There’s a high chance that you’ve never heard of itch.io. This website was originally — and is still focused on — highlighting indie game projects, but its flexible design and easily manageable storefront makes it an incredible platform for getting books directly to your readers with a far more forgiving royalty scheme than many other large sites.
So how do you get a book on itch.io?
- Create an itch.io account and log in.
- Connect to a payment method (PayPal or Stripe).
- Go to Create → Upload New Project.
- Fill in the blanks and attach your ebook files along with a cover image.
- Save the page and set it to public.
Now your book is published and for sale. Yes, immediately. Readers can purchase and download the files from your project page, which has its own unique link with a customizeable theme.
And by default, you get 90% of whatever sales are made (minus any transaction fee from PayPal/Stripe). You can be paid out by the individual transaction, or collect the money in bulk for it to be sent out in one amount by itch.io later.
So if it’s that simple, why am I writing this guide?
Well, there is an entire suite of complex and helpful tools within the itch.io Dashboard that allow for series, sales bundles, data tracking, selling physical books, and more.
There’s also a lot of nuance that goes into individual sales pages, collections, and learning how the sales algorithm for itch.io works. Some of this is on the itch.io site itself, but in many places, they don’t detail the specifics when it comes to selling books.
All of these subjects will be detailed below.
Table of Contents
- Creating an Account
- Updating Your Profile
- Customizing Your Profile Page
- Choosing a Payout Mode & Payment Processor
- Royalty Splits
- Publishing Your First Book
- Titles & Taglines
- Classification
- Pricing
- Uploading Your Files
- Choosing Book Details & Keywords
- Cover Images, Trailers, & Screenshots
- Comments & Discussion Boards
- Going Live
- Topping the Charts
- Running a Sale
- Co-op Bundles
- How to Use Collections
- The Recommendations Feature
- Itch.io Creator Days
- Your Followers
- Selling Physical Books
- Data Analytics
- Downsides of Itch.io
- Conclusion
Creating an Account
While you can use the same account to both publish and purchase media on itch.io, I recommend treating the account where you sell books solely as an author account, as you can easily create a different itch account with any other email if you want to buy from the platform.
So, go to https://itch.io/register, and you’ll see this below.
Everything should be filled out, but for authors, there’s two points of high importance.
- The username. As noted, this will become the home base of your profile page, and will be linked to all of your books, so choose a name with that in mind.
- The ‘About you’ section. You’ll want to check the second box if you are planning to sell books on itch.
Do not use a throwaway email address. This email will be tied to your payments and other vital features, so you need to be able to log in and access it regularly.
Updating Your Profile
After you’ve confirmed your account and logged in, you’ll want to customize your profile. Click your name in the upper right hand corner and go down to the Settings here:
Beyond the basics of your username, public profile URL, and icon, you have a space to link one external webpage (such as an author website) that will display on your profile, as well as an embed for a Twitter account.
Underneath this section are various settings for how itch.io displays to you personally. Click or adjust any of these that you require.
Then comes the actual text for your profile. This will show on your main page (example: https://riengray.itch.io/) and can be customized with tables, links, videos, and images in whatever way you desire.
However, keep in mind that each individual book also gets its own page, so I recommend saving media like book trailers and story previews to those specific pages.
Customizing Your Profile Page
So long as you are logged in and on your own profile page, these options will be available on the top of the screen:
The number of ways you can customize your profile and project pages is so extensive it requires its own guide, but thankfully itch.io has put together their own here: https://itch.io/docs/creators/design.
However, I will call out two sections for Authors specifically.
First: You will probably want to change your Layout to Grid. This will make your books display in one clean line across the screen. The Sidebar version can stretch down the right side of the page once you upload enough books.
Second: If you have multiple books/projects uploaded, they will initially appear on your profile by date of upload. If you want to rearrange how they display on your page — say, to keep a series organized — just drag and drop their titles into the order you desire:
Choosing a Payout Mode & Payment Processor
Why am I going into this before telling you how to sell your first book? Well, like every platform, itch.io requires tax information to process your money, and there are a few finicky details behind making decisions here.
I recommend setting all of this up ahead of time to make sure you are already set up for payments to prevent any issues getting your money once you have books available on the platform.
