Deep Dive: Direct Sales from the Ground Up

Foreign. Hello guys. Happy Saturday. Happy May. Welcome, welcome. We have our May deep dive today and this one is going to be very exciting. This is a topic about direct sales. So direct sales from the ground up. And this is something that is definitely becoming more popular not only with our clients but just in the self publishing world in general. So this is a really perfect topic to be discussing. So please feel free to hop into the chat. We love to know how many of you are watching and especially where you guys are watching from. We've got David. David, nice to see you. Darla, you already know the drill. You said that you're from California, so lovely to have you here. We've also got Dan Wright, Riley, Michelle Rosenthal. So nice to see you guys. Katrina, hello. Hello everyone. It's so great to see you. I am here in sunny South Florida and it's starting to feel like summer just a little bit here. It's definitely starting to warm up. David, you're in Nevada. I forgot about that. You were I, I think in like the Vegas area. Lori Wilson, Southern Oregon. We also have Shane here. Sorry, I've been keeping him as just like a little fly on the wall for these seconds. Shane is our head of digital strategy. So yeah, feel free to hop in. Shane. We're going to give people another moment to hop on, say where they're watching from. We're going to start with a prize after that and then we are going to hand the reins over to Shane to present all of his wealth of knowledge on this. So Bob from Texas who's labeled as me. Oh, Diane from Dallas. Dallas is my home. I love Dallas. Nice hair and makeup.

Yeah, I assume that was has been hyping me up the past couple days. Thank you, Eric. It's gotten me more excited to talk today and yeah, before we hopped on he was talking in our, our free community there. He's like Shane's in hair and makeup. You know, he's getting ready for the presentation.

That's my Eric. You are definitely a hype man. You do this for the COVID Maybe I should hire you to be my hype person. Even though I'm the hype person. Maybe the hype.

Right.

In all caps. That's what I'll start doing. Alrighty guys. Well, we've got a few more people. Deborah from Hampton, Virginia, nice to see you. Joy, always lovely to see you as well. Gina from Atlanta. Dance into coffee college. Kathy, road tripping through Texas. It's a big state so you're gonna be road tripping for a while. Awesome. Okay guys, well, let's start off. I need to pull up our giveaway tool. But you know what? We need to start off with the people who are here. Right here, right now. You guys are going to be getting a prize. And actually, let me talk about what the prizes are. So we have several client books too, that we have. I have brought them over here because I have a little selection of them and I'm not going to go over the synopsis of these like Sarah does, but we've got Rise of the Reader by Nick Hutchison, More Than Cash Flow from Julie, after the Crash by Kelly Tuttle, Self Publishing for New Authors by Dale Roberts, Live Free and Hike by Linda Magoon, realigning medicine by Dr. Jordan Barber, and the Quiet Storm by Imani Roberts. We also, of course, have self publish and succeed, self promote and succeed, as well as our hashtag noboringbooks mug. I will say though, that our oh so soft journals are not in stock right now. I need to get some more. So those are not on the docket today for a prize. But like I said, I have plenty of books and mugs.

We're making up for it with all the books that we're giving away now.

I know I need to. I don't want to accumulate quite as many as Sarah has because I have plenty of Julie's books. So I will gladly be giving these away. So that's what the prizes are. Let me go ahead. And sweatshirts in May. Eric, you want sweatshirts? It's too hot for that. Maybe. Maybe later on in the year. Okay, let me pull up this giveaway tool and let's see. Direct sales from the ground up. So if you haven't yet said hello, you have 10 more seconds to do so for this first prize. Let me share screen. And then after we get this first prize winner announced, we are going to hand it over to Shane. Why is it not. There we go. Let's see. I've been having such fun with technology the past week, so hopefully this works. Yes, it does. Okay, let's see. 21 entries so far. That is a nice big number to be starting off. So let us see who is the first prize winner of today. Oh, yay, Kathy. How wonderful. So, Kathy, it might have been a little while since you've won, so please email me directly atteam t a m book launchers dot com. You are more than welcome to choose any of these books if you want another mug or if you want another copy of one of Julie's books. Totally fine, just let me know. But yay, that is fantastic. So thank you guys all for commenting and for being here and. Okay, I think we. One last thing I want to announce. If you have questions for Shane or just questions in general throughout this whole process, please put it in the chat. It is helpful if questions start pouring in. If you preface your question comment with a Q and then your question, that just helps me find it easier. But I will be holding all of the questions for probably the end. I think that's what we agreed upon. For as many questions as we have time for, we are going to get to. So I will be off stage collecting questions. So please, as soon as it pops into your head, I will be jotting it down. But otherwise I don't think we have any first off. So. So Shane, I'm going to hand it over to you. Have fun. I will be in the background.

Cool. Yeah, thanks so much, Angela. Yeah, Angela had a great little intro there. I appreciate that. And we get some prizes. We're going to have some more later, so stick through to the end. Also, this topic that I'm covering today, there's a lot of details. So I compiled everything that I'm going to be going over into an ebook, downloadable, and I'm also going to be sharing the link to that. So you can. Everybody here can kind of go download that and have like a summary of everything that I've gone over, plus helpful links of the tools that I'm going to recommend and some research that we've done with selling direct as an author. So stick around. I'll share that later in the chat. But yeah, lots to cover today. It seems like a pretty popular topic at the moment. Direct sales for authors, everybody. You know, it's really a powerful tool to use to build your author business from the ground up. So without further ado, I will go ahead and present my screen here and actually go through my presentation because visuals are always a good thing. Okay. All right. Hopefully everybody can see my screen. I lost my. Oh yeah, there I am. Okay, cool. So here we go. I'm gonna pop over to here because I'm hoping I'd like to see the chat while I'm going through this. That's okay. I'll just. I'll just continue going through. Okay, so direct sales from the ground up. For anybody who doesn't know me, I'm Shane Vigent. I'm head of digital strategy at Book Launchers. I handle all of our clients. I build all of our websites, I do all Amazon ads. I set up clients with direct sales as well. I'VE been doing this for quite some time. I do email marketing funnels, I set up online courses, all of that good stuff. So I build a lot of the digital marketing pieces and then I do a lot of the strategy behind it to make sure that it all makes sense for our authors. So the mission of today's presentation really is to show all of you authors the benefits to be had with selling your book directly to readers and you know, empower you guys with the tools to actually get started on your own own. So first off, what are direct sales? So essentially you're just selling your book directly to the reader. Any version of your book, audiobook, ebook, paperback, hardcover, dust jacket, all of that through your own online store that you set up rather than Amazon, Barnes and Noble or any of the other dozens of retailers. It's not to say that you can't have your book on those retailers. This is just another option that's like starting to grow in the self publishing publishing community. So what you'll need to do to set this up is you'll need to build your own storefront, you will need to handle your own fulfillment, which I'm going to show you how to automate that so you don't have to go to the post office every day. You can do your own marketing and promotion on there. So, you know, you build a website, people don't just arrive at your website willy nilly. You know, you have to do the promotion, you have to get people there. So I'm going to give you some tools on how to do that. And then also you are building communities and nurturing relationships with your readers because everyone who comes through your online store, you can actually see that, that data, you can see their email that you can see where they came from. It's all just amazing data that you can use to, you know, build your author platform and to expand your, your business as an author. So that's what direct sales are. And I just want to emphasize that really it works for any author. You know, you can start, you can start small or go all in. You know, you can just build, build a really small store with just one book to start testing it. And you can also expand it into a whole ecosystem with, you know, branded merch and a bunch of free resources, online courses, literally, you know, anything that you want to sell on there that you think would be valuable to your readers and that they would like to see from you. So, and it's scalable. You know, you can build simple setup, you know, grow it in a full ecosystem all Genres sell direct. So in fiction, nonfiction, children's books, workbooks, memoirs, anything can be sold directly. It's really just setting up online store, getting fulfillment and it doesn't really matter. It's not any genre specifically. And it's about connection, not just about, you know, the clout that you have. You know, even just 10 readers can become loyal fans that share your message. Okay, so why is now the best time for direct sales? There are multiple reasons. So, you know, now authors have more tools and more control than ever to access their audience information and to learn, you know, about their readers hand in hand while having their own online store. So there's more tools that are available now and they keep, and more tools keep coming out. You know, Amazon one day shipping, three day shipping is like, is not just exclusive to big retailers anymore. Now tools are coming out where you can set up your own online store and have everything fulfilled in just a couple days. So it's, you know, customers who are now used to getting their packages in an afternoon or in a day or two, you know, it's just becoming more accessible. There's a lot more tools out there. And also one important thing I'm going to dive deeper into this topic a little bit more is, you know, Amazon hides your customers. Whenever an Amazon, whenever an order comes through on Amazon, Barnes and Noble or any of those other retailers, like you just see a number on a screen saying that hey, I sold a book, but you don't know anything about that reader. And that is such critical information for you, building your author business. And, and it's just, it's a missed opportunity is really what it is. So. And more authors are adopting direct sales every year. I have some data to back that up and I believe the next slide, I can kind of show you where this trend is going. And the elephant in the room in the entire world right now is all the algorithms and platforms are totally changing. With AI, more people are looking up things on ChatGPT and Perplexity and the dozen other AI tools that are out there of, you know, they're asking specific questions to go solve their problems. The way people search is changing. The way people find information is changing. The way people find new authors and new books and new products. It's all changing. And if you have your own online store, you this, it's like a constant, you know, you know that this is how you built it. This is the experience that you created for your readers. So that is, you know, you can just feel confident promoting yourself on there because you know, the world is going to start changing even faster, more than ever. So definitely important to consider that. So I promise you the data, this is what the data says. All of this information came from kindlepreneur.com I included the link in the free ebook that I made as well. So you can check that out, but you can dive in. It's a really detailed analysis of this. But all this Data is from March 14, 2025. So it's super updated. Direct sales are going fast. 31% of survey authors started direct selling in just the last year. So that's a big number right there. A lot of new authors are transitioning over into this authors and then some sales Data. Authors with 10 or more books earn five times more than those with two to four books through direct channels. Email list size is. It's something that we preach all the time. Is the number one success driver for authors of 15,000 subscribers or more earn 20 times more than those with fewer than a hundred. I don't want anyone to get scared by that number. You know, you don't have to have 15,000 subscribers to make money, but it's just kind of explaining a point that, you know, if you spend time building up your audience, you spend time building that community. It's the payouts are, you know, astronomical. Like it's, it's, it like the revenue that you're going to get from your book and from all of your other initiatives that you are working on as an author is just, it just exponentially increases the more subscribers that you get, because those are your number one fans. Those are the people who are looking forward to your emails in their inboxes. And nonfiction is thriving. So nonfiction authors selling direct jumped from 17% to 28% in just one year. So but I mean all that to say direct sales gives you more control, which equals more revenue, and you can keep more per book, get paid faster. And more importantly, which I think one of the most important things is, you know who your readers are. You know, you don't. It's not just numbers on a screen. You can actually see this and interact with people. So if you're wondering if direct sales could actually work for you, I've kind of broken down in the next few slides what it looks like for somebody with no fans. So if you have zero fans, you're just starting out. I would recommend building a simple store on book Vault, Shopify or Woocommerce. We'll explain into that in a couple slides. So don't worry about that at the moment. Offer a freebie to grow your email list and build trust. So people who have never heard of you think about it, like if they go to your website and maybe they were referred to you by a friend, which actually would be great. But if they just stumbled across your post on social media and then they got to your website, the chances of them actually converting over into buying your book is probably pretty low at first. So if you offer some sort of freebie, some sort of free resource, a checklist, a self assessment guide, a free video series, a webinar that you're doing like, and you know, that just gets people in the door. So hey, you don't have to buy my book. But if you're, if you're interested in this topic, whatever your topic of the book may be about, you know, you just sign up with your email here, I'll send you this for free. And then you follow up with a couple emails and say, hey, like, I also have a book on this subject and I also do consulting or speaking or you know, I have branded merch. But obviously you want to. Marketing is all about building relationships. You want to shake their hand first before you say, you know, hey, go buy my book, like right now. So, and also if you have ZeRo fans, you can run targeted ads to reach your ideal readers with a very clear call to action. So obviously your own networking and your own organic posting on social media can only go so far. So if you really don't have a following whatsoever, ads are an excellent way, like running ads on like meta, so Facebook, Instagram, you can even do like LinkedIn or Google. You can run ads on any of those platforms and you can drive traffic to your website and then monitor that traffic, see where people are coming from, see if people are buying it and kind of analyze from the data from there. You can host a virtual event, connect, teach and promote your book live, write guest content on your blogs, on blogs your readers already follow. So if there's some micro influencers in your niche that have a solid following, they have a lot of email subscribers, they have a lot of interaction on their social media. You can reach out to them and say, hey, like, I also write on this topic. You know, if you're looking for some additional content, I would love to write something about it on your site. As long as you just, you know, refer people back to my site. You know, it could just be little crumbs here and there, but over time, you know, that stuff does build up and it's all just networking, it's all building relationships with the other People that are out there and that's how you find more readers. Again, that's all marketing is. It's just building relationships. So I'll take a break here too. Everybody can see my screen fine, right? Yeah, I think it's, I think it's good. Looks like people are chatting.

