How to Sell Books Direct to Readers

Selling books to readers cuts out the middleman, which means you can make more money and potentially build a relationship with each and every person that buys your book. But there's a lot of pros and cons to selling direct. So if you want to sell your books direct to Reader, but you need some tips, well, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers. I the author of three books so far, but number four is coming soon. All right, so Direct to Reader has a lot of advantages. So there's a lot of good reasons to want to sell your book direct to readers. When you sell direct, first of all, you can charge any price that you like. Of course, that doesn't mean anyone will pay it, but you are in control of the price. You can also do incentives for readers to buy books. You can bundle them together. For example, if you wanted to get a print copy of Self Publish and Succeed, I could bundle in the audiobook version of the book. You could also get a lot more data on your customer, like where they came from when they bought your book. Now, how to do this. Well, for a long time we used Lulu Publishing to sell Self Publish and succeed from self publishandsucceed.com it was a great setup because Shopify was the cart. Lulu printed and shipped the books and, and we collected the data and the money from the sale and then we paid Shopify, PayPal and Lulu fees for the printing and the shipping and the merchant fees. Once it was all set up, which was a bit of a pain, it was very hands off and the data was delivered directly to our CRM system. It was a great way to handle the direct sales because I was running ads here on YouTube and on Google to sell the book and it allowed me to track conversions from those ads so we could turn off unprofitable ads and add more money to the ones that we're converting. But even more important than that, it allowed us to get the contact information of the book buyers so we could send them emails and build a longer term relationship with them. Of course, Amazon never tells you who buys your book, so that is great for running ads. Building the longer term relationship is especially important because we barely ever broke even on the books after ad costs. And that's okay because the longer term vision is that somebody reads the book and then wants to hire book launchers or take one of our courses. All that said, we stopped using Lulu halfway through 2022 because they raised their print prices several times over 2022 and then announced a further increase that would take effect on November 9th, and they also increased their shipping rates in the US too. This brought the cost and printing of shipping a single print book to over $16 per copy plus we had to pay Shopify fees and PayPal fees. Even if I sold a book for $20, I was not going to break even the so there was no margin left for ad costs or any profit at all if somebody just came direct to the website and bought the book. To make it even worse, we were getting a lot of complaints because Lulu was taking two weeks to deliver a book to a buyer. We even had somebody submit a chargeback complaint to PayPal against us because they hadn't received their book after 12 days. We had several angry emails from people saying they would never trust our service if we can't send a book out in a few days. It was bad, far worse than the money we were losing. But it sucked because we were losing money on every book after ad costs and we were creating angry customers. So we had to turn Lulu off. The good news is the alternative is cheaper, but it's more labor intensive. So we're currently buying cases of books from Ingram at a net cost of $5.44 per book plus our shipping cost. When we buy a carton of 30 and ship it to an address in the U.S. our shipping is roughly $50, so our cost per book works out to about $7 per book. Doing it this way, it's if we print through KDP print, we cut a dollar off of the top for each copy. Now the trick is we then have to mail the book to the buyer of the book, which is done via media Mail and our operations manager has to drop them off at the post office. To make shipping from home a little easier, we use stamps.com, which allows us to print labels at home. So it's nice and easy. It costs us $3.49 to print a media mail label and then have it ready for the post. So all in, doing it this way costs us just under $11 to send a book. So plus the time it takes to print the label and ship them off. All that said, if you're selling lots of books like hundreds and hundreds every month direct, it might be worth doing a large print order to get a discount because doing that you can get your print cost down to about $3 per book if you do a big enough print run. And then now your shipping costs and print costs are now under $7 and things start to look a lot more Profitable at that. And that's what you'll want to do. If you're doing a free plus shipping funnel, which is where you're charging say 7.99 for the shipping. Well, it's not really free, right? Because obviously the free plus shipping model, you're actually not giving the book away for free. You're trying to cover your print costs. The buyer's paying for the book. But if it were really free plus shipping, it would be $3.50 or some version of that because the media mail costs are not $7.99. I know the free plus shipping model is popular and very successful for many authors, but for it to work financially, you need a strong upsell and backend offer as well as the lowest cost printing options you can get to bring your unit cost down. There are newer services that I've heard about recently and we're going to speak with them about what they do and probably do a test run. One of those is Indie Author Print on Demand. This is not going to replace Lulu as far as direct sales go because they don't do single unit sales and shipments. But it could be a really solid option for printing a bunch of books to have on hand for your direct sales. You can check them out@indieauthorprintondemand.com I priced my book out on their site and it looks comparable to Ingram and I've heard great things about their print quality. And you can order different books to qualify for bigger discounts. So I could potentially order more than Cash Flow, the new brand new Self Publish and Succeed and my new book and have all of them bulk together into one order to reduce the overall print costs. Which is kind of a cool feature because with other companies you have to order a high quantity of each of those books in order to qualify for a reduced rate. So that's a pretty cool feature, especially if you're an author who does a lot of trade shows or selling books at live events because you probably want to have a variety of your books on hand right now. The only other way I'm aware of getting a print book to an author if you aren't selling thousands of books direct, which can then open up warehouse services that are cost effective where they store your books and then ship them out one by one for you. The only other way that I really know of that will work is to just go right into your KDP account and ship author copies direct to buyers. I I don't love this option if you are selling books to national buyers because the book comes from Amazon when somebody thought they were buying it from you. But I do like doing this for international because it's way more cost effective than shipping a book from the United States to another country. Personally, if somebody's buying direct from me, I would like to have it look like it's coming direct from me. And I also want to include a card or a promotional material or stickers or something. And