Note: I am not an accountant. I have only used itch.io to connect to various services for sales as someone with an American physical address and the tax constraints of the United States. None of this is intended to be financial advice, and you may need to investigate further if you run into issues with selling through itch.io.
When you go into your Settings and select Payout Mode, these two options will appear below:
Itch.io has provided an extensive guide on the differences between these two payout modes, which you can view here: Payment Modes.
You can also select your desired currency on this page, and there are VAT options available if you’re selling to customers in the EU.
After selecting your Payout Mode and submitting your tax information, you can connect to Stripe or PayPal under Payment Processors and select which one you’d like to use (or both!).
One important thing to keep in mind is that Stripe only works for customers who have a debit or credit card, while PayPal customers can pay directly from their balance and bank or a card.
Royalties
Unlike many other websites, itch.io operates on a model of Open Revenue Sharing. That means you, the author, decide how much of each sale you would like to give to itch.io’s operating costs.
The default is 10%. Industry standard is 30%. You can adjust your royalty percent at any time under Settings → Revenue sharing.
Please note you cannot assign individual royalties per book, so this percentage will apply regardless of how much you charge for any particular title, whether or not it is on sale.
If you decide to adjust the number to compensate for bundles or deep discounts, make sure to hit Save so it applies!
Whichever payment processor you selected will also take their own fee out of the resulting royalty. Itch.io has no control over these fees, but they do recommend pricing your work at 2 USD or above to ensure you are still making a profit per sale.
Publishing Your First Book
Finally! You have your account set up, and are chomping at the bit to get a book on sale and sweep up that delightful royalty percentage.
So click your name in the top right, and under Create, go to Upload New Project.
Initially, the resulting project dashboard may seem to be intimidating or confusing, so I’ll break it down by section here. Itch.io gives creators a wide amount of freedom, but the tradeoff is that all of those choices are directly in your hands.
First and foremost, scroll down to the Visibility & Access part of the project page, displayed here:
DO NOT switch your page to Public until you are ready to sell your book. This includes cover images, uploaded and complete ebook files, payment processing, etc. This is the very last stage of the process.
The instant your page on itch.io switches to Public, it is available for sale to everyone in the marketplace. This impacts its position on New and Bestseller lists (which I’ll go into later) and means that itch.io admins can review the page. If you continuously post incomplete listings, your account can get in trouble, as noted on their detailed Quality Guidelines.
Most of these Guidelines are very straightforward and are intended to stop abuse of the platform, but if you are a writer of NSFW content, you may be wondering — is my work allowed on itch.io?
Yes, absolutely. Itch.io hosts a substantial amount of adult content, both in text and visual formats, and is very open-minded about what NSFW subjects can be uploaded to their platform. But there are a few important (if fairly obvious) exceptions, so I will note them below:
- You cannot use sexually explicit images for your cover.
- You cannot use pornographic images or video of real-life humans in any of your content.
- Content glorifying sexual violence is not permitted.
- Depictions of minors, minor-presenting, or suggested minors in a sexual context are not allowed and will result in account suspension.
If your work is intended for adults only, there’s an easy box to check that marks it as such. Checking the box should not ‘dungeon’ your book — it is still available for search normally but will be hidden from any user that has chosen not to view adult content on Itch.io.
But with that aside, back to publishing your book.
Titles & Taglines
While these sections look self-explanatory, note that you can manually alter your project URL if you’d prefer it to not pull from the title.
Taglines are, well, taglines. Short and sweet is the ideal. More than 10–15 words is likely to be cut off when displayed.
Taglines don’t appear on an individual book’s profile page, but they do show on sales pages and your main author profile page.
They are (as noted) optional, but I highly recommend having a tagline for every book. It’s a free little text box to draw in readers who will be scrolling through a big marketplace.
Classification
When you get to this section, you’ll probably notice it defaults to ‘Games’ because that is itch.io’s bread and butter. But just click and you can select ‘Books’.
Leave the Kind of Project section as is. All of the other options are for types of video game files.
Pricing
This is a very important section, which I’ll break down piece by piece.