You can see Shane. Yeah, everything is, everything is perfectly visible. There were a couple comments though that I wanted to highlight because Eric had said, like when you were first starting off, direct sales means, you know, you only touch the money, not the book. Which in today's world with how busy, you know, authors are and just in general, I mean that, that's a really snappy way to say exactly what this is. I really like that. So that's why that stood out to me.

Yeah, that's great. I mean it is true. Like you with the. I mean I'm going to show everybody here how to set up the automatic fulfillment. But yeah, it's a beautiful thing. You know, people buy your book and you don't have to have it in your hand to bring it to the post office. You just, you know, it gets automatically fulfilled. It's just like Amazon, you know, but it's just. You just set it all up on your own.

Yeah, absolutely. We do have one question that came in so far. If you want me to save it for the end, that's fine. Or do you want to talk about it now?

Sure, I'll dive into it. Yeah, it's probably related to what I was just talking about, so.

Okay. It says it's from David Grady. Nice to see you, David. How does this website tie into your author website or can they be the same?

Great question, David. They can be the same. So I mean if you were to build an online store on Shopify and your work and your author website was on WordPress, the way that it would tie in would be you would just, you know, there would be a Buy my book link on your website and it would just go to your Shopify store. So it's just a link there, you know, just simple. You'd want to keep. You want to have as many least amount of clicks as possible to get there. But that's how you would link that. But they can be the same. So if you hire us for say to build a WordPress website, there's an online store plugin called WooCommerce and you can connect automatic fulfillment to that online store. So it'd be a one stop shop. So it'd be your full author website plus automatic fulfillment on there.

Awesome. Thank You. And that's it for questions right now. So unless you want to do a prize, we will. I'll go back off stage and.

Yeah, I'll keep going. I just, I. I'm used to zoom. I can see my little face in the top. But this, on this presentation, you can't see. I just only see my face.

Well, we can see you. Don't worry. We can see you and the presentation. So you're good.

All right, great. So, yeah, we'll get surprises later, but I think this is important. Important. I just want to go through. Okay, so we just went over. What ha. What do you do if you have zero fans? Okay, start. Get your foot in the door in a lot of places. You know, build your platform. Like, like get everything started so that when people find you, they know what to do. And when, like when new people find you, you want to have like that intro, like give them some sort of resource, some sort of freebie that like kind of says, okay, like, this guy seems all right. If you have a hundred fans, congratulations, that's already awesome. You want to engage with your fans personally, Send personalized thank you notes to people who buy your book, ask them for feedback and host a small virtual meetup. And maybe you can even start some conversations and help each other. And you can get some really valuable information on how to improve your online store experience, how to improve even some methodologies in your book. Whatever, whatever it may be, it's just extremely valuable to talk to the fans that you do have. And these are your biggest supporters. You know, these are your brand ambassadors that people are recommending your book to other people. And yeah, they, they help promote your book in exchange for perks like exclusive merch, early access to new content. So, yeah, I mean, just engage with your fans. That's. That's the best way you can. You can start doing that. And then also another great way to do it is to create a referral program, offer incentives for sharing your book. Just do free console calls. If you do that, do free coaching. You know, you don't have to give all your services away for free. But, you know, if you're looking to drum up business, if you're looking to kind of get some traction, it probably help get you kickstarted just to kind of start. Start those pieces, get them moving, you know, so you can. So they can go recommend people. And when you do give a free console call, you can tell if you can ask them to refer somebody else and, you know, I'll give you a signed copy or something. You can do a free mini course. You don't even have to build a full blown online course on like Thinkific or Kajabi or anything like that. You can just do like an, an email mini course. So it's like sign up and you'll get four emails step by step. How to do X and achieve Y. You can build all these things with your existing tools with what you already have. Personalized shout outs are also really great too. If you have somebody who's really into your work, you know, you can shout them out on social media, shout them out in your email newsletter and maybe even like share their book or share their business, whatever it is. So, and then if you have a thousand fans, bravo. That is what a lot of authors, you know, look to achieve. You know, there's a whole science behind just having a thousand true fans. Like how valuable that actually is because it's literally just people who are going like fans. By the way, let me just define fans. Fans aren't like people who like if you sold a thousand books, that's not, that's not a thousand fans, that's just you just sold a thousand bucks. A thousand fans are like, fans are people who come back and buy everything that you, that you offer. They show up to your webinars, they subscribe to your newsletter, they visit your website, they, they follow you on social media. You know, you come out with a new book and they pre order it. Like that's what I'm referring to when I'm saying fans. So if you have zero, start building. If you have a hundred, kind of nurture that audience and ask them to, you know, and create collaboration, create a space for that, makes them feel empowered and wants to share that. But if you have a thousand, you know, you're cooking with fire here. So you know, use your leverage to create collaborations between like other, like other people in your niche who are maybe doing something similar to you. It doesn't have to be an author, but somebody who's like, you know, sharing the same type of message, you know you can. But like with this many fans, it gives you the credibility to approach people like that and say like, hey, we can kind of help each other out here so they're more likely to collaborate you with you when they see you have an engaged audience and then encourage social sharing with your followers too. So with about a thousand fans, even just a very small percentage of them, sharing your book online can create a, you know, a butterfly effect with a million other things. User generated content. Social media posts becomes a powerful Tool to attract new readers. Referral program with incentives would be a powerful tool here as well. So yeah, same thing with a hundred fans. If you have a thousand, you can use a referral program as well. Signed copies, free merch, free webinars or trainings or whatever it is that you'd like to give away. You know, you always just want to be providing value, that's all. It's not, it's not, not everything's a sales pitch. I mean it's, you know, the ultimate goal is you want people to buy your book and visit your website and do all the things, but you, you can't force it. You know, it's, it's more just about building those relationships. So this is, the next few slides are really like how to set up an effective online store for your book. So I'm literally going to walk you through, like if you were to hire me today, I would, this is like what I would build for you to set up an online store. This is essentially the ground floor, the base, the building blocks that you need to explode your author business. Explode might be dramatic, but you know, it's to, to get it started and, and yeah, anyway, so step one is to build an online storefront. Build on Shopify, on WooCommerce on a couple other platforms. But really I think these are, these are my two go tos. Put all the different versions of your book on there or any other products that you want to sell. You can do mugs, you can do T shirts, you can do bundles of books. So if you want to sell all of your books in a bundle, like that's fine. If you only have one book, that's fine too. You don't even have to put all the different ones on there. You can just put the one and add the price, make it really easy to check out and do that. But tools like Shopify literally allow you. It's all, it's essentially a template. You just add your products and it shows you how to do everything. WooCommerce is a bit more customized because it's with, with WordPress. So you got to know a little bit more technical, technical wise on how to build those, but still a really great platform to use. So step one, you got to build something for people to actually visit. Step two is to set up automatic fulfillment. So whenever an order comes through your store, your order is placed, the book is automatically printed and then it's shipped without you touching anything. Like what Eric said, direct sales. You touch the money, you don't touch the book. So have all of that set up and automated so that you don't have to worry about it in every single time an order comes through. You don't have to be rushing to get to the mail and shipping that out to your reader. And that, oh, this important clarification too. This is just for print versions. You don't have to set this up for ebook. Obviously ebook and audiobook, you can just deliver right to the people's, right to your reader's email. So same deal. There's tools for this. The order is placed and then the book is delivered auto, auto, automatically via email. And the cool thing about this too is, is you can do like custom little thank you emails and actually that's. I believe that's my next slide. Yeah, so this next one. So step one, sorry, online storefront, step two, automatic fulfillment. And then step three, automatic opt in and thank you emails for new customers. So you want to set it up so that anyone who buys a book through your store, buys a mug, buys a T shirt. They are automatically subscribed to your newsletter, they are automatically subscribed to your ecosystem. And this is just a screenshot of an automation that I set up for a client. So it's like any one of his versions of his book is purchased, they're automatically tagged as a direct sale reader and then they are sent a customized thank you message. That's just a nice little personal touch that you can do with a direct sales store. And then step four is to continue to nurture those relationships. This is, we had a few questions about this in the community before I even started. The presentation was like, how do you follow up without being annoying? How do you, like, how do you continue the conversation? Or okay, you already have, you know, 100 fans that have already bought your book. Like, how do you keep, keep that going? How do you keep them interested? And it's really just, you know, again, nurturing those relationships. Send follow up emails, ask them for feedback about their experience. Let readers know, like, what you're currently working on. If you're not working on anything, engage them with questions. You know, what's your biggest challenge with your book's topic? What's, what are you working on? What part of this methodology, what part of this book did you find most valuable? You know, you could share resources that you found interesting. You know, a lot of authors obviously to write their books, they did tons of research, they read tons of books and podcasts and talked with a bunch of great people, read all these awesome articles, like put together a stockpile of Those and you'll have email follow up content for weeks, if not months. And you can just say, hey, I came across this article when I was writing my book and it really helped me figure out this, this and this led to this connection and all of these things. And you can basically turn it into something of real value. You know, you want to tell a story, tell something that's relevant to what these people want to hear. So they subscribed in the first place, so they obviously are interested in the topic that you're covering. So you know, give them a reason to open your email. Give them a reason to, you know, make their day a little bit better. It's all about providing value. And yeah, you could also host Q and A sessions too. Like you can do just an online, like a YouTube Live. You can just do one of these and have be in the chat and just like kind of get people's feedback that way. And I would say just like with anything with marketing, this last bullet here, test everything. Test with short emails, test with really long form emails you don't like. You don't really know what's going to resonate with people the most until you test. And with these email marketing platforms, you can see all the numbers too. You can see what the analytics are, how many people are opening it and how many people are interacting with it, reading it, staying on there. So I would say test with multiple different options and see what works. So to recap all of that, I know I went over it a couple times, sorry, but one, build a storefront. Two, automate your fulfillment. Three, send thank you emails and automatically opt people into your newsletter. And then four, nurture those relationships, keep the conversation going, don't let them drop off. Because if you have, if you spend a year building an email newsletter and then you have 150 subscribers and you take a six month sabbatical and then try and reach out to those people again. Those people have moved on and most of them, you know, probably have, some of them are probably still your biggest fans. They want to hear from you again. But if people are actively reading your emails and they're, and they're used to getting them into their inbox, you want to keep that going. You don't want to be annoying about it, but you also want to stay there, stay top of mind so that whenever they have an opportunity to recommend your book or your, your services, they can't because they've been hearing from you. They know that you've been offering all these great resources and you know, encourage people to respond back, encourage people to keep the conversation going. And that's how you get more relevant content. You answer your readers questions. But the most important part of this whole setup is that everything should be automatic and the same great experience for all customers. You know, you don't want to have. You just don't want to have a bunch of different paths that people take and it's just hard to test with. So you want to have just the same great experience and you want to be hands off. You just want to focus on sharing the message rather than dealing with shipping problems and other logistical things. So hopefully that all makes sense. Okay, so actually, you know, before we dive into the tools, I say, Angela, it's probably a good time to do some prizes if you're there.