you can't do that if you're using Amazon. Direct to your reader also means selling at trade show events and other places where you're actually taking credit card information or cash from the buyer. If you do this, I strongly encourage you to give receipts that include their email address so you're still building that connection so you can follow up on their purchase, ask for a review, or even make some sort of an upsell offer. Or if you aren't doing that, you at least should be inviting the reader to join your email list at the time of purchase. Stripe or Square are great ways to have a mobile payment app collecting money when you're doing these events, and you can set them up to have an email receipt that goes to the buyer and allows you to follow up on the purchase. And of course, if you're selling direct, you should have cash on hand for change. And think about that when you price your books too. It's probably easier to sell your book for a round number to avoid needing to make and give out a bunch of change. Now that's all print books. For selling ebooks direct Book Funnel is the choice most authors make. They have a robust sales system that allows you to keep a lot of controls and still sell your ebook direct to the reader. See how easy it is to get going with Book Funnel? They also recently announced an integration with ThriveCart, which solves a lot of issues for more sophisticated authors selling direct that may want to offer upsells to every book purchase, as well as have a system that automatically calculates sales tax and some other features. Now ThriveCart does come with a heftier fee to integrate, but depending on the model for your author business, this might make good sense. There are also other platforms that many indie authors use to sell ebooks direct. There's payhip, Gumroad, and E Junkie, to name a few. Payhip could be a great option if you want to build an entire funnel of offerings like courses, membership sites, and more. I've personally not used them, but I know some authors who do and they're pretty happy with how the system works. If you have used them, please do comment below and share your experiences. And of course, if you comment the day a video is released, you get entered to win some of our fabulous hashtag NoteBoringBook swag. So comment about Payhip, Gumroad or anything else to do with selling books and ebooks and audiobooks Direct to readers now, selling audiobooks direct has not been super easy to date, but there are services coming on board now that are making it possible. And some of the above services like Gumroad, which podcasters use for membership sales, could be kind of rigged to work for it. But as a pure play service to make it simple and easy to sell audiobooks direct to your audience, there hasn't been a really strong service yet. But again, the audiobook market is one of the most exciting places and that's changing fast. Book Funnel is now beta testing audiobooks. By the time this video is out it will likely be easy to get in on the fun there. Another option for audiobook Direct sales is one I'm testing right now, which is with Supporting Cast. We've just uploaded Self Publish and succeed to Supporting Cast, which is a podcasting platform. But they're getting into the audiobook sales space. Connecting it with Stripe allows you to sell your audiobook direct to listeners, and now their platform creates a secure copy of your audiobook for that buyer so they can listen to the book like they would a podcast. But you haven't just emailed somebody all your mp3 files and put them at risk of easy pirating. I suspect Book Funnel is going to be a better place for audiobook sales now that they're beta testing audiobook sales because they've made it super easy with sales pages and bulk delivery options for ebooks already. And their fees are low, so I think they're going to be the superior option. But as you know, I love choices, so I'm testing Supporting Cast. The big thing to consider before you dive into Selling Direct is to understand that that middleman, whether that middleman is Amazon, a bookstore, or some other platform that sells the book to the end reader or listener. The big thing is to understand how the reader is going to find out about you and your book. Because if you don't have an audience to sell direct to now, how are you going to make sales again for Self publish and succeed? I'm still promoting it to the normal stores using my Universal Book Link. Not sure what that is. I have a video for you on that that I highly recommend you check out because Universal Book Links are awesome, but when I pay for ads or If I'm doing a podcast interview and I want to sell the book, or if I'm giving a talk and want to highlight incentives when you buy the book, I will send people to a page like self publishand succeed.com and this allows me to get buyer data, track conversions on my marketing efforts so I know what's working at what isn't and ultimately build a stronger relationship with people who are willing to invest in my Advice it's easy to get excited about selling direct, but it's extra work, so make sure it's worth it by assessing what the advantages are to you and your bigger picture goals for doing all the extra work of becoming the store yourself. Amazon and Barnes and Noble have buyers and yes, it's not like they're going to find your book without you doing work to make sure they are able to, but at the end of the day they are bringing buyers to their platform that are there shopping for books and and if your book gets in front of the right buyer, it could sell itself. Their platform also has buyer trust. When you sell direct, you have to make sure you can drive the buyers to your pages or your platform and that you can establish enough trust that someone will pull out their credit card without knowing who you are. Once you're set up, it's not too bad, but it does take quite a bit of work to set up a sales page. You need sales copy, you need imagery for the page, a privacy policy, a return policy, and you need to connect a payment method to a bank account and figure out if you need to charge sales tax. Which by the way, you probably don't unless you're selling more than $400 of books in any one state in a year. And then you'd need to charge and remit sales tax. So if you are getting into this, make sure you've got an accountant and you factored taxes into your price point so you can remit it if you hit that point in any one of the states you're selling in. Some of the platforms like Book Funnel make this more straightforward to set up, but it still takes work. Now I think it's worth it to set yourself up for direct sales if you're going to be driving a lot of traffic to buy direct, especially if you're paying for that traffic through Facebook, Instagram, you know, ads anywhere like Google or YouTube, your Amazon bestseller Rank. Or if you've got some other goals that make it advantageous to sell through a store like Amazon or Barnes and Noble, focus on that. Don't worry about direct right now. There isn't one way to be a successful author, and success isn't always measured in books book sales. So figure out what's most important to you and take steps to get there. Now let's talk about that universal book link because it's a good one for you to have and super easy to set up. That video is right here. And here's a video on selling at live events because that is an amazing way to sell a lot of books direct to your reader. So be ready for that opportunity should it arise. Both are really good viewing, so click on over and comment while you're there so I can send you some comment love right back.