Full Free Book! Get Your Book Selling on Your Website - USA Today Bestselling Author Monica Leonelle

Chapter 1: Creating a Direct Sales Website. You want to build a store on your website, but you have questions. Questions like: Is it profitable to sell your books from your website? Is it worth the effort? What is the technology setup for this effort? How do you get people to buy from your website? These are some of the questions I get from authors about how to create a store on your website that you own. Where you can sell your books in all formats directly to your readers. If you have somehow stumbled upon this book, and you are confused by what I'm saying, then I'm not sure this is the book for you. I would recommend instead that you pick up the first book in this series, get your book selling wide, get the basics of publishing in print, ebook, audiobook, translations, apps, and more, Book Sale Supercharged #1. This book is going to catch you up on the series, and prepare you for the following discussion, about selling your books directly on your website, which is the subject of the book you're reading right now. The series starter, Get Your Book Selling Wide, is permanently free at most ebook retailers. Check the price to make sure. It costs nothing to try it, so definitely pick it up. With that out of the way, let's get right into the topic at hand: direct sales through an author website store. Selling books direct to readers on your website. I've taken out most of the beginner stuff that I normally include in my books in favor of keeping it short and sweet, as I know most authors reading this will be savvy about things like what a website is and why you might want a store on your website to help you sell your books. Here's how we divvy up the chapters. Chapter 2: Why Sell Books on Your Website? Why Authors Don't Sell Direct and Why They Should Be. Chapter 3: A Basic Website Setup. The 5 table stakes of selling from your website. This is all you ultimately need to get started. Chapter 4: Choosing Your Special Offers Setup. The different technology you can implement to get your landing pages setup in place and the add-ons you'll want to consider. Chapter 5: Choosing Your Web Store Setup. The different technology you can implement to get your website store setup in place and the add-ons you'll want to consider. Chapter 6: Advanced website sales concepts, the different technology you can implement to get your website store setup in place, and the add-ons you'll want to consider. Chapter 7: Important nuances to direct sales, catalog sales versus direct sales, and how to balance your new website store with what you are already doing on retailers. Chapter 8: Ushering people through your product catalog, what a product funnel is and why you need one, plus the step-by-step of mapping out your product funnels for each major product line. Chapter 9: Ushering People Through Your Sales Process. How to use the 10 Stages of Audience framework to figure out exactly what marketing material you need to improve conversion at each major inflection point of your product funnel. Chapter 10: Selling Your Books and Related Products. The quirks and tidbits of selling ebooks, audiobooks, print books, Non-book products like merchandise and bundled combinations of any of the above. Chapter 11: Messaging for your website: The 3 things you need in your sales messaging: excitement, objections, and psychological triggers. Chapter 12: Getting your messaging out there: How to turn your messaging into copy that sells. Who am I? My name is Monica Leonelle, and I have been independently publishing since 2009. I write young adult fantasy under Solo Storm and used to write romance under another pen name. I'm relaunching those under the Solo Storm brand. I have about 40 books total in my catalog, 25 of which are fiction. My urban fantasy novella The Last Daughter hit the USA Today bestseller list in 2017 as part of a boxed set. I've also written over 15 nonfiction books about writing, editing, publishing, marketing, and business. You can learn more about my work at theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Getting Things Wrong Sometimes. This book and Book Sales Supercharged, the series of books that it's attached to, covers an ambitious spread of topics in intense detail. I consider myself as well-versed in the publishing industry as any independent author making a full-time living at this. Still, there is plenty that I don't or can't know. I have done everything humanly possible to get these books right, but there may still be gaps in my knowledge or places where we misstate something. Call me out—no, seriously. Notice that I got something wrong, or suspect that my educated guess is not so educated? I want to hear from you. Please feel free to reach out to me with corrections or additional information if I've gotten something wrong within these pages. I want to make these books the best resource they can be, so I won't be offended. You can email me at team@theworldneedsyourpassion.com, or through my email with Writer MBA, support@writermba.com. I'll be sure to incorporate those updates into the next version of the book. Lastly, website sales, direct