Of course I am. Here I am. Always lurking in the background. Okay. Yes, absolutely. We can do some prizes. Okay. We've got some questions coming in, which is great. So I think what we need to do is we need to get some additional participation because this is like my new favorite thing that I started maybe a couple months ago, and I love it. Shane, think of a hashtag that people need to put into the chat. And we are going to do a search for that specific hashtag in the chat and those people will be entered to win a prize. Now, if you already win today, we will choose another prize winner. So that way we can share all the love. So, Shane, what is the hashtag that you think people need to put into.

Let's go. Hashtag direct sales success.

I will put this in the chat so you know exactly what to do. Direct sales success. Capitalization does not matter, but spelling does. Don't space out the words. It does need to be. It does need to be one little word. Okay, awesome. So we are going to let those come in. I am just going through and going to star some of these questions. They are starting to pile up, which is great. I love seeing all the questions come in here. Okay, let's give it about 10 more seconds. Get that hashtag into the chat and then I am going to put that. Maybe I should pull up the giveaway tool. That might be helpful. Let me do that right now. And I am going to queue up this hashtag so that you have the opportunity to win it. Let's see. Hashtag direct sales success. I even make it easy for you guys because I put it into the chat. You could actually like, copy and paste it. But, you know, we won't. We won't be.

We're supportive over here.

Okay, let me Go ahead and share screen and I will choose or not me. But the giveaway tool will choose this next prize winner. Okay, you can see we got hashtag direct sales success over here. Let's see, we've got 19 people. Let's see who the winner is going to be for this. Michelle Rosenthal, you are the winner. Well done. Yay. I know you have gotten a few things recently, so let me know if any of these books you would like. I might have already emailed you about those. You do have a mug coming, but yes. Let me know if there are any others that you would like and I will get that shipped on over to you. Well done. Should we do another, Shane? I think.

Yeah, let's do it.

All right, let's draw another. Let's see. Who will this be? Jody Murphy. I'm not sure I recognize that name as a prize winner. Fantastic. Well, I know Michelle already knows the instructions, but Jody, for you, please email me directly at Team T E A M and I will put this into the chat team@book launchers.com Let me know which of the books or the mug you would like and I will also need your mailing address. And as a side note, if anyone is located outside of the US I will need to send you one of the books. But luckily enough, I have plenty for you to choose from, so. Fantastic. Oh, it's your first time winning, Jody. That's awesome. How perfect. Well, thanks for tuning in. What a perfect way to. To be the first prize winner. Okay, let me stop sharing now. Okay, perfect. Well done. Okay, do you want to go over questions or do we want to save this for the end? Because they are starting to pile up a little bit, which is fine.

I think a lot of the questions are going to be related to what I'm going to talk about next, so. So I can just dive back in.

There we go. Sounds good. Okay, well, I will hand it back over to you. Do you want me to add your stuff back to. Actually, I think you have to re. Add it.

Yeah, I think I got it.

Okay, here we go. Perfect.

