A great way to increase your ebook sales is to offer it for purchase directly from your website. This would be done not via a link to your ebook’s Amazon.com landing page but by installing the actual ability to purchase and download it from your website.

There are several advantages to such direct sales. First and foremost among them is you will capture more sales. When someone goes to your website, they’re interested in your title. Having them click away to another page to make a purchase diminishes the chances of them doing so as a potential buyer now faces additional steps and other distractions (like promos for other books appearing on your landing page). Secondly, through direct sales you can learn about your readers to better meet their needs in future books. Usually direct sales software and apps allow you to know who is buying your books, where they live, what brought them to your website, and their email address. Lastly, direct sales can allow you to interact with readers, which improves your chances of a sale. A purchaser’s email address, which can be added to your mailing list, allows you to respond with a thank you for the purchase and to promote books at latter dates.

Setting up a purchase and download option on your website is easier to do than you might imagine. For example, If you use PayPal business account, its merchant services allows you to create pay now buttons for your website; when the payment is made, the purchaser then is sent to a website where your book can be downloaded. Another option, if you use WordPress, is any number of ecommerce plug-ins. Some of the apps also allow you to sell print books, though that gets you into the distribution business. A third option is a showcase, or a visual display of your ebook covers that readers can click to purchase that title. A number of companies offer websites where you can create an attractive showcase then paste the code for it onto your webpage; the company with whom you made the showcase collects a small percentage of each sale, but it’s almost always less than what Amazon.com takes.