By default, every project on itch.io is Pay What You Want (PWYW). That means someone can download it for free, but whenever they do, a prompt will appear to ask the reader for a donation/tip. It’s optional, but a lot of itch users tip regularly.
The Paid option is what most authors are likely to use. This sets a default minimum price for your book (3.99 or whatnot) that anyone who wants to buy your book has to pay.
However! People can still choose to tip you over this minimum price. This allows readers who want to support your work to do it directly and quickly, without the need for something separate like a Patreon or Ko-Fi tip jar — although itch.io also has free Patreon integration, if you’d like to use their platform to provide books or other content to your patrons.
No Payments is well, no payments. It means the book is not only available for free, but tipping is forbidden as well. This can be very useful for distributing free books as part of a newsletter or other promotion.
Uploads
This is where you put your ebook files. However, unlike services like Amazon, itch.io is not going to embed your cover with an .epub, .mobi, etc. so make sure that it’s already part of the digital file!
You can also upload the cover as a separate file if you like, but I recommend labeling it appropriately.
Uploading different or multiple file types is not only welcome, but easy. But for the convenience of your readers and ease of organization for yourself, it’s not a bad idea to mark those types.
After uploading, you will have several options.
- Change display name does just that. This is what will display when readers go to purchase your book, so changing it from the default file string is a good idea.
- Move up and move down will appear if you have multiple files uploaded, so you can list them in order of priority.
- The file type section will automatically be Executable, but clicking will give you a drop-down menu where you can select Book or Document.
- If you have tiers of content — such as a special edition of your book — you can set a different price for the specific file.
- If you want to run a pre-order, all files on the page must have this box checked. But if so, it will allow readers to purchase your book before the uploads are made available.
- If you ever want to hide a specific upload from the public but keep it attached to the project page, check the bottom box.
Details
These sections are vital to the marketing and promotion of your book.
First, the Description.
This is where your blurb/summary goes, as well as any additional information you want to provide about your book (content warnings, wordcount, so on and so forth). You can also include review quotes here and any awards your book has received.
The description is displayed only on the individual book’s page, so write as much as you like. Examples are here, here, and here.
Tags are next.
You only get 10 keywords total, so choose wisely! There are many suggested tags built into itch.io — such as romance, dark fantasy, LGBTQIA, etc. — and those will get far more traction than a custom tag.
However, custom tags that get used regularly have a chance to become a suggested tag. So, if you produce regularly in a genre or subgenre that itch doesn’t already list, there’s nothing wrong with trying to start the trend!
- You don’t need to put ‘book’ or anything like that in your keywords. By selecting Books in the page classification above, it will automatically be sorted into itch.io’s Book section.
- Don’t use your book’s title as a keyword either. It’s already indexed into the search, and will only add more junk into the tag system.
- Keyword synonyms aren’t needed. If you put dragons for one tag, putting dragon after it is a waste of a tag.
App Store Links don’t apply to books, and while you’re welcome to invent a custom noun, it may make your book harder to search for.
Cover Images, Trailers, & Screenshots
The Cover Image is not the cover of your book. This is a rectangular image that shows on itch’s storefront and your author profile page.
It should, however, be as compelling as a cover. Chances are this is the first thing a reader will see while looking to make a purchase (unless they’re directly linked to your book’s sale page).
The Trailer section is where you can provide a video link if you have a book trailer, Kickstarter promotion trailer, and so forth. I don’t really use it much myself, but the option is nice.
Last is the Screenshot section. As itch.io itself notes, this is optional but highly recommended. You can have up to 5 screenshots, arranged in any order you like, and it’s a great place for previews, highlighting reviews, moodboards, character art, or anything else you want to showcase about your book.
The dimensions for these screenshots look best at 630x500, just like the Cover Image above.
Because itch.io does not have a Look Inside similar to Amazon, I recommend using the screenshot section to give readers a taste of what they’re getting into. You can make it match the aesthetic/theme of your individual book page as well.
Comments & Discussion Boards
Not everyone wants the same kind of feedback for their books. By default, readers can rate your book (1–5 stars like other sites, although by a quirk of itch.io’s algorithm, 5 star ratings are heavily weighted) and leave comments on your individual book pages.
