One of the things I have been doing some research into over the past several weeks is payment processing options. As long as I am doing on-line sales, what I’ve currently got set up through PayPal works just fine. But I’m also going to be doing some off-line sales and need a working solution for those who would want to pay via credit or debit card.

I had heard of a Christian company called Cornerstone Payment Systems that sounded promising, but after a week of failed attempts to submit their on-line form, and having two e-mails returned as undeliverable I gave up on that option. So today I started investigating the options through PayPal. The Virtual Terminal was looking like a viable option until I saw the pricing chart – $30/mo. fee + a per transaction fee of 3.1% + $0.30. Eek! Perhaps I will find that the pricing is competitive with what I would have to pay to use a credit card processing company, but I still have no idea. I can’t imagine making enough in book sales at this point for that to be a cost-effective solution!

Still need to do some more research, but I would love to know if anyone has any recommendations for credit card processing companies. Also, I’d love to get some input on whether you think it would mean a significant loss in sales if I opted not to accept credit/debit cards at this point for offline sales. I just have a single book, priced at $14.99. Is it unreasonable in this day and age to limit people to paying with only cash or check? Any advice or opinions?

Wow…I can’t believe it’s been almost a month since my last post! It’s certainly not due to a lack of working on book-related projects. I have lots of things I want to post, and some really helpful links I want to share, but for the moment I thought I’d just post this list of Top 10 Reasons to Self-Publish. The inspiration came to me quite suddenly this week in the aftermath of the arrival of my truckload of Pajama School books (hooray!) and as I thought back over the long process that it took to arrive at this point. Enjoy! 🙂

1. You’ve always heard people complain about high levels of stress in their jobs and you’d like to experience some of that first hand.

2. You have too much money sitting in your savings account and would rather take the risk of printing a couple thousand books, having no idea whether they will sell or not.

3. You’ve gotten a little too comfortable with your current skills and responsibilities and want to try something new that will make you constantly feel like you don’t have a clue what you’re doing.

4. You think you’d enjoy the mental stimulation of juggling all the details that publishing houses usually employ 25 different people to handle.

5. You want to test the love and loyalty of your family by periodically acting like a crazy wreck and seeing how many times they are willing to help pick up the pieces of your emotional wreckage.

6. You get a thrill out of doing cost comparisons and trying to figure out what supplies you will need for order shipping and where to purchase them and how to ship them.

7. You love filling out on-line applications and waiting for days to have your accounts approved and/or updated so you can cross items off your to-do list and move to the next item.

8. You’re feeling a little rusty on your math skills and want to spend hours calculating how much square footage your order of books will require and what size boxes you’ll need in order to ship the various quantities that will be ordered by customers and wholesalers.

9. Your current workload is too light and you wish you had a list of extra projects to fill all of your free time. In fact, you’re curious to try eliminating sleep from your regular routine and see how long you can maintain your sanity.

10. You have dreams of spending the rest of your life doing shameless self-promotion and exploring every possible marketing strategy to hopefully sell all those books you’re storing and maybe even reclaim some of your life savings.