sales, and the publishing industry as a whole are evolving rapidly. Things are changing all the time on various platforms. It's a lot to take in, and even more to keep updated. While I will be issuing new editions of this book regularly, please keep in mind the publishing date on the version you're reading, as much of the book could be out of date in a few short years. Where you can find even more information about selling from your website. If you want to follow industry news as it's happening, make sure you join my Substack newsletters. Each newsletter offers regular articles, with about half posted for free and the other half paid. By becoming a free subscriber, you'll receive great news and analysis about what is happening at various retailers and in the publishing community in general. By becoming a paid subscriber, you'll get all the content plus access to the full archives, where you will find several articles on each retailer. The biggest benefit to joining is that my newsletters are an extension of this book and the rest of the books in the series. My coverage goes deeper and is more accurate than tech sites that do not have a focus on publishing. By supporting my newsletter, you are supporting a niche news resource with a slant toward what publishing is truly interested in. My Substack newsletters are: Author Analyst: Direct sales and all of the Big Five retailers are changing all the time. Meanwhile, this book gets updated every 2 to 5 years, and a lot can change in that timeframe. This is a place where I can offer my news, analysis, and opinion on happenings in the industry, and I'm usually able to break news long before news outlets do. For authors who are going aggressively wide in subscriptions and memberships, this publication takes a deep dive into everything about serialization, fiction apps, and subscriptions and memberships. AuthorAnalyst.Substack.com. Author Ecosystems. For authors who are trying to get to the next level in their publishing business, it would help to know exactly what kind of author you are. Are you a nimble desert, an expansive grassland, a rolling tundra, an interconnected forest, or a dynamic aquatic? Dig deep into the new methodology developed by USA Today bestselling authors Monica Leonelle and Russell Nohulty, creators of the Kickstarter accelerator Go Wide Grow Wide, Book Sales Supercharged, and more. AuthorEcosystems.substack.com. I also have a Ream subscription that focuses on creativity coaching from a spiritual perspective. It is an evolution of my work with authors and takes some of my spiritual frameworks and applies them to passion, purpose, creativity, relationships, and more. My fiction subscription also lives here. https://reamstories.com/lovelightlinus. Our community to support direct sales authors. My Book Sales Supercharged series co-author Russell Noholti and I also have a Circle community. Circle is a fantastic, decentralized platform that has similar functionality to Facebook without many of the downsides. Please join us in our Circle community to ask questions and continue the conversation from this book. We share lots of awesome stuff related to this book series there. go.writernba.com. Additional Resources. Read Monica's blog. I've been blogging professionally since 2006, and in the last several years have begun to collect all my work in one spot, under one brand called The World Needs Your Passion. This is the one place on the internet where I am not on brand or niche focused toward a goal. I bring my whole self to this blog, write about whatever I want, and share everything from my greatest lessons learned to best my business advice, to my love of Lego, tarot, Taylor Swift, and more. It's also a place where I keep the footer fully updated with all my links to everywhere you can find me on the internet. Read this resource: theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Subscribe to Monica's YouTube channel. My YouTube channel is The World Needs Your Passion, and I teach people how to find, pursue, nurture, reignite, and even make money from their passions. I also teach people about entrepreneurship, creativity, business, writing, art, and more. You can watch my channel: youtube.com/theworldneedsyourpassion. Subscribe to Monica's podcast. I post new 20-minute episodes about publishing going wide, serialized fiction, industry trends, and so much more on my podcast feed. theproductivenovelist.buzzsprout.com. Follow Monica on Medium. I post regular articles about the publishing industry if you prefer to read about new developments. Monicaleonelle.medium.com. Check out the rest of the series. The Book Sales Supercharged series focuses on each retailer, format, and platform, diving deep into everything you need to know to succeed in that particular space. There are also multiple books about direct sales topics like Kickstarter, live events and signings, subscriptions and memberships, website sales, and more. You can find all the information about the series, plus grab the entire set of books in a bundle directly from my website, at a significant discount to purchasing each individually at retailers. Shop.theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Take