Awesome. All right, so this is what everyone's been waiting for is what tools do we recommend? What do I build all of this stuff on? It's a really, really important question. And especially if you don't have any platform whatsoever, it's really useful to know this information. So what we recommend. I personally prefer Shopify. I think it is. I mean, there's so many online stores on Shopify nowadays, and people are just conditioned to that checkout process. You know, they go there and it's familiar. They can, they can see, you know, it's, it's intuitive, it makes sense. There's not a lot of clicks. They remove the navigation menu. It's, there's no distractions. It's. It just makes sense. And the user interface on Shopify is great. They have templates that literally build the entire site for you. If you have little to no tech experience, I would go with Shopify or with Gumroad. Gumroad is for, is kind of for like digital products. Like if you want to sell your ebook, like I would go to Gumroad. Same thing with Book Funnel over here. But if you're selling print books and you want to do automatic fulfillment, then Shopify or WooCommerce is going to be your go to. Shopify is its own platform. WooCommerce is and it is a plugin in addition to WordPress. So you need an actual WordPress website. And it's not, there's two different WordPresses. There's WordPress.org and WordPress.com won't get into the details of that right now, but you need to get WordPress hosting to have a WordPress website and then. And you can buy that on GoDaddy Hostgator Bluehost. This is, I don't know if you guys are going to be getting a lot of value for me listing all of those, but there's so many up there. Just look up WordPress hosting on Google and you'll find them. And so you would set that up on WooCommerce. It's a little bit more of a custom setup. Like you would actually have to build the online store and it's. I like it a lot just because you can customize the entire process and it's, you can literally tweak every element and add, you know, all your vibrant colors that you want or just keep it super simple. Either or. So Shopify, Woocommerce both integrate with the fulfillment, the fulfillment tool that I'm going to share with you next. And then Book Funnel and Gumroad are great for ebooks and audiobooks. That's where you would actually go to check those out. Gumroad is really easy to set up. Book Funnels a little bit trickier. It's just like an older looking interface but great nonetheless. And that connects with Shopify so that you can sell your audiobooks and your ebooks on Shopify and WooCommerce as well. As far as auto fulfillment tools, this is, we have Book Vault is what we set up all of our authors on this, handles all of the fulfillment needs. So essentially you connect it to your online store, whether it's Shopify or WooCommerce and you add a saved card in the account. And so that every single time an order comes through, the order gets sent from your online store to book vaults. Your card gets swiped for the shipping and the printing of the book and then it gets brought back to the online store and then shipped through the shipping profiles that are associated with your online store. All of that is set up with you for you on these online store platforms. That's why you have WooCommerce and that's why you have Shopify. All that good stuff. So all that stuff is like all the really technical pieces are kind of done for you, but you just need to make the connections between the two and then, yeah, Book Funnel again automates ebook and audiobook fulfillment. You can link that up with your Shopify Woocommerce stores. Lulu is, that's the publishing company Lulu. They have a direct sales integration with Shopify and WooCommerce as well. I personally have not built anything on there, but I've spoken with them and we considered going with them. They were just a little bit on the pricier side. However, I believe you pay, you're paying extra for, you know, their ease of use. And it just integrates with Shopify and with Woocommerce. Really. Well, a lot of the same with Book Vault, but I would say those two are Book Vault and Lulu are probably your best bet for print. Print options, whether it's paperback, hardcover, whatever option that you have, they have a bunch of different sizes. You can choose the paper, you can choose the, the laminate on the COVID you can have a dust jacket. You can do bespoke books, like, like custom colors on the pages, all that good stuff. And then IngramSpark does a share and sell program. So it, you know, IngramSpark does worldwide distribution with all the distributors, but they also just offer the share and sell program. But there's limits to that one, which is I don't think you can access all the, all of your customers data. I think they keep all emails and like where they came from, but you get higher royalties because you're not selling through one of the big retailers. So it actually just goes through their printing and then sells direct, sends it directly to the users. And by the way, I'll reiterate again that all of these I have in a free ebook that I'm going to be giving away as well. Like all the links to these things and we have affiliate links so you can have, you know, free trials on all of these services as well. For email marketing is we recommend Kit that it used to be called ConvertKit but now it's called Kit. This is, it's a really great interface. I mean mailchimp and Kit have the same functionality. It's really just different interfaces essentially. There may be some difference, but for the most part they're all the same. And this is where you can set up automated thank you emails for your subscribers. This is where you can set up sequences that deliver follow ups for weeks, months, years if you want. This is where you collect all of your email subscribers. You can see the analytics of people opening your emails and interacting with them and who's unsubscribing, who is sharing your message, who is responding to emails, all of that good stuff. Stuff. So a lot of really awesome uses for both of these email marketing tools. And I did want to put a disclaimer on here too. Like there are a lot of other tools out there. If you Google how to do any of the stuff that I'm mentioning in this, in this presentation, you know, you're going to get a lot of options, a lot of ads that show you, hey, like this is, we'll do all the setup for you for free with this one package price. Or you know, we do all of these pieces together. And I don't have experience working with these companies so I only recommend platforms that I know are reliable and that will help you achieve your goals. So, you know, and all these tools do require a decent amount of upfront setup. Like, I'm not saying that you can just sign up to these accounts and they'll, everything will be connected for you. Like, you'll have to follow their tutorials and follow their guides to actually do that. But they're all very well documented. You just need to put in the time to build it. And if you don't have the time, feel free to hire us to build it. But yeah, I mean I've had multiple authors who were interested in direct sales. Like send me an email and say, hey, have you ever heard of this company or have you ever heard of like this service? And I check out their website and it looks legit, like it, you know, it seems like it answers all of your questions and it says like, you know, just create an account for free here and you know, you'll save money on royalties. You'll, we'll set up an online store for you. We'll do all of this stuff. But in my experience from building on, on digital marketing tools on a day to day to day basis for the past five, six years, the tools that include everything, that do everything for you all in one, usually, you know, there's a catch to that, like maybe you don't get access to all of their data. Maybe you can't customize your store the way that you want it to. Maybe there's a hefty monthly fee that you have to pay after signing up, you know, so just do your research. If you really want to dive into this on your own and pick your own tools, just do your research. I'm sure they will all help you get to where you need to go. You can sell your books direct, but just the tools that I'm recommending here allow you full customization, full automation, and it just requires a bit of setup, that's all. But again, it's all very well documented. You just need to put in the time to actually build it. And lastly, you know, with your own online store, you can be authentically you. Every store can be custom built to match your author brand, your genres, your goals. You can make it as simple, straightforward and plain and boring as you want, or you can make it intricate, vibrantly colored and fun or anywhere in between. It's really, you know, anything that you want to do. And that's so, that's why these direct sales is so cool. Because you know, Amazon, yes, you're on there and you get access to their billions of customers. But here, when people get to your website, you can literally create an experience that only your readers can have and you can make it fun and you can put a lot of time into it and just really make an impact on somebody who's interested in buying your book. And that's how you create fans. That's how you build communities. You know, you, you're, you create that experience for somebody. And these stores, they drive more than just book sales. They grow email lists, they build communities, they present new opportunities like branded merch and all the other things that I've been talking about. So, so many opportunities with it. If you're, what if this is, you know, this is something that you're really interested in and you want, want to dive into it. You know, I'd say that's a really big motivator is like, what experience do you want your readers to have on your store? Like, like how do you want people to remember you by? Like, obviously you want them to read your book and get the messages from the book but like, how can you facilitate an amazing experience before they even buy the book? You know, And I think that's why direct sales is becoming so popular nowadays, is just because you, you have full control over that. And I don't know if, if anybody's ever interacted with a really cool website or follow somebody that they really admire and they, they, you know, bought their book and they got a really nice thank you message or they got like a, a handwritten note from the author or like anything that really just made you feel seen or heard or you know, made you want to tell more people about that author. Made you want to tell people about your book. That's the power of direct sales, is you can, you can create that with, with anything. And literally if you use these tools, you can create it from scratch and build whatever it is that you want to do. So you might be asking at this point, isn't Amazon easier? Technically speaking? Probably Amazon is convenient, but you lose the reader data, the control and the long term revenue potential. I actually didn't even create a slide, but I should have created a slide on the royalty differences. So Amazon even just increased their royalty rates just last week. So you're losing money first of all. And then I think the reader data and the control over the experience that your readers are having is even more, more important. You can get paid faster, you can build real relationships with them. You can do both. You know, it doesn't have to be either or. So is Amazon easier? Sure. But I think that this is just much more worthwhile if you're trying to build an author business. What if I'm not tech savvy? You don't need to be. You just need to put in the time. Like I was mentioning. All these tools are very well documented and have tutorials for everything. And if you want help, you know, we have done for you, set up packages that make it even simpler. So you can just start with, you can hit the ground running when we'll just build everything for you. What can I sell besides the book? You can sell signed copies, bundles, workbooks, exclusive content, virtual events, even coaching and courses. Especially if you're a nonfiction author. Direct sales opens that door. There's really no limit to what you can offer on there. Whatever you think that your readers would get value from, you can add it as a product. And even if you don't even think it's going to sell, you throw it on there and test run, run a five dollar a day add to it and see if anybody bites. You know, never really Know what's, what's gonna, what's gonna work there. How do I get people to my store once I build it? Use a lead magnet to grow your list. That's what I was talking about earlier, like a freebie, some sort of introduction, a checklist, a self assessment assessment webinar, and then drive traffic through social media, email ads, influencer partnerships, if you can get them, and keep your store clear, optimized and ready to convert. So that's, that last sentence is what is really important. Before you do the outreach, before you start sharing and letting everybody know that your website is live and then everybody can go there and, and buy it. Make sure that, you know, do a test order on your website. Like go from like login, like grab your, your partner's computer or your partner's phone and go to your website and literally go through the process of buying the book. And if you're, if you get stuck or if you like, you probably won't get stuck because you built it. But if you feel there's too many steps or if you feel like, okay, this needs to be changed a little bit, then you should probably make those changes before promoting it. You want to make sure that that experience is solid for when people do get there so that you're not spending money for people just to get to your site and then drop off and not convert. How do you track success with this? So you want to set up systems in the online store to measure website traffic conversion rates and sales. Shopify and Gumroad and Book Funnel and a couple other tools already have all this stuff built in, so there's really nothing you got to worry about. But if you're building on WordPress, you just need to link up Google Analytics. You just need a plugin on your WordPress website to link it up to your Google Analytics. And then you can see, okay, hey, I'm getting a thousand hits to my store a month, and out of those a thousand hits, 10 people bought my book. Like, that's how you kind of track the success. You gotta make sure that you know where people are coming from, what pages they're visiting. You know, it's, it's all really valuable information. And shout out to Eric Reed for the question in our free community, what shouldn't I be doing? You should not be manually fulfilling orders from your store. I would say that this leaves too much room for error and will take up literally all your time. That would probably be a good problem, you know, if you're selling tons and tons of books, but in Reality, it's not sustainable. And plus, you know, your gas money for driving to the post office all the time, even if you have it set up just to have the post guy pick it up from your door, I'd say it just leaves too much room for error. And there's just tools out there that can automate it. So why not automate it? Save yourself some time in the headspace and just know that, you know, things are being shipped properly. Another question from Eric. What's the ideal first touch point and, and how to structure follow ups without like being annoying with it? I think this is a great question. Well, there's two questions in here, but the best first touch point is to offer something valuable. Valuable upfront. First touch point, it means like somebody has never heard of you before. Somebody's never heard of Eric Reed and his book and what, what his messages are, they just stumble across his website. Okay, how do you make that, how do you offer value to somebody who's never heard of you? Like, where did they come from? Like why, why are they there? Like your, your website and your store, like needs to have a purpose. Like not just hey, buy my book. Like what's, what's your book about? Like what, why do people, why should people stay on the website? Why should they dive deeper and why shouldn't they just leave back to the Google search results and, or chatbots and see what else is they're recommending, you know, like what's going to keep them there? What makes you unique. So the best first touch point is offer something valuable, offer a free resource, a checklist, a mini course that's tied to your book's topic that like immediately scratches an itch for the reader. Okay, what's a, what's a common problem that they have? What's, why are they searching for something online for this? Like what are they looking for? What stage of the journey are they at? Like if you can kind of nail something down to have an front cover of your website, that hero banner, like hey, like thank you for, thank you for coming. Like, here's, here's a checklist for, you know, if you want to get started on X right away. So I'd say that's a really good first touch point. And then they can, you know, you would do an email subscriber wall so people would subscribe and then you would follow up with those people and say, hey, like thank you so much for doing this. I hope you guys got value from it. I also have a book, I also have coaching services. I'm doing a webinar. I have merch, all this good stuff and then how to structure follow ups without being annoying. Start with a thank you email immediately after they engage with your first touch point. So whatever it is that freebie is, thank them for subscribing, make them feel welcome and then follow up with a sequence of three to five emails over the next few weeks. Each email should be providing value. It's not just, you know, taking up space in their inbox. You want to make sure that you are delivering some hard hitting, you know, resources that they can actually benefit from and then gently guide them towards your book or service after that. But it's not an immediate sales pitch right away. It's like building that relationship. So we'll do a bingo card of how many times I'm going to say that today. What's this is shout out to Olayoi for the question. Hopefully I got your name right. What's your take on structuring follow ups without coming off as salesy again? Always begin by thanking them for their time. Each follow up should provide value. Quick tip, relevant story or resource tied to their interest and space it out. Avoid overwhelming people with too many emails. A good rule of thumb would be like three to five follow ups over a couple weeks. So as I promised too, I did make a free ebook for essentially everything that I covered in this presentation here. If you go to book launchers.com direct D I R E C T it'll automatically download an ebook to your computer and yeah it'll cover all the, all the resources that I went over, all the different tools that I use to build these online stores and even in the data that I included way back here on, on direct sales there's, this is only a few bullet points of that data. There's so much more stuff that you can dive into there. So I would recommend reading that just to kind of further show you the benefits of direct sales and what people are thinking about it nowadays. But that's what I would do to get started. So go to book launchers.com direct and yeah, there we go. So I think at this point probably ready for some questions.

Yes, and you were right Shane. You did answer several of them right off the cuff. So let's see Alvin, your question about Shopify versus WooCommerce. He did cover that, that woo commerce is that plugin for you? There was a question that came in before that though and I don't think you covered this. My brain didn't hear it so sorry if you did. But this is from Deborah Ann and it says so I have wix and trying to use Lulu Book Vault didn't have my book size. Do you put ebooks on WIX or in Lulu or both?

Both might be a little confusing. Do you put books on WIX or Lou? I haven't put books on either of them to be honest. But if Lulu has your book size, I would probably go with them. And if it's Wick store does. Oh, bookfall doesn't have your size. Okay then yeah, I would, I would give Lulu a try and I believe maybe see if they integrate with, with WIX and they can do those automatic fulfillment stuff. If not, Lulu will be able to put together your own little landing page for your book as well. Yeah, I'm sorry, Sorry Deborah, I don't have a ton of information on that for you.

