a store only has products.

That is the split. The store closes the sale; the site is how somebody arrives already wanting to buy. When the store is doing both jobs, the second one is usually the one quietly not happening: no reading order, tropes and warnings buried in product descriptions where no search engine reads them, and a reader who hasn't picked a book yet landing on a grid of covers with nothing to tell her where to start.

Nothing about your checkout has to change for that to get fixed.

If you'd like a second opinion on your current setup, or you just want someone to tell you honestly whether you're overpaying, say hello. I'll answer either way.