If you don’t want comments, you can simply turn them off. But if you want to create a space for your readers to chat about the book, itch.io has a built-in forum option with Discussion Boards.
Going Live
Once you’ve uploaded your files and edited the connecting page to your heart’s content — you can Save at the bottom and preview the results at any time! — then it’s time to release your book out into the wild.
It’s time to go back to Visibility & Access and change it to Public!
The moment you do, your book will go live across itch.io and be available for purchase. You can direct readers to the book’s individual page and embed the link anywhere you’d like to promote it. Congrats!
Note: If you want to unlist your book from without deleting it, or prevent your book from being downloaded while keeping the public page, just click Configure Settings next to ‘Public’ and these menu options will appear:
The Charts
So your book is out there now, but how does it sell?
Under each media section of itch.io — Books, Games, etc. — there’s several sections where new, popular, new and popular, top-selling and top rated titles appear.
As soon as your book is available for public sale, it will go into the Most Recent section by default. You can appear in multiple sections at the same time, though, so if you start to sell well, the book can also move into New & Popular within hours.
There are also several important filters that can be used to draw in readers, no matter how new or popular your book is.
- Free is self-explanatory.
- On Sale will catch any discounted book — I’ll go into a lot more depth about Sales, Bundles, and Collections below.
- Paid is also self-explanatory.
- The $5 or less and $15 or less sections are very popular, and since most ebooks are under 15 USD anyway, it’s a good price point to keep in mind.
Sales
Creating a Sale for your book on itch.io is simple as going to your Dashboard → Promotions. It will automatically be on the Sales & bundles tab and you can click ‘Create new sale or bundle’.
One quick note: the difference between Sale and Bundle on this tab is just a matter of how many books are being discounted. If you’re discounting a single book or don’t want to group it with other books on sale, then it’s just a Sale. If you are selling multiple books together at a discount, it’s a Bundle.
Either way, the resulting page will look identical:
The sales title will display on the unique sales page that itch.io generates, so make sure they’ll catch the attention of readers and make it clear what is being discounted.
Next, you choose what book(s) you want to be on sale. If you don’t do percentage math well, itch.io helpfully shows the discounted price side by side with each title.
If you’d like to run a private sale — like a discounted run for newsletter subscribers or Patreon members — you can use itch.io’s Coupon Code system to generate a hidden link and hand out the code to anyone you want to access the sale.
Lastly, you can add an Earning Goal to any sale, which will add a banner to the sale that includes a progress bar for how far you’ve gotten.
Once you’re ready to launch your sale, just flip it to Public and hit Save & view sale.
Co-Op Bundles
What if you want to group up with other authors and run a sale? That’s what itch.io Co-op Bundles are for.
While in many ways, co-op bundles work like regular itch.io bundles, there are some very important exceptions:
- Every member of the co-op bundle must have an itch.io account. You can’t add books to a bundle that don’t already have their own itch.io page.
- Every member of the co-op bundle must approve the bundle before it goes live. Make sure whoever you’re doing a bundle with has easy access to their account to approve any changes quickly.
- Bundle payouts are always done in bulk. Therefore if you only have Direct to You as your itch.io payout mode, you’ll have to manually request the payout from itch after the co-op sale has ended.
- Every member of the bundle will be able to see which books are part of a bundle, who has accepted/approved of the bundle, and what every member’s royalty split in the bundle is.
Despite these additional constraints, co-op bundles are a great way to sync up with other authors and do cross-promotion.
Collections
Collections on itch.io serve two purposes. While users primarily use it to organize their purchases, public collections can also be used by authors to sell series or shared universe books.
If you’d like to create a Collection on itch.io, it’s simple as going to your book page while logged in and clicking this button here:
This will prompt you to name the collection and mark whether or not it is public. If you’re making one for your own book series, making it public means you can display it on your author profile like so:
If you need to edit your collection, you can simply click the title of it and do so at any time.
Recommendations
Over time, itch.io will develop associations between your books and others. This is based on their algorithm, not anything you control, but I’ve found it to line up pretty well with genre and tone.
If there are any recommendations for your book, you can see them by clicking this button on a book page:
And then you get these:
Itch.io also has a separate Recommendations tabs for itch.io users who are logged in, which is available under Explore → Recommendations.