Okay, let's see the next one then. So she did have a follow up question later about a coaching site. Both good wix and you were mentioning, I think with Shopify having more than one item on there, if she wants to do her book coaching and other things as well as their particular one that might be best suited to that.

Hadn't started adding to profile yet. I'm just. Deborah, I'm just trying to understand your question. So you're building a coaching site but also setting up a direct sales store. I mean your WIX site can do both. I want to do a coaching site trying to figure out the best way to do it. I would say your website should be primarily focused on you as a coach. You as, as like the thought leader in whatever niche it is that you are. So show value right away. Show why Deborah, Deborah and Martin is the, is the voice to be listened to in this space. What are your credentials? Showcase, you know, your previous, your previous coaching work. Maybe if you have like a portfolio or clients that you've worked with, like showcase that first off, show that like credibility immediately and then have your book, you know, there as an addition to it. So the book should be like an addition to your coaching. Like, hey, like here's what I do, here's my experience, here's what I'm good at. And then also I've written a book on the topic. You know, that's what I would recommend doing. And then as far as connecting it with Lulu and Book Vault, all that good stuff. Yeah, I wish I had more information for you right now, but I got to do my own research. I actually want to test out with some of these new tools as everything's coming out. I actually want to see if some authors would be some test dummies for, for the, the these other services so I can get a handle on what, you know, how they all work and what's the best platform out there because I think it's long overdue with all these other tools out there. We should really have somebody who knows like which one's the best to go with.

Awesome. Thank you. And I was trying to spotlight you and it spot lit me and I don't know why I want it to spotlight you.

You just want to be the spotlight, that's all.

I guess it doesn't, it doesn't want to work. Okay, so this is a question from Eric. So Storyfront for non fiction with Nothing Option A WordPress Woo to book Vault Shopfront. I'm gonna let you understand this question, Shane, because a little bit of this is, is over my head.

WordPress Option A WordPress Woo book vaults, Shopify for merch. Oh, which is my pick between WordPress Woo Book Vault or Shopify. Woo. Book Vault, which is your pick? Oh, I would say, Eric, if you already have a store on WordPress, I think you commented way back when that you already had like you already had a WordPress setup. If you already have that, stick with that. Don't transfer over to Shopify. But if you're just starting out, I would go Shopify. Woo. Book Vault. In my experience, it's just had less problems. Not like problems, but like less.

Less.

Hiccups in the setup. And I don't know, I'd like to know if you actually have that set up already. But I would recommend if you already have a WordPress site, stick with that. If you're used to that tool, don't learn a whole new tool and just stick with that because they have the same functionality. WooCommerce is just a bit more effort to build with and it's more customizable. However, it's just a little bit more of a setup.

All right, next up, let's see. So Cynthia Barnett asked who prints the book.

So for Book Vault it is called a print on demand worldwide. So they have, they are, you know, Book Vault of service and I'm sure Lulu and maybe some other companies out there are the same. So they're like the service, they're like the front man business that does the printing and the fulfillment. So the people who print the book, it's just like an actual book printer. Like for Book Vault they have printers in Canada and US and Australia and uk and the way it works is Depending on where somebody bought the book, like wherever in the world it gets printed from the closest printing location and out the door. So that's, and you know, that's kind of what I was hinting at at the beginning of this presentation too, is like, why now book sales? Because why now do you, why do you do direct sales now? Because, you know, this, the, the reach for these direct sales printers and fulfillment is just expanding. You know, they're opening, there's new printing locations opening up all over the place that allow you to ship worldwide. So hopefully that answers your question.

Next up is From Eric with IngramSpark. Can you direct without opening for distribution?

Yeah, I, I, I wish I knew this, actually. I, I don't know, Eric. I'm sorry. But maybe it's IngramSpark share and sell program. I would just Google that. Check out the page there. And I want to say no, because they offered it as like an alternative option. So I don't think you have to do the wide distribution to do just the share and sell program. But I could be wrong. Sorry. I don't know. Eric.

Okay, next up is from. And we're just flying through these because we've, we've still got plenty to go through from Joy Young. What is the most economic way to order a volume of books that I might take to a conference to sell?

Let me, I have that written down.

I was gonna say something that Eric had commented. That is an option, Joy, is to purchase author copies and have them sent there. You would want to coordinate with your contact at the event just to try to have an accurate number of books. That way you don't way over order or way under order. But then yes, most of the time, even if it's at like a hotel, they can receive those for certain events. Shane, was it something different you were going to add?

Yeah, our production, our head of production at Book Launchers. Sh. She, she would be the one to answer that question. But I just asked her this the other day and for a different client, and she said that you can, if you have ingramspark to that does global distribution, you can order author copies at print at print cost plus shipping. So that would be the most economic way to order a volume of books. I'm not sure if you're printed through Ingram, but wherever you're printing through, see if they offer author copies. So that way you can actually order like basically what Angela said.

Yeah, yeah. The author copies is going to be the way to go, though. You don't want to like go to Amazon and order like 200 copies of your book new. That would be very, very pricey. It would get the job done, but it would be very pricey and not. Not so great. Okay, next up. And you know what? I'm gonna take a break. We're gonna do a prize. We're gonna do another prize, guys. Just because. Why not? We are within the home stretch. We're under an hour to go. And let's see. Sorry, there were more questions coming in. Let me get this giveaway tool sharing again. Give Shane's voice a break for 30 seconds.

Thank you.

Okay, so this is just going to be for the people who have commented so far today. We're probably going to do more hashtags or something in particular later. More keywords. So let's see who our new winner is today. As a reminder, if you have already been one of our lucky winners, I will reach you just so that we can share the book Launchers. Swag Love, Lloyd, a Vermont Sarah senior. Congrats. Thank you so much for tuning in and for commenting on this live stream. So, Lloyd, I have plenty of prize options. Please email me at team T A M book launchers.com let me know which you would like as well as your mailing address. And let me remove this. We're going to go back to some questions and. Oh, I see that. I still have Joy's question up there. Okay, so this was more of a comment, but I thought it might be something that you could also talk about as well, Shane. So Jessica said, I literally just created my store on Canva for free as I don't have a budget to pay for a site monthly right now. So I purchased a domain connected to Canva and buy. And add a buy now button for my book, which leads. Oh, and it didn't save the second part of her question. Darn.

Is there a part two?

I think there was more to it. Let me see if there. Let me see if I can find by the time stamp.

While you're looking. I can comment on it. That's awesome that you made it on Canva for free. It's a fun tool to work with that website builder on there. I use Canva all the time too.

It leads to Lulu. I found it.

Can'T.

Yeah.

So, okay. All right. Is she asking if it can lead to Lulu? I have a budget paper site monthly, but. So I purchased a domain connected to Canva, add a buy now button for my book, which will lead to Lulu. So the buy. Let me. Let me do a quick little Google search right now. Does L Direct. I actually don't know this. It looks like Lulu's allowed, like, he allows you to have landing pages. So yeah, what you would need to do, Jessica, is. And I don't know this for certain, but you would basically link the Buy now button on your Canvas store, go create an account on Lulu Direct, and they'll have like a page for you to sell your book on. You know, have an image of your book, the description, and then an actual Buy now button. The problem with that is, though, you're like, when people want to go buy your book, they have to click Buy now like two or three times. So that's kind of like not ideal. That's why it's great to have your own online store. Or like, I understand you don't have the budget for it, but in that case, if you don't. If you don't have the budget for it, then I would look into something like. Something like Gumroad that will allow you to create a free account and you could sell your ebook on there. It wouldn't, like, you wouldn't be able to do the print fulfillment, but you could, you know, since you don't have a budget to set all that stuff up, I would do like, you can just do a landing page on Gumroad for your book. You know, have your big cover image, the title book description, the price, and then you can just deliver your book right to people's emails. So you don't, like, have to sell the print copies. You can just do the ebook and see, like, okay, you know, if a lot of people are buying it, you know, all of that is profit. You know, every single time you sell an ebook, you're getting, there's no overhead for that. So you get a 9.99 or whatever it is. So I would test, test out with Gumroad.

Thank you, Shane. Next up, Prescriptive Living asks, is it even worth it to sell or do direct sales for audiobooks?

I mean, let's see, for audiobooks, I would set up like, the way that I set it up, I set it up through Book Funnel. I believe the membership for book funnel is $15 a month. It's cheaper if you pay for the year. So I think it's a hundred bucks for the year. And then to add audiobooks on top of that, to add audiobook delivery, it's an additional $10 a month. So that's $220 a year. So it is worth it if you are selling more audiobooks than that. If you're selling more audiobooks to compensate for that. So if you say you don't pay yearly, it's $15 plus. So it's $25 a month to sell your audiobook on your store. Say Your audiobook is $25 to buy. You just need to sell one a month. So I would say. I would say it's worth it, assuming that you would be able to sell more than once a month. You know, if you sell 3, 4, 5, even better. It's all profit after that. So I would say yes, definitely.

That was actually something I was wanting to ask you or make sure that you address. Shane is are there fees, like an average amount of fees or costs that authors should expect with this?

Yeah, it's a great question. The. The fees that I've seen are really just the printing and the shipping costs because you don't have a. When you sell direct, you don't have to pay royalties or pay Amazon fees or stocking fees or shipping fees or anything like that. You literally just. You set up. That's why. That's the beauty of this. You set up your own online store. You connect all the fulfillment, and all you're doing is hiring a printer to print and ship your book. And that's what Book Vault and Lulu does. They will print and ship the share and sell as well. The ingramspark share and sell. So they will print and ship your book for you. And some of them will do like, initial setup fee, but It'll be like 20 bucks just to like, just to get the book on the store.

Okay, next one. I didn't know if you might know what this was. I think I'd asked for more context, but I don't think I've seen it. They were also curious about paid ads, and I didn't know if you had any advice for paid ads regarding direct sales.