our Author Ecosystems Quiz. The Author Ecosystems Quiz will give you more self-knowledge and help you identify what type of publishing business model is going to work best for you. Are you a nimble desert, an expansive grassland, a rolling tundra, an interconnected forest, or a dynamic aquatic? Dig deep into the new methodology developed by USA Today bestselling authors Monica Leonelle and Russell Noholti, creators of the Kickstarter accelerator Go Wide Grow Wide, Book Sale Supercharged, and more. https://author-ecosystem.com/ https://authorecosystems.substack.com/takeaways. Throughout the book, I'll offer takeaways and task checklists at the end of every chapter. I'll also post takeaways as they come within each section to help you solidify some of the material, which can get dense and specific in places. Takeaways cover the big ideas, while the task checklist contains to-dos and action items that will move the needle forward for you on this topic. The takeaways for this chapter are: This book aims to help you better market and sell your books on your website. Over the course of 10+ chapters, we break down all the ins and outs of selling from your website. If you think I'm wrong, let me know at support@writermba.com. The books are just a starting point to understanding website sales. Books are inherently static objects, and the publishing world is changing rapidly, faster and faster every year. Please follow my newsletters and social media content to stay up to date on newest developments about website sales. Task Checklist: Subscribe to the Substacks. Join our community. Follow me on social media channels and my podcast. Grab the books as a bundle and at a steep discount from my website. Keep on reading. Chapter 2: Why Sell Books on Your Website? As the industry for independent authors becomes a greater media force to reckon with, we are transitioning into a period that nonfiction was not long ago, where prescriptive playbooks stopped working for most people. Everyone in the nonfiction space has so many options for how to build their businesses that each person gets to forge their own path. Very few nonfiction businesses look alike these days, where once they all followed a lot of the same marketing strategies and tactics, and there was a linear step-by-step to success. Most nonfiction authors sell direct in some way, whether it be our courses, coaching, events, and more. That makes it easier to transition to selling books from our websites, because the pieces that make it all run—the store, the shopping cart, the taxes, and more—are already done. We just need to add the book-specific stuff around fulfillment, most of which can be automated for dropshipping. On the fiction side, our businesses are still relatively simple and retailer-focused, but they are getting more complex. The decision we're all making right now around many platforms, formats, and retailers available to us is not truly between yes and no. It's more like now or later. Because it's all coming. We can no longer rely solely on retailers to sell our books. In this chapter, I'll dive deeper into why the majority of independent authors still rely primarily on retailers, and why they shouldn't. Why People Don't Sell Direct. Most businesses agree that you want to question the necessity of every middleman in your distribution chain. You get rid of unnecessary middlemen to improve profits and have larger control over the business's future. For independent authors, the middlemen are distributors and retailers. I will never advise any independent author to forgo distributors and retailers We need them to succeed. And I will also never advise them to not build additional streams of income direct to reader. Having both protects your career as an author, while giving you a far larger reach than you could build on your own, through only direct sales. Still, some people are not convinced that selling direct to readers is worth it. Here are some of the reasons that authors don't want to create a website store. Number 1: Exclusivity. Many authors are unable to sell their ebooks and audiobooks direct from their website due to exclusivity contracts they have with various retailers. The most popular exclusivity program in independent publishing is Kindle Direct Publishing Select (KDP Select), a program that puts your books into Kindle Unlimited for a 90-day term. About 85 to 90% of independent authors have some or all of their books enlisted in KDP Select at any given time. These authors are not allowed to sell their books in ebook format through their website. There are other popular exclusivity programs through fiction apps for ebooks and Audible and other companies for audiobooks that may prevent someone from selling on their website. None of these programs are necessarily bad, but they can be limiting, and ideally the author has calculated the cost of opportunity of exclusivity and deemed it to be worth it to them. I'm a huge believer that exclusivity is incredibly valuable to companies. Amazon has built their US market share in ebooks off of their KDP Select program. They hold 90% of the market, but used to hold closer to 60% before designing Kindle Unlimited. That alone