Where writers (and others) sell books -- and more ...

Welcome to the AuthorSales.Com Home Page

IMPORTANT! This site is under development, and we are not quite ready to set up live stores at this time. Any entries to any of the forms below will be treated as test entries, and will not be used to set up functional stores. Please don't enter any submissions until we are ready to go.  If you are interested in the service, drop us a line at with the subject line "Keep me informed" and we'll do just that.

Do You Have Everything You Need to Sell Online -- Except the Webstore?

Well, Now You Can Have the Webstore Too!

For a $20.00 sign-up fee (and even that fee is waived during our start-up phase), you can have an online store that accepts credit cards, checks, money orders, and PayPal payment. There are no monthly fees to pay, either. Instead, you pay a transaction fee to us for each item sold through the site.

If you are an author with (or even without) a website, and you have stocks of books you'd like to offer for sale online, then AuthorSales.Com is for you.
If you have CDs of your own music to sell, AuthorSales.Com is the place to do it.
If you're just someone with a stock of books or other items suited to online sales, working through AuthorSales.Com will make it easy.
AuthorSales.Com is an ideal way for a school, church, or organization to manage online sales.

Click on the Demo Store link, and see what your store could look like! (Then click the back button your brower to come here and learn more!)

Here's the Idea

Briefly put, we'll handle the online order-taking -- setting up an online store, managing credit cards and other payment types, and handling incoming orders. We'll send you an email notice whenever an order comes in.  When you receive that email, then you go to work and do the physical shipping of merchandise.

This divisions of labor lets you sell from your own stock, lets you offer your customers personalized autographs and other value-enhancing services, and lets you develop a list of people who are so interested enough in your books, music or other products that they went ahead and bought them. It also gets you out from under the headaches, expense, and computer work needed to set up and run an online webstore, and allows you to sell online via credit card.

How You Get Paid

Once a month, we'll send you a detailed statement reporting your sales, along with a payment for eighty percent of sales, plus your shipping fees. For example: Let say you offered a book for sale for $15.00 and charged $2.00 for shipping. If you sold six copies in a given month, that would be $90.00 in sales plus $12 in shipping for a total of $102. We'd charge you 20 percent of $90.00, or $18.00, and send you a check for $84.00. (Click here to see the paragraphs of our standard agreement that contain information on minimums, payment procedures, etc.)

Go to our set-up forms to enter basic set-up information, and data on your books, and we'll have an online bookstore set up and running for you within three business days. During our initial phase, we're waiving all set-up fees and recurring fees.

A few other details

Credit card companies and most other payment systems charge minimum fee plus a percentage of the total. In order to cover this, and our own time and costs, we have to charge a minimum of $2.00 per order.

Technically, once you have notified us that you can and will ship items to the customer, the merchadise to be shipped becomes the property of AuthorSales.Com until such time as it is actually shipped, at which time it becomes the property of the customer. Our monthly reimbursement to you will be our payment for the items we have ordered and sold in the previous month.

In our initial phase, your online store will be hosted on our parent website www.foxacre.com,    Your store's web address will look somethng like this:

http://www.foxacre.com/cgi-bin/hazel.cgi?theme=author

Later, as we expand, we may rehost the stores at a slightly different address. This shouldn't be a big deal in terms of altering your setup. We'll keep you posted.

You can of course put that same address behind a link that says Visit My Online Store. Go ahead and click on either link to get a look at a demo store.  Also have a look at our demo page, which lets you try out a few of the options available on our page. One of most powerful features of the webstore you'll use will be its built-in links back to whatever web page you designate. If you link back to your existing home page, match the background and headline store with your existing home page -- and you can integrate the webstore into your existing web page. Visitors to your site will have to be pretty sharp-eyed to know they are moving back and forth from your site to ours.

You will also get detailed sales pages for each book you offer. The link address will be similar to this:

http://www.foxacre.com/cgi-bin/hazel.cgi?action=detail&item=blivvet&theme=author

but of course you can create a link that says More about this Title that will take them to same detailed sales page. In other words, you can create links from any webpage directly to those detail pages.

We'll provided you with a list of links you can add into any  existing website pages. Alternately, if you don't have a webstore, you can buy a web address ( i.e. www.yourname.com) and, using a simple technique called redirecting, you can set things up so that anyone who types in www.yourname.com will go straight to your webstore. We are looking into providing convenient purchase of websites for our customers, but you can of course use any new or existing web address.

How Much Will It Cost? And What's The Catch?

During our initial start-up phase, we are waiving start-up or recurring fees for using AuthorSales.Com.  Later on, we do expect to charge a $20.00 setup fee, but do not at this time plan to charge any monthly maintenance fee. Instead, wach month, we will deduct 20% of the total of your book sales (or the minimum charge of $2.00 per order), and send you the other 80%, plus the total amount you have charged your customers for shipping, plus whatever sales tax we have collected on your behalf.. You may cancel your service with 30 days notice at any time. See our Frequently Asked Questions page for more information.

As for  the second question, to be blunt about it, we're new at this,we're looking for guinea pigs -- and we hope you'll be one. At present, AuthorSales.Com is a pilot program. It's owned and operated by Foxacre Press (www.foxacre.com). We've got a lot of experience in handling retail small-press orders, and we're seeing if we can extend that expertise to third-party sales. Because it's a new test-bed operation, a lot of what would be automated in a larger operation we are doing by hand. This means that, for example, updates to your site might take a few days to get done.

Another catch is that, at present, to paraphrase Henry Ford, you can have whatever style of webstore you want -- as long as it is the one model we offer. While there are various color and layout options you can choose, you will be using one basic template. In future, if this takes off, we'll likely offer more templates, and (for a fee) customization of your site. Finally, to emphasize once again, this is a pilot program. Everything from our fee schedule to the web addresses we use might change as we learn.

Once we launch,  during our initial start-up phase, we will limit ourselves to a small number of Webstores, each selling no more than ten items

How to Get Started

Step One: fill out the Vendor's Application and a few other online forms. We'll review your application. Space is limited, and we'll select applicants based on how well we believe their items will work in this sales environment. But we're just starting out, and both our available space and our experience are bound to grow. If we turn you down, check back in future -- when we might have learned enough, and grown enough, to say yes!

We'll process your application as fast as we can. Assuming you're accepted, you'll receive an email notice advising you of the web adddresses for your store, and for each of your products. You'll also receive a Business Prefix (which we'll usually base on your last name or your existing business name) and a Password. You'll need to enter these when you update your store.