Yeah, so paid ads are an excellent way to drive traffic to your websites. And you pay for two things. You pay for the traffic to your website, but you also pay for all the data that comes with that. So you can see what demographics you're targeting and which ad images people are interacting with the most. Which buy buttons are people liking or resonating with the most. And I would recommend running ads on meta. So just look up Matt Meta advertising on Google. And. And you can create an account. If you have a Facebook account, you can run Facebook ads. Facebook and Instagram, it's all on the same platform. So you would just run ads across both platforms. And essentially what you would do is you would, you know, create an Account you would. It walks you through the whole process of creating an ad. It'll show you how to add an image. It'll show you how to add five different titles to test with. It'll show you how to add a link to your website. And yeah, so once you set up all of those pieces, you'd let it run and I would say do five bucks a day to start out, so. And run it for a couple weeks. Just don't. And then let it run. Don't touch anything. And then go back a week or two later and see, okay, where, like, what's working, what's not. Am I just spending money and nobody's buying, buying my book? Why aren't they buying my book? Like, I'm getting thousands of people on my website but nobody's buying it. Okay, you have two questions to answer. Am I targeting the right people? And is my online store optimized to sell? Maybe people are getting there and they're getting lost and confused and they don't know where to go and buy the book. Or maybe like you have a book on self development for accountants but you're promoting to a bunch of woodworkers. Like those are things you got to consider when you're doing paid ads. So paid ads, this, this, I wouldn't say it's really like a question. It's more just like a statement, paid ads. But that would be a whole nother presentation that I could dive into. If you want to learn more about it, just drop another question. I'd be happy to touch on it. If you have like specific questions about the paid ads.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. If you, if you post that in there, prescriptive living, just let us know. Okay, next up is quality during design. Asks after the three to five email nurture sequence, how have you concluded it successfully?

After the 35 nurture sequence, how have you concluded it successfully? I wouldn't say that anything is like concluded at this point. I would say this is just like the 5 email welcome that every single, like what I said in the presentation, you want all your readers to experience, to have the same experience, the same purchasing experience, the same enrollment experience, the same five email experience, so that that five email nurture sequence like welcomes people in. So I'm assuming that this you're kind of referencing like when people sign up or when people buy your book, they get opted in. You say thank you so much for buying the book. And then the next email says, you know, here's some podcasts that I found really relevant or here's Some articles that I found and then, you know, continue to offer value. So after that five email sequence, nothing's concluded. This is just like now these people, if they're still subscribed and they're still opening your emails and responding and interacting with you now they, they know, they know what this is all about. They're comfortable here. This is the new normal. They, they, they that you've started that relationship. So now as the author, you keep that relationship going.

Cool, thank you. Eric was asking, There we go. Eric was asking about the $750 for direct sales on our website. And Eric, were you just curious? I'm, I wasn't sure. Like, let's see, this was another one he had said. Like, does the $750 on our website include the WordPress woo book vault setup and design? So yeah. Shane, do you want to talk about that?

Yeah, yeah. Eric, the, the, that 750 fee covers the Connect. Yeah. So WordPress, a basic WordPress website. So not like a full blown five page site. It would just be an online storefront on your WordPress website, plus the Book Vault connection. And that'll also help you set up those email automation pieces as well. So that covers like essentially the building blocks of that store. If you want a full on full website. In addition to that, you know, a homepage about the author, a book page, media page, all that, all that stuff, that would be an additional charge. But the 750 covers. Yes. The online storefront, the integration with Book Vault and then the email automation.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm gonna post in the chat the specific page that Eric is talking about if others are interested in looking at it as well. Okay, next question. Let's see. So let's remove that one. Got Eric's question. Okay, so Alvin asks, so for clarity, can I sell my ebooks and audiobooks on Shopify? I thought I heard you say digital files would, would need to be on WooCommerce.

No. So yeah, I think it'd be important to clarify here. Shopify and WooCommerce achieve the same goal. They're both online stores but they're separate. You don't want to use both at the same time because then you have two online stores selling the same thing. That would be like, you know, say you have a, say you have a, you have a store on Main street in your town and then you have a store right next door on that same main street that sells the same things. That wouldn't really make a lot of sense. So WooCommerce, Shopify are both in their own tools, and they can both achieve all of those. Like, they can sell ebooks, audiobooks, all of that stuff. Audiobooks require a little bit more setup. So for clarity, can I sell my ebooks and audiobooks on Shopify? Yes, absolutely. Ebooks are just delivered via email, so that's a simple app that you would download on a Shopify and then Audiobooks. What you would want to do is you connect your. Your Book Funnel account. There's a lot of, lot of, A lot of software to be used here. But with audiobooks, you need like an app or a platform for people to listen on. Right. Like, you don't want to just send. If somebody buys your audiobook on your store, you don't want to just send them 25 audio files, like MP3 files, you know, for your book. That's not realistic. You want to give them a platform to listen to that's not Amazon, Audible or Shopify or Spotify, the music app, not to be confused with the. The online store platform. So Book Funnel is an app that allows users to listen to audiobooks that they buy from authors, and that's what you would need to connect to Shopify. A lot of moving pieces there, so hopefully that made sense. But, yes, you can sell your ebooks and audiobooks on Shopify. You can sell your ebooks and audiobooks on WooCommerce. You just need these automation, these fulfillment tools to make that happen.

Yeah, and Julie will use Book Funnel for some of her books as well. So, yeah, there's. There are a lot of names out there. There's Book Vault, there's Book Funnel. Yes, there are a lot of different. A lot of different ones out there, so hopefully that clarifies it. Okay, next up from Christy Piper. Do you use a blog or other ways to drive traffic to your website? I miss the first, first part. If you already mentioned it.

Yeah, no worries, Christy. I didn't touch on this specifically, so it's a good question. Yeah. Use a blog to drive traffic to your website. I think it's a great way to do it. As long as you know you're writing about topics that, I mean, you want to make sure that you optimize it for search engines. You know, write about topics that people are searching for. However, I would say the most powerful and fastest way to drive people to your website nowadays is social media. So I think blogging is really, is still very much relevant, if not even more so, because with chat, GPT and these AI tools coming out, you don't even have to be Ranking at the top of Google for chat GPT to recommend you anymore. Chat GPT and these AI tools are going to recommend the most relevant information for a specific user for a specific query, right? So I'm even noticing our website, our company website is starting to show up a lot more with, with AI tools just because we have like a lot of, a lot of relevant information on a lot of specific niche topics around self publishing. So blogs are still very useful, but I would not use them like alone. Like, I would like write a blog and then use multiple pieces of content from that blog. So don't like, if, if you write a blog on a topic that dives deep into one specific thing, maybe create a couple social media posts that you pulled from there and, and maybe it could just be you talking. It could just be like a voiceover and some nice graphics or just like an image and then explaining, you know, what it is that you're trying to convey. And then link people to your blog, to your website. That's what I would recommend doing. So a blog's great, but I would recommend pairing it with other methods of reaching out and all these other methods of reaching out, you know, make sure that you're driving people back to your website. So your, your bio and your social media channel should have your websites. The bottom of your post should have it, you know, and just always invite people. You know, it doesn't have to be like, check out my website. It's more just like, if you'd like to learn more, you can, you can see my website here.

It's like the modern day business card. You know, you don't always hand it out and like flaunt it, but it's very much available and there for people to, to check out and you mention it, at least that way they know that you have it and they can go look at things there.

Yeah, of course. Like if you're in a conversation at a cocktail party, you know, you're not gonna want to talk to the guy who keeps saying, you know, go look at my website. Oh yeah, this is on my website. Go, go check it out there. Like, like you're not gonna want to talk to that guy. You're gonna go like to the other side of the room. But if, you know, if, if you're, if you're talking about something that's relevant to them and you're taught you're providing value and you say, you know, if you'd like to learn more, all you need to do is go here. Like that's, that's what it's all about.

Yeah. Okay. Dan Riley asked, what's the average turnaround time to set up direct sales when using book launchers.

Okay. Hey Dan, I can't see you but hope you're doing well. But average turnaround time to set up a direct sales. I can set it up within a week or two, two maximum. But usually I can build it in a week.

Awesome. Joy Young asked, if I want to sell internationally, how is that going to work?

So these tools that I mentioned in the presentation, Joy, are they all offer international shipping? Actually a lot of them have printers worldwide. The Book Vault especially. I know that they have a US printer, one in Canada, one in, in Australia and one in the uk. I don't know if I said that already, but so, and what it works is anybody who buys a book from your store, the they, you know, the IP of that person's address is tracked and they, the, the printer that is closest to that location ships the book from there so you can sell it internationally there. It's, I mean, yeah, it's, it's pretty intuitive nowadays and it's only going to get better. Like Amazon obviously ships it everywhere to any, anybody in a day or two. But these new direct sales tools are getting better. And you know, you can have a book to readers doorstep in like three to five business days with that. So you can definitely sell internationally through direct sales. And if you're selling ebooks and audiobooks, that's anywhere anyone who has an Internet connection can access it.

Prescriptive Living asks, can you forward multiple domains to one site?

You sure can. Yeah, you can have as many as you want. And wherever you bought it, whether it be GoDaddy, Namecheap, Domains.com, squarespace, I think that's not even around any. Oh yeah, it is Squarespace. They bought Google domains there. I could go down a list. There's like 25 different places you could buy a domain from. And yeah, just go into your domain registrar where you bought them, click into the settings and there will be a forwarding option and you can essentially just like say, okay, forward this domain to my main website. So you can always have these cool little name tags to tag everywhere.

Awesome. Liz asked, what about a Google site? And now I am blanking on the context of what that was in reference to. Do you know?

Yeah, this, I would need some context for this. Just because Google doesn't like. Google doesn't build websites. Google directs you to websites.

Yeah. Liz, if you're still watching, if you could provide a little bit more Context. We'll get that later because I remember it in the moment and now I don't remember what you've been talking about today.

Yeah, yeah. Liz would be happy to help.

Next question from David Grady. Since Amazon reviews is such a big thing, how is that impacted by direct sales?

That is a big thing, you're right. But I would say these are two totally separate thing. So if I don't word this, if people on your direct sales store, they are probably not going to leave the store, go on Amazon, see how many reviews you have, and then go back to your store and then buy it from there. They're probably just going to buy it from your direct sale store, or they just don't buy it from your direct sales store. I think it's like as an author who's published on both, like, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all the things, and then you want to have your own online store. Like, I get, like, there's so. There's so much knowledge out there. Like, okay, you know, you need to get reviews for your Amazon page. You need to like, get the word out there and start building that up because that helps with conversions on Amazon. But it's like, I would say these are two separate things. It's really, it's. Which one do you want to focus more on? Like, if you want to focus more on Amazon reviews, then, then you should not do a direct sales store and you should focus on Amazon. But if you want the customer data and if you want to build relationships and create experiences for your readers, then direct sales is your way to go. Um, it's a lot of different thing. It's, it's tough to do both at the same time. I think you'd want to stick with one and just roll with that. Like, it just depends on, like, okay, what are your goals? What are your goals as, as an author? Like, do you want to create this custom experience for your readers or do you just want to sell books? If you just want to sell books and you just want to move as many as possible and just get those Amazon bestseller flags and, and have all the access that Amazon does and then focus on Amazon, I would say just. But if you want all the pieces, all the benefits that I mentioned in this presentation about direct sales, then I would focus on that. But I would say Amazon reviews and direct sales, it's like two different objectives there. So you don't, like, you don't want to try to build both up because you're going to do half the effort of one and then half the effort of the other when you want to put full effort into just one.