should showcase how much exclusivity is worth to them. I don't think there's an easy answer to how exclusivity financially compares to selling direct on your website and elsewhere, as it's going to depend a lot on your catalog and how well it can do through either avenue. What I can say is that exclusivity is never a great reason to not start your website store. No matter how exclusive you are with any one retailer, They probably don't own absolutely everything in your catalog, in every format. Most authors who are in KDP Select with their ebooks could still sell their paperback versions on their website or in book boxes, and many do. They can also sell their books for a limited time on their website before putting them into an exclusivity program. They can also sell audiobooks, translations, merchandise, and more through their website., and while it seems like you may not make a ton of money doing so, you are building something larger, which is getting the systems in place to handle direct sales and building sales and marketing funnels to bring people to your website. If you move those portions out of exclusivity in the future, you will be able to get off the ground running with your store much faster than if you wait to figure it out in the future. Number 2, keeping business simple. The fiction business is a simple business where you upload files and let retailers deal with print, selling, fulfillment, and more. But do you want all your income streams to come from one retailer? Or even multiple retailers, which is a sturdier foundation but still not perfect? Or do you want to develop some income streams that you control end-to-end? Every income stream you develop requires more effort, time, and energy to manage and grow. This is true when you create a new pen name, or start a new series even. It's true when you list your books on a fiction app, or at a new retailer. It's even true when you try to sell more ebooks versus getting page reads. Since developing new income streams is always going to take extra effort, time, and energy, you can plan it out for website sales. Maybe you dip your toe by first taking your most popular series. Maybe you dip your toe with a single book launch. You get to choose the pace at which you make the mindset and business transition. Take off a month to drop your whole catalog into a new space at once, or create a multi-year plan to explore growing your print book sales on your website. While fiction businesses are fairly simple right now, selling digital products through third parties and not having to deal with taxes, territories, and so much more is about as easy as it gets. They likely can't and won't remain that way in perpetuity. As competition increases among independent authors, authors will need to forge their own path. You will have to develop stronger business practices to sell books and other merchandise from your website. There is no way around that. Luckily, these efforts are also what help you make more money in general and build a better business too. Consider this a graduation of your business to a new level. And think about how getting stronger business practices into place will help to grow you as a person too. Number 3: Eating into sales at retailers and hurting algorithms. If an author is already doing well at retailers and/or in ebook, why create a competing outlet for sales of the same products? If you are wide on retailers, there's no issue with selling your books direct as well. You likely aren't focused on sales rank at Amazon, and most of the other Big Five retailers offer their best visibility through merchandising, so you don't need to worry about rank as much there either. If you are in an exclusivity program, you may need a bit more balance in your approach. When balancing direct sales and retailer sales, I like to think about the timeframe. Exclusivity in publishing contracts is almost always limited by time. It could be that you sell on your website only during the times when your content is not exclusive, like during a pre-order period on retailers. You will likely lose some initial sales at retailers, which could hurt your sales rank and thus your algorithmic juice behind the scenes, but for most authors it won't make a significant difference. Remember, in this scenario, your book would be exclusive to your website only during the pre-order period, and it would be time-limited. Further, just because books are doing well in a particular format, or at a particular retailer now, doesn't mean they will be doing as well in that format, on that retailer in the future. We've seen authors' incomes suddenly drop to 20% of what they were making in years past. This is not an industry where you can rest on your laurels. It's always changing, and there are always new ways to make money. There is always new competition too. You want to stay ahead and diversify your income as much as possible, so when some avenues are down, other avenues are up. #4: The books don't sell well on retailers right now. Sometimes people ask us, do I need to be hitting a certain threshold of book sales before investing in a website store? And while we would never recommend throwing good money after