3 Ways to Sell Your Book Directly to Readers (Without Amazon!)

Selling your book direct sounds great until you realize there's a dozen confusing choices and none of them are perfect. And everyone online is going to tell you to do it a different way. Today, I'm going to break down three approaches to sell your book direct. So if you're confused by selling your book direct and need the details, this video is for you. Hi, I'm Julia the Book Broad, founder of Book launchers.com and your host here at Booklaunchers TV. Book launchers is your first choice for all things related to writing books, publishing and promoting a nonfiction book. And after a long discussion in our author business accelerator group this week, I realized that more authors want the option to sell their book directly to readers. They want to sell it on their website, they want to run ads, but they're confused as heck as to which approach will work best for them. So in that call, I broke it down into three buckets and explained how to do each. And they loved it. So I thought I would do that for you today too. Now going to talk about the easiest way, the medium complexity approach, and the most powerful but also the most involved way to sell direct. So first of all, let's start over here in the easy bucket. Yeah, the easiest option, Ingram Share and sell link. You set this up directly from your IngramSpark dashboard, of course, after your book is set inside of there and when someone clicks your link to buy, Ingram handles printing and shipping. You set the price, they pay, shipping and tax, you earn the list price minus printing cost and a fixed surcharge of $3.50 per the US boom. It really is easy. So assuming your book is set up to sell in Ingram, watch how fast this is. You can set up a special promotion pricing my book here. When you include printing in their fee, it's going to cost just over $8 to fulfill. So anything I price it over, that is profit and that will be deposited to me. Not bad. What I love about this, there's no inventory, no shipping, no fuss. It's quick and easy to set up and you're in business selling direct. What's not ideal? Well, you only see how many books sold and country data, not who bought or conversion tracking. Payouts happen 90 days after the end of the sale of the month. So if you're hoping to sell books and grow your platform, this isn't going to work. But if you just want to test the waters on demand for direct purchases, you want a good quality product that ships fairly quickly and you want to make more money per book than you Would selling retail. Well, this is is fantastic. What a great way to start. You don't get granular data, but you can always upgrade later if you're finding that you are selling enough that makes getting all that data worthwhile. All right, bucket, bucket. I said that really loud. Bucket number two, medium complexity, which is self fulfilled direct sales. So this is your next level. Sell via whatever payment processor you have. Stripe Square, PayPal. So you set up the link inside of whatever platform you have to take payment on your site or a checkout page and then you ship the books yourself. And then if you're using ebook or audiobook, you can deliver those as well through book funnel or story origin. We'll stay focused on print. The advantage is you collect buyer data. You can run ads, track conversions and build your email list. You also get funds quickly. Stripe often deposits the next day. PayPal is one to three business days with no extra fees. So it's quick. You can even have the option to sell ebooks and audiobooks with some automation setup. Again, this is really focused on print, but I wanted to mention it. The big drawback of this method is you have to stock books yourself. And b the shipping department. Physical shipping can be semi automated. Take payment, have that set up to go to stamps.com where it prints a label and then ship those weekly which means you're physically going to the post office or the post box. So it's a medium complexity and definitely heavier lifting because you have to make sure you're getting the books printed. You've got inventory, envelope prep, labeling, trips to the post office. But this approach gives you control greater data ownership. And I like this. If you're on a budget and you're not sure how many books you'll sell direct anyway, you can always wait to do a more complete complex setup. When postal shipping becomes overwhelming, that would be your signal to move to the next option which is a more scalable system. We're off to bucket number three, advanced complexity. Shopify plus a printing system. So I recommend Shopify because you can cross sell upsell. You can do all kinds of things with a Shopify store. Then you connect it to a print on demand provider like Lulu or Book Vault or a warehouse distributor like Accutrack. This is not easy to do. I tried and I had to get Shane on my team to do it. He does it for all our authors and he said there's always an issue and it's something different every time. So it's not for the tech haters or tech afraid. It's a bit of work to get this operational. I think though, if you're going to run ads and you aim to sell more than 30 or 40 copies a month from your website, you really do want to get yourself set up like this. So what does this mean? Well, you can choose and there is not a perfect choice in my view. Different options for different folks. Options. We work with Book Vault again we're setting up Shopify. So both of these connect with Book Vault. Book Vault and Lulu as print on demand. Book Vault is best in the uk. They're in the US and Canada. They're an option, but we're not in love with them as much as we hoped we'd be. We found that slow shipping usually averaging 8 to 10 business days to get the book into the hands of the buyer. The shipping costs are crazy high, which makes our books ridiculously priced for the buyer relative to buying from a retail outlet. And it's mediocre customer service. When there's problems, it's hands off and you will make a dollar or two more than with Lulu Print on demand. But if you have issues, it's a pain to resolve them. And Lulu excels at customer service. So Lulu, great customer service, good print quality, but typically 8 to 10 business day delivery from time of order, it's painfully slow for the buyer. They offer volume pricing discounts if you scale. What we love at Lulu are the humans that work there and the print quality. So if there's issues, they're going to help you. So we love Lulu but they cost a little bit more and they are a little slower to ship than Book Vault. All right, AccuTrack they require a pre order of 300 copies but once in place they fulfill quickly like 3, 4 business days delivery. So they're fast, they're reliable, especially for consistent volume. They are highly cost competitive. We know authors using them and they love them. This though is only a volume play. If you're not selling at least 50 books a month, the fees will start to add up and and you will have books collecting dust. So definitely make sure you're going to be able to sell through that 300 books relatively easily. But if you will, this is the way to do it all day long. If you're serious about your book business and directly selling to readers, one of these options is the way to go because it allows you to set up a dynamic storefront again where you can bundle and upsell, track conversions, collect valuable data and so much more. But as noted, the setup is a pain and costs are higher, but the scalability and automation can be a major payoff if you know you're going to be moving a decent number of books every month. All right, so let's tie this with a nice bow, shall we? Start simple with Share and Sell. You don't have to have inventory, you don't have to ship anything. It's a painless way to sell direct, but you're not getting contact information. Number two, you can go a little bit medium complexity, set up fulfillment and use Stripe or PayPal or Square to collect payment, but you are shipping the books yourself. Or more complex but scalable use Shopify plus a print on demand or warehousing option where volume, automation and branding will matter the most. That's going to be your choice. How do you sell direct to your readers? Let's chat about it below. After, of course, you've subscribed to the channel and liked this video and then I can't wait to see you on the next one.