To start I should say part of this experiment in self publishing was to see if I could keep the overhead down to zero dollars for the first while. And I have! I expect to incur some costs soon, as I attempt to get Marrowbones into eBook shops like amazon and Barnes & Noble but the initial push has cost me nothing. Well, nothing but time, which is a pretty valuable thing.
Anyway, the materials used to create Marrowbones were all digital. My Cintiq, my iPad and a few different programs. I consider all of these paid for previously from my income. So, it costs me nothing but electricity to draw the book. Which looks funny now that I write it down. But it's true.
Oh! There was one cost I forgot about. I had a friend format the book in exchange for art. so, some bartering did occur.
But, to get to the distribution side of things. To be perfectly honest I did not know how I would distribute this until 10 minutes before it launched. My assumption was that I would email out every purchase. I thought about this moments before the time I had announced for the launch and realized this might be unfeasible. It would mean people in China and Australia would have to wait hours while I slept in order to get their book. That totally negates the benefits of selling digitally, i feel. I really didn't want that. It also meant sitting by my computer all the time waiting for sales and emailing them off. I started to panic.
So, what did I do?
I googled "how to sell your eBook with Paypal"
Within moments I found an instructive video on YouTube and was uploading the book as per its instructions while I was till watching it, pausing and rewinding as I went. It was a pretty frantic 5 minutes. And I was pretty lucky. I wish I could find the video now! But no matter how many times I google it I've lost it.
The actual process is extremely easy and fast.
Once you have your comic formatted as a pdf and ready to go start an account at Mediafire. It's free to start a basic account. Mediafire is a free file and image hosting site. You can read more about it here.
After you have an account there, upload your book.
Once the book is uploaded you need to copy the link to your file. This is straight forward and you shouldn't have any issues doing this.
OK, so you're all done with Mediafire and that side of the process, next you need to create a "Buy Now" button in PayPal. You'll need a Paypal account for this. They make this pretty easy.
What you need to do here is have the Buy Now button redirect the purchaser to the Mediafire site with your file. So, create the button you need and open the advanced options at the end. Check "buyer is directed here after purchase" or something along those lines and place the Mediafire link into the space provided.
And that's it! It's insanely simple.
Now go make some comics!
..if you want to see how it all works, why not try it by buying my comic? ;) Only 2 dollars for 47 pages!