All right, let's give Shane's voice a break for just a moment so he can grab a drink of water. No, not at all. I am just imagining that if it were me. I would really like a little break if I were you. So I would like to. I think I had asked this earlier. I don't remember seeing any responses. So I will ask it again. And I would love to see see participation in the chat for this. I would like to know who already had direct sales before this presentation and who does not have direct sales as of yet. So if you did have direct sales already set up and you use this presentation to help clarify some things for you, please put a yes into the comments. And if you have not had your direct sales set up set up yet, please put a no in the comments. I just love to see a quick poll and I don't think you can actually do polls in in stream yard, which I would love to do. But I would love to see who had it set up beforehand and who did not. Okay, so we're so far more no's. Okay, so this is a great foundation point for you guys. So well done. Shane ended already just for being so specific with your stuff. I think I've only seen one yes so far. Wow, Eric, looks like just you. Okay, keep it coming guys. Let's see. No, not yet. No, not yet. No. No. Wow.

What are people saying no to again?

So they did not have direct sales set up. So Eric is the only one who has currently set up direct sales.

Wow.

So, so many people. How interesting. Yeah, Eric, you are the only one. Okay, so this is really solid foundational information for you guys. So unbreakable TV says I've set up something but only for a signed copy of my book.

That's cool.

Interesting. Okay, guys, well, yeah, so great info here. Feel free to save this video to a playlist like on your YouTube channel so that you can come back and watch it again in the future. Eric said, but not as good as Shane can. He's talking about like the direct sales that are perfect. And yeah, Gino, you're exactly right. That's why we are here. Awesome. Okay, well, let's get back to the questions because we are in the final 25 minutes. Okay, so Cynthia Barnett asked is Bookbaby a good option instead of Ingram? And Cynthia, I didn't know if you what context you were asking this in if it was as a distributor. Ingram is going to be a wider distributor than Bookbaby Shane, do you know, do you might have an idea of some of the context of what this could be in reference to?

I mean I know Cynthia, Cynthia was part of our communities. I know, I know that we were working with her on a few things. And you're working on your book. I would say. Yeah, I would need to know like what, like is a good option for what? For, for publishing your book or selling your book. Like that's what I would need to know. That'd be my follow up question.

Okay. Yeah. Cynthia, let us know if you add some additional context into the chat. We'll, we'll come back to that. Okay. This is an author website question from Lori. My book goes to the editor next week. So when do you create your. I imagine this is author website.

Yeah. Hey Lori. I would start building it now. That would be, now's the best time. If it's going to your editor then it's going to be out of your hands for just a little bit. I think that's the perfect amount of time to start doing that. What I would start with is start building that your email newsletter list. Create an account with kit. Create an account with, with Mailchimp and either or you can, you can get 14 days for free with book launchers.com forward/kit K I T and and build a landing page that says hey I'm Lori, I'm coming out with a book soon. Here's what the book's going to be about. If you want more information, you want some behind the scenes details, if you want to get, be the first to get the pre order link. You know, sign up here and I'll give you some more information. And what we call that is a book army. So you want to send that to you know, friends, family, your own like personal or professional network. Start building up that email subscriber list. You know, even if it's just people that you know just to start out, those are your, you know, your brand ambassadors, those are the people who are going to be sharing a message when it does come out. So have all that set up. So do a landing page. It doesn't have to be like a huge full blown website. Do a single page. Hey, I'm Lori Wilson, here's my book. Sign up for more details. Obviously you can include a little bit more information than that. And then when people sign up, do a little welcome email, say thank you so much for signing up. You know, here's what to expect coming forward and look out for more of my emails coming soon.

Awesome. That was a great response. And our website guy, as he said at the beginning, so perfect one. Okay, this is a question from Eric. I would assume for direct sales, you need to come with COVID formatted for a Book Vault ready to load.

Yeah, good question, Eric. Yes. So the way it works is when you go to do the setup, I would need to know. I would need to know, you know, what the size, what the dimensions of your books are, what your book is, how many pages there are, what type of COVID it is. Hardcover, paperback, glossy, laminate, matte. I would also need to have like the finalized interior files. So like in a, in a PDF form. They're on the Book Vault website. They have guides on, like, how to size all of these things. Like, like what the interior file size should be and what, you know, what the. The page bleed should be and all that good stuff. And yeah, same thing with the COVID You would need to have the COVID formatted specifically for the printer, so it would need to be all print ready. So all things that you would probably do the same thing. Set it. Setting it up on Amazon. And yeah, there's sizing charts and everything on their website. I'm sure Lulu also has sizing charts as well and any other of these direct sales companies that I kind of recommended.

Awesome. Yeah, thank you. All right, so we did get a little bit of clarity. Not. Not much. So going back to that. That Google sites. So Liz was saying you can build a free website on Google sites. I don't think I've seen anything come through about. About what if that was for perhaps a storefront or an author website.

Yeah, I actually, I didn't even know this was a thing, but you can build free landing pages on Google. So I would say, Liz, like, if you. If you want to get that started, like, go right ahead. It seems like it's a really easy way to. To build an online store. I mean, I mean, not an online store, sorry, a. A website. It. But it looks more of just like, like a portfolio. Like there's not much functionality you can do with it. Like, it's. If you want to sell your books from it, it doesn't look like you can do that. It's more of just like here's a little space of the Internet that is uniquely yours.

Perfect. Yay. So thanks for clarifying that. And you learned something new too.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Liz.

Okay, another question from Christy Piper. Is there a good widget to link your Amazon reviews onto your own website?

Yeah, I saw this question in the queue and I looked it up. And I'm going to post this in the private chat. I don't have access to the regular chat.

Oh, I see. Okay, I will share it.

Share that with her.

Okay, Christy, I will put this into the chat and then I will also save this link so that it can be added to the video description later. Okay, perfect. Okay, so we got some clarity from one of the questions earlier, so. Or they're. I'm sorry, they're looking for a little bit of clarity. So if I were to have a domain for my book that is one domain, but want to redirect a domain to a webpage that is an entirely different domain, is that possible?

I have a domain for my book that is one domain. Redirected domain to a webpage that's entirely different domain. Yes. Yeah, I mean, what you're asking is possible. Would I recommend it? Probably not. It's. You want to keep things simple. And I, I wouldn't say you want to have like, there was a question earlier that I answered, like, can you forward domains to one website? Like, yes, absolutely. You can do that and you can always have that option. But like, if you want to have like a full website and then your book page itself be like a totally different domain, I think that's just, that's your. It's, it's confusing. It's. It's. It's a confusing setup. And I don't even think your users would appreciate that. What I would, what I would do is maybe forward like, okay, say you have a domain that's prescriptive living.com and then the name of your book is, is how to Live Prescriptively. I'm sorry, I'm just making this up. If you have the domain how to Live Prescriptively, you can point that to the book page of your website. So it's the same deal. It's just forwarding it. So it's not like when people navigate around, they see a totally different domain name that's, you know, it would still be prescriptive living.com and then you can just share with people. Yeah. All you need to do is go to howtoliveprescriptively.com and it'll go right to the book or right to your online store, whatever it is that you're trying to set up. So, yes, it's possible, but I would recommend keeping that setup simple.

Awesome. Alrighty, guys, we are getting down to the last couple questions and before we get to those, I'm going to do another prize because it's been a little bit and so let me. Oh, I thought I stopped sharing that comment. I did not. Okay, let me open this back up again. We are. And we'll do one other prize at the very end. So stay tuned. Stick around for just less than 20 minutes left. So let's see who is this upcoming prize winner? There should be. Julie always says this, but there really should be music. Joy Young. Wait, did you win earlier? Am I blanking on that? I don't think you didn't. You didn't. So fantastic. Joy, thank you so much. We always love having you on our live streams, whether it's our YouTube lives or our deep dives. So fantastic. Thank you so much for all of your comments and participation. Let me know. You should have my email address. Let me know which of the prizes you would like. Okay.

So also I want to touch on one note that I'm just reading the chat and Eric Reed had a really great idea for David. He said that if you. With direct sales, like he was, David was asking about like Amazon reviews plus direct sales, like which one should be focusing on. I think that was a great idea, Eric. Like you, when people buy the book, when people buy the book from your own online store, you can have like a 99 cent ebook sale. And, and so in the thank you email, like when people buy your book, you can say, hey, like if you like my, my actual book is available on Amazon for 99 cents. If you click this link and go buy it and then leave a review, send me a screenshot of the review, review and then I'll send you a signed copy or I, I will, you know, I'll give you this, this free resource that, that will like this free workbook that goes with the book, you know, so if you, so actually you can do both if you really want to. That would be a pretty seamless way to do it. So great idea, Eric.

Awesome. Okay, so we got some clarity from Cynthia. So trying to decide whether Book Baby or Ingram is the best place platform for printing and distribution. I'm planning to square. Square. Is it square face?

I think it's square. Squarespace, not.

Oh, I was gonna say is this one I don't know of for the book page and maybe list it to Spotify for direct sale. So what are your thoughts on. On that chain?

Interesting. Cynthia. I would do, I mean we would recommend Ingram. It's the best platform. And Squarespace and Spotify, I would just pick one of those. I wouldn't do both because then you have two different websites. You have two different platforms. You got to Worry about if you just want to do direct sales, do stick with Shopify. Don't do Squarespace because on Spotify it's. It is an online. It is a website builder. It just has the online store functionality. Squarespace is a website builder first and then you have to connect all of the online store functionality. Spotify already. Wait, Shopify already? I do that all the time. Shopify. Spotify. I do that all the time. Shopify has all that functionality. Plus you can build an online store all on one platform, have analytics and connect all the printing and fulfilling all that good stuff. So I would say don't use Squarespace, just stick with stuff. Shopify if you're going to do direct sales.

Yeah. And as far as distribution, ingramspark is what we use and it is going to have a wider distribution than you will. So that is one of the reasons why we did it. Okay, and next up, Gino says is there a limit to how many pictures I can include in my book? I wasn't sure if this was a book specific question itself or if there is some sort of limit within direct sales PDFs.

