Learn how to price and monetize ebooks uploaded to the free Kotobee Books library.
Kotobee Books is a free online digital library where you can publish and sell your ebooks. You can upload ebooks to Kotobee Books from inside Kotobee Author or from the Kotobee Books website. This article will guide you through pricing your ebooks and more importantly setting up your payment credentials.
Set Up Payments With Stripe
What Is Stripe?
Stripe is an online payment processing platform that allows businesses to send and receive payments over the internet. It is based in San Francisco, California. Stripe Payments simplifies the process of starting and managing online businesses for merchants. Their suite of products significantly saves the time, money, and resources needed to set up an online payment processor for accepting customer payments.
Stripe is used by some of the world’s top companies such as Amazon, Shopify, Github, Yelp, Spotify, Uber, TED, Lyft, Reddit, and hundreds of top companies globally.
Check out the full list of features with Stripe payments.
Create a Stripe account
In order to use Stripe, you need to have an active Stripe account. To create a new Stripe account, you may refer to Stripe's support pages:
Get Your API Key
To collect payments using Stripe, you need both a Publishable Key and a Secret Key. To get these keys, follow the steps below:
1. Open your Stripe Account dashboard link: https://dashboard.stripe.com.
2. Click on Developers > Api Keys.
3. Copy your keys from there to use inside Kotobee Author.
Add the API Key to Your Account
You can add the API key either through Kotobee Author or through the Kotobee Books website. The same credentials (i.e. email/password or serial number) can be used to log into either.
If you are using Kotobee Author, go to the Manage tab and select the Kotobee Books library. Click on the Payments section, the select Payment methods.
Subsequently you may also edit your payment methods from the Account settings by clicking on your username at the top right corner and select Account Settings from the dropdown menu.
Click the Enable button under the Stripe box, enter your API Key and click Save.
If you are using the Kotobee Books website, once logged in, click on the Profile tab to go to your profile.
Scroll down to the Billing section and add your API key under Stripe, and click Save Changes.
Test the Payment in Sandbox
Stripe provides a test mode to use regulatory test credit card numbers to process transactions up to, but not including, the point the bank is actually charged. When setting up your API key in Stripe, they will provide you with both a test API key pair and a live pair.
You can set up your testing environment by following the steps listed on this page: https://stripe.com/docs/testing.
Set Up Payments With Paypal
What Is Paypal?
PayPal is one of the easiest and quickest ways to send and receive payments online.
Check out the full list of features for Paypal.
Getting Your API Key from PayPal
There are a few basic steps to get started with your PayPal integration:
1. Create and sign in to your PayPal developer account.
2. In your Developer Dashboard, navigate to the 'Apps & Credentials' section and click on the 'Create App' button.
3. Decide if your app is for regular online selling (Merchant) or a platform connecting multiple sellers (Platform) then click on ‘Create App’.
4. After your app is created, click on the button called ‘Generate Sandbox Access Token’. This step creates a special access token for testing purposes in the sandbox environment. This token is used to make test payments and transactions during development.
5. If you're ready to go live and accept real payments, switch from 'Sandbox' to 'Live' mode. Follow the steps provided to create a real business account.
6. Click on your newly created app's name in the Developer Dashboard. This is where you'll find crucial details like the Client ID and Secret. We will be using them later in Kotobee Author to complete the integration.
7. When you click on your newly created app, You will find your test account credentials (email and password) in the "Sandbox account info" section. We will use them later to test purchasing a book in Kotobee Reader.
Details of these steps are provided by Paypal below:
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/get-started/
Add the API Key to Your Account
You can add the API key either through Kotobee Author or through the Kotobee Books website. The same credentials (i.e. email/password or serial number) may be used to log into either.
If you are using Kotobee Author, go to the Manage tab and select the Kotobee Books library. Click on the Payments section, the select Payment methods.
Subsequently you may also edit your payment methods from the Account settings by clicking on your username at the top right corner and select Account Settings from the dropdown menu.
Click the Enable button under the Paypal box, enter your API Keys and click Save.
If you are using the Kotobee Books website, once logged in, click on the Profile tab to go to your profile.
Scroll down to the Billing section and add your API key under Paypal, and click Save Changes.
Test the Payment in Sandbox
PayPal provides you with a simulated environment to test your payments just like the production environment. You can set up your testing environment by following the steps listed on this page:
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api-basics/sandbox/
Setting an Ebook's Price
In Kotobee Author, go to your uploaded ebook and click on the Dashboard button.
Scroll to the Permissions and Pricing section, enable purchasing for your ebook and hit Save.
To set an ebook's price from Kotobee Books website, after uploading an ebook, fill in the price field when editing the book details.
