Selling Your Books From Your Web page

Should you?

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At some point, you will ask yourself, what if…?

Sometimes that question can lead to creative thoughts that solve life's problems; other times, it can take you on a wild ride that creates more. You need to consider carefully why, when, and if you should sell your books from your own platform. Selling your books from your own platform is called Direct Selling.

I can't promise to provide you with the answer to whether you should or shouldn't. I will attempt to explain the disadvantages and advantages of doing so, what I’ve learned from my own experience, and some of the costs involved.

Advantages of selling direct:

• You'll earn more money off each sale. Every distributor that sells your book (Amazon, Kobo, Apple, etc.) takes a percentage. If you have someone distribute the book for you to Kobo, Apple and Smashwords they also take a percentage. When you sell off your website most of the money comes to you. The only money you'll lose are credit card fees and costs associated with your monthly web maintenance charge and any costs involved with adding a store. Word of warning: the retail price of your book should remain the same across platforms, unless you are running a special sale. You cannot charge less because you are selling it off your platform. In some cases this would be against the policy of your distributors.

• You get paid immediately. Money is funneled into your bank account as soon as your store or platform, in my case, Wix clears the sale. You don't wait thirty, sixty days, or longer anymore.

• You learn about the reader, the person purchasing your books. Most website platforms have all kinds of analytics that will tell you whether the reader is coming from Facebook, IG, or Google; and what country too. Whether they're using a phone or a computer, and what time they visited your website. This is just a tiny sampling of the information available to you.

• It’s easier to establish your author brand on your real estate. You totally control the look of it. No more hijacking of your book page.

• There's a direct relationship with the reader. (I own the email, not Amazon or someone else.) You can easily integrate the buyer's info into your mailing list after the sale. Always ask the buyer for permission. In this case, I tell them my newsletter gives them access to free romance books every month through BookFunnel.

• You are no longer totally dependent on other book sellers for every aspect of your writing life.

• A higher percentage of closed sales. The buyer isn't distracted by a million other books shoved in their face like multiple pole dancers eagerly vying for attention at a rowdy bar. You can also contact the buyer should they have a problem completing a sale.

• Maximum Control. Am I a control freak? Probably…but it saddens me when I hear about authors who've built up big numbers on Amazon, suddenly locked out of their accounts, or their sales plummet, and they have no idea why. If you own your own website it's yours. If sales plummet, you have some analytic tools available to figure it out.

Realize only some readers will purchase from your website. I give people a choice, although I've heard of some authors that only provide their button to buy from, no one else’s.

There will always be individuals who will only buy on Amazon or one of the other book selling sites. Perhaps, they discovered you on Amazon, Kobo or Apple Books and that's fine. Other readers might seek you or your book out after seeing you or it on a Facebook ad or IG. In this situation where you are bringing the reader, you have a better chance of selling your book from your webpage, controlling the sales experience. I expect more and more authors will sell from their web pages as time goes on.

This is not an either-or proposition. Chances are good that most of us will always sell books through distributors. Still, every time you sell a book off your platform you've captured the person's email and made a connection. You can sell them a second book and one after that, thereby gaining more control over your book and your career.

Nothing is perfect, and it's not all peaches and cream.

Disadvantages of selling direct:

• The books you sell on your site will not count towards your ranking on Amazon. If this is important to you, then selling off your website may not be worth it.

• If you sell in Europe there are more tax issues to contend with.

• If you’re not technically savvy (such as myself) you will need to hire help. This means more costs to set things up.

• Selling Direct means different things to different people. I did not want my buyers having to go anywhere else after they pushed the buy button on my website. This eliminated the use of storefronts like those mentioned at the end of this paragraph. I felt sending the person away from my website defeated one of the reasons for doing this. The more buttons someone has to push to complete the sale, the more chance you have of losing them. However there are definite advantages to these store fronts. The framework for everything is there and all you do is put your products in. You will also eliminate many setup costs, but have to pay a small percentage of each sale to the transitional site whether it’s Gumroad, Shopify, Payhip, Thrivecart or WooCommerce. Because I didn’t use a storefront, I had to pay a programmer to develop code to interface with Wix and Bookfunnel. My website manager, nor the technical support people at Bookfunnel could locate existing plug-in codes.

• Initial cost investment. You may have to upgrade your webpage platform. For instance because my Wix webpage now takes payments it had to become a Business account. I had to upgrade my BookFunnel account to a higher priced version as well because it needed to integrate email with Mailchimp. I had to pay a programmer and web-manager $1200.00 to write the code and make changes to my webpage. And in truth, I’m still not done. We haven’t even added the two audiobooks yet.

• You can no longer be as loose about things. If you haven’t done it already, you’ll need to open a Business Checking Account where your store can send sales income. And depending on where you live you may have to prove you're a business to your bank, providing formation papers, etc. If the business checking account dips down under $5000.00 you could be charged a monthly fee. It seems when you’re a business, everyone in the world wants a piece of the pie.

• I made Kay Freeman an LLC. The cost for this $275.00.

• I had to set up a Business PayPal account because I wanted to accept PayPal as well as credit cards. I didn’t want to use my personal PayPal account and again I had to prove to PayPal I was a business.

Would I do it all again? Yes, but perhaps I would have waited a year or two. I believe long term it’s the best thing an author can do for themselves. I think taking a course to learn more would have been wise, but at the time I didn’t want to put money into a program when I needed to put it into the development of my webpage. There are several courses that will teach you how to go about selling direct and provide the necessary training to get you up and running.

This article, The 3 Best Courses on Selling Books Direct to Readers, arrived to my email Thursday, July 20. I started this post, the prior Monday. It’s always like this in the writing universe. Funny, the Steve Pieper course they mention in the article is one I came very close to signing up for a year ago. Unfortunately, he used one of those blasted count down clocks at the end of his video and lost me with that. Regardless, the article is worth reading because there are two others courses mentioned. Realize these courses do not come cheap. The Steve Pieper one used to be $997.00 but you could pay in installments. If you want to know the price now you’ll have to sit through a sales video, but like I said, he advertises on IG all the time.

Was it worth it to set the sales site up on my web page? Even though it has only been live for about a month, the answer is yes; I felt a sense of satisfaction the first time someone purchased off the site, and each time it happens, I still get a high from it. I’m now taking a look at an abandoned cart and discussing what can be done about it. We already have an automated email that reminds the purchaser to complete the sale, but I want to send a link to the person so they can go to BookFunnel and get the first three chapters for free to tempt them back. Like I said, the site will never be done. Geez.

Next week I’m writing about the 5-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge taught by Bryan Cohen. It’s a free class on advertising your books on Amazon, offered quarterly. If any of you are taking the class or have, and would like to interview for the article, please contact me. I would love to get your feedback for the piece.

Have a great week!