I would say no. I wouldn't say there's a limit. However, very important thing to consider. The more pictures that you have, your printing cost is going to go through the roof. So if you want to have tons of pictures on every page, direct sales may not even be worth it because you're gonna like the money that you would save in royalties. Like you're gonna end up paying for it with printing. Not saying you shouldn't have pictures in your book. However, if you're like just by the question, I have a hunch that there's probably a lot of pictures. So just. You just know that your printing cost is going to go up.

Yeah, absolutely. And if it's color pictures as well, totally. Okay, we have. This might be the last question. Can I buy author hardback straight from Lightning Swap source and not have to use their Amazon distribution? I also heard so Ingrams Lightning Source should be the same thing as IngramSpark. I believe that Lightning Source is what it used to be called or their way for ordering used to be called that. So I also heard ingramspark has a direct link I could put on a website or newsletter. I don't know about the direct link. Shane, do you know about that one?

Yeah. So Antoinette, you're right. In Group Spark does have a direct link you can you can put on your website or your newsletter. That's the IngramSpark share and sell program. That's that's the. You can just put a link directly to your book. And you just need to go and create an account on the Ingram share and sell program that they have so that you're. You can have like a landing page for your book. And that link that you could put on your website or your newsletter, you could say, you know, buy my book here. And it would go right to this page on ingramsparks share and sell page. And it would have your cover description by the book. And then it would just automatically ship and fulfill through them. The only downside of that is that you can't see who those people are. All you see is a number on screen that a sale came through. You can't see their email, you can't see where they came from. All that good stuff.

Okay. And I just looked it up as well. Lightning source and in response are different. I apologize. So they, they're similar, but they are not exactly the same. Okay. And then Eric said that he looked it up. Sharon, Sale cell does not need to be open for distribution. Okay, that is the last question I have seen, guys, which is perfect because we are right at the cusp of being finished. So what we're going to do is, like I said, we have another prize to give away. But before we do that, I would love to see a lot of love come through for Shane just for taking time. This is his first deep dive, guys, and he did a great job, did he not? So please take a moment to type out some thanks or perhaps what was your favorite thing that you learned in the chat? Ooh, actually, we're going to do two more prizes. I'm feeling generous. We're going to do a random name picker. And then I would love to hear what your favorite takeaway was from. From today's training. And I'm going to have Shane pick that one. So I'm going to put you on the spot, Shane. So once those start pouring in, as far as takeaways, you will get to choose those. So while we do that, let's do the random name picker. Let me get that pulled back up.

Thank you, everybody. I'm happy that a lot of the audience members hadn't set up direct sales yet. So, you know, I kind of geared it toward the beginner. Like, okay, how do I get started? And that's what the data is showing too. Like, more and more people are converting over into direct sales. So it's really important for authors to get to know this stuff and start to understand that this is possible and this is Very doable. Like with even platforms that you already have, you know.

Awesome. Okay, let's see. Let's see who this final. At least for the random draw. The final winner is for today. Let's see. Prescriptive Living, you had lots of questions, so I'm so glad that we were able to answer as many of those as we could for you. So Prescriptive Living, please email me at team T E A M book launchers.com let me know which of the prices you would like. I will also need your mailing address and I apologize, I feel like I should know who this person is behind this YouTube handle, but I don't. So I will also need your name. There's so many YouTube handles on here that I can't keep track of them all. So I apologize if I don't remember your name because of your YouTube handle. Okay, so we have. Let me remove this from the screen. We've got some, some Shane Love coming in. Let's see. Favorite takeaway. I don't see it yet. Jodi, yours looks like it was the first one, but I don't see anything yet. Lori Wilson said, thanks so much for being so honest, transparent. Your knowledge is valuable. Eric's favorite takeaway was mapping out the tools and when and where to plug them in the heart's way. Says your presentation helps me understand the step by step process and how to put the pieces together. That's fantastic. Gina said, I learned so much, especially about direct sales in general. That's fantastic to. Especially since so many of you guys, essentially all of you besides Eric, unless you didn't put it in the chat, haven't set that up yet. So we can help you with it. But you know, even if we're not the ones helping, we would love to be. You have a solid foundation. Deborah says, yeah, thanks Shane. You answered all my questions that I put in and I learned a lot about direct sales. I sent an email to Book Launchers to get more info about working with you guys. Yeah. Because she and you had mentioned a potential, potential guinea pig client. So I asked Deborah to write into us. Carla says, great presentation. I love that I can hire someone to help me with this. I'm in the author accelerator group.

Oh yeah. Hey Carla. Yeah, I know. I know you.

Yes. Yeah, we do have communities, guys. If you are new to the book launchers world. We have two different communities. We have a free community that is a really great tool for asking questions, learning about the book process. Eric is in there. Eric is very active in there as well. We also have a paid one that is 150 per month for authors whose books are launching or have launched. So Shane has done presentations in there as well. And we have office hours, so that's another really great place. So I will pull up those links. My multitasking skills are going to have to come into play here. I'll pull up those links to share in the chat. If you're not a part of the communities, we would love to see you in there. It's like this but you know, just every day. It's not just on the deep dives.

Yeah.

Shane, anything you want to say? Sorry, like while I'm getting those links, anything you want to add about the community?

No, I don't, I don't think so. It's been really active lately. More, more active than, than, than ever. It's, it, it's, it's growing. We're also going to be coming out with a new book marketing software in the next couple weeks. What's going to be called Author Launch Kit and essentially it's using the power of AI and combining it to create an awesome book marketing tool. So that's going to be coming out soon. The members of our community are going to be the first ones to access it. So if you're interested, go sign up to the free one or if you want some more one on one help just like this, go to Author Business Accelerator. So the links, we can put the links in the chat too?

Yeah, I just did. At least for the communities. Yeah, that's why I was hoping for a quick second for my brain to do that so I could post those in there. Okay, let's keep going through some of these because we only have a couple left. Christy said. Thank you. Shane, what you said about, about the AI picking up on the valuable niche blog post was so helpful. It will help uncover and match buyers with experts. The rest of your answers were so well thought out.

Yeah. Christy, I'm glad you got value from that. AI is, it's, it's changing everything right now and it's like you don't even have to be top of Google anymore. It's just if you have the best information on any subject, it will like it. You know, it'll source you out. It's a really great tool. That's, that's becoming smarter than all of us already.

Yeah, right. Joy said, my big takeaway is that direct sales does not require me to go to the post office.

Yeah, that's alone. That's a win.

I know I might need to look at direct sales for some of this swag. Saving me a little bit of time. Bill, I think this might be your first comment. Nice to see you in here, Bill. I've been doing direct sales since I launched in February 2025, but assumed I had to do all the fulfillment. Glad to learn today that there are options for direct fulfillment that I can link to my existing site. Wow. So this probably just saved you a lot of time. Mental space. That's. That's crazy.

Good luck, Bill. Hopefully, hopefully you can set all that up.

Yeah. Lloyd says, thank you, Shane. Big impression. David Grady says, help me start thinking about what I should set up. Thank you, Shane. And then I think that's it. Oh, Christy did add something else. Thank you for giving me so many options on what we can use to sell our books directly for every budget level. Yeah, that's really, really awesome as well. And every fan level as he talked about. Also how to leverage our current Amazon reviews with a website widget and AI Finding us was helpful. Awesome. So, Shane, you get the fun task of trying to pick which was your favorite takeaway, and that person will be our, our final prize winner.

Yeah, I'll go with, I'll go with Christie. I think, I think Christy was, you know, had a great takeaway there, and.

I think it's this one or her first one or both.

Yeah, both. I liked them both. Honestly. I think those are really, really, you know, important things to know about right now with, you know, just knowing that there's tools out there to, to sell your book directly. You don't have to go through these retailers and pay these, these, these royalty fees and make 30 cents on your book. You know, you can, you can go and, and take the most amount of profit you can from each book sold, plus customize the entire experience through, through and through, from beginning to end. Somebody actually buying your book and interacting with your stuff. And also I think it's really like, I didn't even plan to touch on AI a ton in this soft in this presentation, but I think it's really important to know that, you know, you don't have to be ranking high on Google. I think as long as you have helpful, full, informative information, then like, you're gonna, you're gonna start appearing in these AI searches.

Awesome. Okay, let's see. We've got one last question that sneaked in and this will be the last one. If others sneak in, I'm sorry, we will have to call it after this. Deborah asked, what do you do when you do direct sales and some people want signed copies. Well, that's a compliment right there.

Yeah, that would be awesome. If some people want signed copies, what I would do is the signed copies, I mean you're gonna have to fulfill those yourself because you have to physically sign them. But if people like this, I guess there's a couple different scenarios. What you could do is you could just buy a bunch of author copies, have them stocked in your house, sign, you know, 100 of them so that, and then put them as a product on your store. So if anybody is interested in buying it, they can just buy that. And then you would go to the post, the post office and ship that out. But if somebody already bought it and they also want a signed copy, then just, you know, say, you know, if you're interested in a signed copy, like go leave a review on my website. Like, like and then have a place on your, on your store where people can leave a five star review and then as a thank you, you can send them an author signed copy. I think that would be a pretty good incentive.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, guys. Well, Christie, I didn't tell you what to do either. I know you're a prize winner but just to remind you, please email me@tamooklaunchers.com let me know your prize of choice. And then I do think we have to give, you know, because we essentially have like a, an honorary Book launchers member here with Eric being such a hype person in the chat and in the community. So Eric, please email me. I would love to give you a prize as well. And yes, as you've learned, please email me because I don't check the communities as frequently as some of our other team members. So Eric, you are our final prize winner. Thanks so much for being a hype person and for the stuff and he actually just added into the chat as well about book plates. Let me see if I can share it like that.

I appreciate it.

Yeah. Having the book plates in response to the signed copies, having book plates shipped and then offer limited book plates. Awesome. Alrighty guys. Well, we are right at the top of the hour. Thank you guys so much for taking time out of your Saturday to learn about direct sales and websites as that was brought up a little bit as well. Thank you so much, Shane. For your first deep dive. You did fantastic.

Oh, and the, and the ebook too, if you, if you came in late.

I can share it again. Huh.

Book launchers.com forward/direct. That's an ebook that essentially walks through all the tools that I explained and the process of setting everything up. So, yeah, give that. You don't have to enter in your email or anything. You can just download it and. And yeah, hopefully you get some value from it and then reach out to us if you need anything.

Awesome. Well, thank you guys again. We'll see you on the next one. Have a fantastic rest of your weekend, guys. Bye, everyone.

Bye, buddy. And.