I have no patience and wanted to figure some things out, so Healers is on itch! Books2Read isn’t playing nice with that link, sooooo I have created a new landing page for each of the books to use instead of / in addition to the B2R link.
Here are the itch.io links:
The Healers’ Road by S.E. Robertson / C.A. Moss Fiction
The Healers’ Home by S.E. Robertson / C.A. Moss Fiction
The Healers’ Purpose by S.E. Robertson / C.A. Moss Fiction
Things I like about this system so far:
- TAGS!
- Multiple file type options from the same purchase
- You can include a free sample if you like. (Now set up, and included on this site as well.)
- Pay-what-you-want is an option. And creators can set their own royalties, basically: you choose how much you want to contribute to itch, and the rest goes to the creator. (I chose to give back 20% so far. This still gives me better royalties than any other storefront. I will probably tweak that later.)
- The listing pages and creator landing page are pretty customizable.
Things I’m still learning:
- It is, after all, built for games and not books, and so it takes some mental translation. Ex. I’m trying out “screenshots” to include a couple of short excerpts and the content notes. Will that be confusing? We’ll see! [Edit: I took them back out. a) because I realized I couldn’t add alt text, and b) they kind of cluttered up the page. There’s already a free sample. I think that will suffice.]
- …That’s mostly it.
Editing to add: itch.io has the best analytics out of any system I’ve used so far. (I’ll also shout out Mailerlite, which I use for the newsletter.) It’s the only one I’m using that even gives you referral links, i.e. “how people found your page.” I don’t mean to stalk; it’s just useful info to know that, for instance, more people find my stuff through the Newest Books feed vs. through my site. Thumbs up to that.