Excellent news to end the week for those who want to sell ebooks while helping independent retailers: Bookshop.org has expanded its ebook distribution to the UK.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Bookshop.org hasn’t been in the news for a little while, so it’s worth recapping. Back in 2020, the platform was set up as a way of supporting local bookshops and was part of a concerted move at the time to find alternatives to Amazon for consumers who wanted to support small businesses.
The idea was that instead of having to order books from Amazon or rely on whatever your local bookshop had in stock, you could order online from a central platform, but nominate a local bookshop (and not just local to you—it could be any store you wanted to support) that would receive a cut from the sale.
From Skepticism to Success
I remember a degree of skepticism at the time, but Bookshop.org has done steadily well and has ridden the wave of a zeitgeist that has seen consumers want to embrace the local, the small, and the artisanal. And in January of this year, as ALLi reported, the platform moved into ebooks.
This is a great opportunity for indie authors to reach audiences who want to support all things indie, including shops.
At first, this was just in the US, but now Bookshop.org is opening a platform in the UK. The UK print book service has already seen independent bookshops receive £4.5 million through sales on the platform.
How Authors Can Join
As with the existing offering in the US, you can make your books available through Amazon’s expanded distribution, Draft2Digital, or a number of other platforms, while IngramSpark will distribute paperbacks. Guidance for indie authors on how to add books can be found in Bookshop.org’s support documentation.
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