How To Start Selling Books on Google Play Store – Guide

Have you ever thought of becoming a book author? In the past, publishing your own book was quite a task. But thanks to the Internet, now you can write and sell a book without needing acceptance from a book publisher or approval from anyone.

Few days back, I have talked about selling your ebook using e-Junkie. In today’s post I will be sharing a detailed guide to using Google’s Book Store, and how to sell your own book on Google Play.

One of the benefits of using the Google Play store is the fact that Google doesn’t ask for exclusive rights to sell digital editions of your books. That means that you can sell your book on Google Play and via other marketplaces as well. This is an important feature of Google Play that makes it favorable to Amazon KDP.

Additionally, Google Book Partner Center (dashboard) lets you do various tasks such as:

• Set different pricing for different countries
• See a detailed analysis and sales report for your book
• Manage promotion of your book
• Offer .pdf versions of your book for free (good for marketing in certain scenarios)

If you have an ebook which you are selling elsewhere, or have a new book which is ready to be listed, you should definitely considering listing it on Google Play.

Getting Started with Selling On Google Play Book:

• Prior to taking any other steps, you need to first check if your country is eligible for selling books on Google Play. You can find the country list here.
• Next, create your Google Books Partner account here. Accept terms & conditions. Inside the dashboard, click on Book Catalog, and select “Add new book”.

• The first thing it will ask for is an ISBN number. If you don’t have one, select “This book doesn’t have an ISBN or other identifier”.

• Next, add the title of your book, sub-title, book description and author description.
• The next step is to upload content. You should read this help guide to learn about the upload requirements. You can upload your book in .pdf format or .epub format.

Pricing your book for the Google Play store:

This step is very important, as the pricing of your book will have a definite impact on sales. You can go to this page to see the pricing for top selling books. This will give you an idea of a reasonable price for your book.

Meta Data settings:

This is another important field which you should complete very carefully. This section will help you to obtain the optimal means of discovery of your book on the Google Play book store. The more people who come across your book offer, the more book sales you will achieve.  You can read in detail about the book store’s meta data settings here.

Note: You can offer your book for free using Google Play if you choose. In MetaDATA settings, use 100% in the preview settings, and in preview details select “PDF download allowed”.

• Once you have made all the necessary changes click on “next”, and publish your book! You can publish your book only to Google Book Store or to both Google Play and Google Book Store.
• It will take few days before your submitted book will be live and available for purchase/download.

Meanwhile, you should browse Google Books Partner Center and check out few areas such as:

• Promotions: This is useful when you want to run a sale or promotion for your book. Think of this as a free marketing tool to boost your book sales.
• Payment center: You need to specify your payment details, and you can also choose to hold your payment. You will be happy to know that the minimum payment threshold is only $1. If you are an Indian publisher, you can read this guide to adding payment details.

That’s it! Now you will simply  need to wait for a brief time to pass, and then you will see your book live on the Google Play/Book Store! You can see my authored book live on Google play book store here.

Conclusion:

With recent changes, Google has made selling eBooks easy.  And with the growing popularity of Google Play, you should not miss out on the opportunity to list your book here. Setup will only require about 10-15 minutes of your time (for an existing book), and you will tap a new revenue source for your book.

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