BAIPA Launches Bookshop on Bookshop.org

Thank you to Andy Hunter for starting bookshop.org and presenting at our January meeting. (Members can see the video of his presentation here.)

If you missed it, here’s the distilled version. Andy Hunter started bookshop.org as a public benefit corporation with a mission to support local, independent bookstores. When you buy a book on bookshop.org, part of the price goes to the authors’ royalties, paid to the author through Ingramspark. (Only authors who have their books published through Ingram are on bookshop.org.)

Bookshop.org also gives a percentage of each sale to a pot that goes to independent bookstores. They’ve raised $18,690,609 for local bookstores since they opened just a few years ago. The purchaser can specify an independent bookstore if they like. 

Bookshop.org also relies on affiliates to sell books. BAIPA is now an affiliate. So we have a bookshop that is a subset of theirs, and when someone buys one of these books, BAIPA gets a small cut. 

Bookshop.org is also a great resource for those of us who want to provide potential readers with an alternate vendor to Amazon.

Thanks to new member Pauline Wiles, we’ve put together a preliminary BAIPA bookshop.org “shop.” (We’re open for business already, but we haven’t fleshed out our “inventory” yet and we haven’t promoted the site yet.)

The web address is easy to remember: bookshop.org/shop/baipa. You can see that many of our members’ books are already posted, but we have not been systematic, so we are asking your help to get as many of our books into the shop as possible. (Scroll down for the form to add your books.)

Here is a screenshot of the top of the page. Click on the image to see the full page.

If you published your book through Ingram, then your book is, most likely, already available on bookshop.org. Go there and search. You can, if you like, send potential readers to your book or author page on bookshop.org.

Or you can send them to the BAIPA bookshop, where your book(s) as well as books by other BAIPA authors will be. 

We’ll post more about this as we get further along. We’ll also post about how to publish on Ingram if you have not done so, but have already published on Amazon/KDP. (It can be tricky.) 

For now, let’s get as many of our members’ books into our bookshop as we can.