I have noticed this secondary recommendation feed does lean more toward games than it does associated books, though.
Itch.io Creator Days
Every few months, itch.io runs a Creator Day for everyone on their platform. Simply put, during a Creator Day, itch.io takes zero revenue share on every purchase made.
While payment processors will still take their share, CDs are a great opportunity to run a sale on your books without worrying that a royalty cut might penalize you.
So long as you are receiving emails from itch.io on your author account, they should inform you every time there’s an upcoming creator day, and they even provide a pre-filled bundle tool if you want to host a sale:
Creator Days are promoted by itch.io themselves across social media, so it’s a great way to take advantage of increased attention and audience.
Followers
On all of your associated pages — your author profile and individual books — this button will appear for itch.io users to click:
People who follow you on itch.io will be emailed whenever you release a book, and they will also see your releases and any associated posts in their itch.io Feed.
As a result, encouraging readers to follow you on itch.io can be a very useful promotion tool.
Selling Physical Books
You might be wondering if selling paperbacks or hardbacks is feasible through itch.io. The answer is yes, although there are a few important things to know about using itch’s Reward Tiers to do this.
Once you’ve enabled payments on your account, any book you control can have rewards. On the book’s edit page, in the top navigation section, find the Exclusive Content menu item.
This can be customized to your heart’s content depending on what you’re selling — as well as changing the name if exclusive content doesn’t fit what is being sold — and you can decide if there is a limit to how many copies you’re selling or not.
The reward editor also lets you specify a custom text field in order to collect the buyer’s name, address, or any other information you need in order to send them a book.
But there are two very important things to keep in mind:
- itch.io does not calculate or cover shipping costs. It is your responsibility to set reward tier prices correctly for this, or collect the cost of shipping by another method. You can have multiple Reward Tiers, so it’s possible to mark one as covering USA shipping, EU shipping, and so forth.
- itch.io is not responsible for reward fulfillment. If your book doesn’t reach a reader, itch will not fund printing a replacement or intervene with the buyer.
In my opinion, this is best used for limited signed runs, exclusive covers, or any sort of book project where you know exactly how many you plan to sell ahead of time.
Analytics
The itch.io Dashboard allows you to track a fantastic amount of data about your books. This includes gross sales, daily views and downloads, numbers of collections your books are in, ratings, referral links, weekly number of impressions, and a total conversion rate.
It’s also where you can access the Devlog and design a Widget to embed your book for sale on other websites (detailed below).
To me, the Incoming Visits section is one of the most valuable for authors. It gives you a direct line into how readers are finding your books, and can be used alongside other promotional tools to see how well various bundles, social media posts, and so forth actually impact sales.
The above allows me to see how many people find Valerin the Fair from the other book in its series — Martis the Brazen — and how many readers are using various tags and different search engines to guide their purchases.
If you want this information condensed down by high-level domain rather than individual URLs, just click by website/domain and it will adjust the display immediately.
On the same dashboard, you can click Distribute and itch.io will generate a customizable widget to embed your book for sale on another website.
Downsides of Itch.io
While itch.io has a lot of benefits for authors, there are a few direct downsides to the platform.
- Reach: itch.io is nowhere near the size of Amazon. It does not have the same massive algorithm, nor can it get your books on library or brick-and-mortar shelves. The trade-off of higher royalty split and complete control over your book is a smaller audience.
- No Direct-to-Device Downloads: right now, itch.io can’t send an ebook directly to an ereader as Amazon or Kobo might. Readers have to download the files themselves, which some audiences may not be used to.
- Site Priorities: Right now, itch.io is primarily centered on games. While that’s expanded over time, a lot of the tools and dashboard still presume you’re trying to release a game and not a book. But I believe regular feedback from authors on itch.io can change that.
Conclusion
I believe itch.io is a valuable tool for all kinds of authors, and a storefront that will only become more useful as more authors sell their books through itch.io’s platform.
If you have any questions resulting from this guide, feel free to comment and I will answer if I’m able. If this guide has been of value to you, my Ko-Fi is here, or hey, you can pick up some of my books from itch.io itself! And feel free to follow here on Medium if you want more writing here.