bad—bad covers, bad story, bad editing, bad marketing, all must still be fixed before attempting to sell books through your website. We also don't believe that you need to be doing well on retailers to sell well direct to readers. In fact, my book sales supercharged co-author Russell has sold far more in direct sales of both print and ebook than he has of those two formats on retailers. So while it can help to have books that are already selling well in ebook and on retailers, you may be able to sell well in print anyway. Keep in mind that retailers are still primarily focused on selling more of the most popular books and the most popular genres. If your book isn't that, it may be more challenging to make retailer sales but easier to make website sales. #5: Difficulty of setting up a website, taxes, etc. When you sell direct through fan-backed websites like Kickstarter and Patreon, your website, or in-person events and signings, you will need to handle taxes that must be collected from each customer. This is enough to make a lot of authors run for the hills for some reason, even though most online entrepreneurs across almost all industries have to deal with it, and there are tools and solutions from those industries that work for authors too. The same is true for almost everything else, like setting up a website, creating a shop, writing landing pages, and more. When you open your website store, you will not be alone in having to deal with these challenges, and you will not have to build anything yourself to handle them. You truly only need to use the website platform, buy the plugin, send the extra information to your accountant. These are new-to-you problems, but they are not new problems. This is all stuff that you can figure out how to do or hire someone to do it for you. There are tons of resources to make this work, built by the people who came before you who had to make it work. #6 Greater legal and financial risks. I don't disagree that selling books and other merchandise from your website will carry greater legal and financial risks for you. Still, there's greater stability in selling from both retailers and your website instead of one or the other. So yes, when you consider the small decision of setting up your website store, it will feel risky and uncomfortable. But in the long run, leaving your business retailer-only is far riskier. I have seen authors have their accounts at various retailers shut down or never approved at all, and watched their businesses lose 75% or more of their profits overnight. I have seen ebook catalogs perform well for 3 years, then suddenly drop to 10-20% of their value in the 4th year. I have seen ebooks take off on a particular retailer, then plummet on that same retailer due to shifting trends, algorithmic changes, advertising problems, and more. Building more income streams can help you weather the storms in your author business. Spreading your sales out between retailers and then between direct sales and retailer sales will go a long way in bulletproofing your business against changes in the industry. #7 Expanding your product line. While you don't have to expand your product line just because you have a website, you'll find that people are more likely to buy things that aren't available anywhere else, like special edition hardcovers. Even creating the same book in a different format can be costly. For example, in print you may have to format different versions, which means you may have to hire someone, buy a program like Vellum or Atticus, or learn to do it yourself with something like InDesign. For merchandising or special print editions, you may need to find and commission artwork. You may need different cover files for each version of your print book, which means you need to buy them from your cover designer or figure out how to do them yourself with your designer's permission. For custom artwork used in special editions, additional internal artwork, or variant covers, you may need to find and pay multiple artists. Number 8: Holding inventory. Selling physical products from your website, including print books and merchandise, requires you to hold inventory somewhere. Inventory requires storage space, but if you hold a small enough inventory, it's manageable for most people. You can get your inventory paid for by using Kickstarter to do print runs, and you can get rid of your excess inventory through Kickstarter, Patreon, Substack, direct sales on your website, and dropshipping through a company like Printful or Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). If you don't want to hold a small amount of inventory, or if you don't want inventory in your home, you may have to rent or pay for warehouse space elsewhere. You may decide to store your inventory (books and merchandise) in your home, or you may want to set up a Printful or Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) account to ship your books and merchandise to for storage and dropshipping. You may need to pre-buy a large shipment of books. You can't open a shop without products to ship, so you'll likely have to spend your own money to stock your inventory at first. Or you can raise funds for your print runs via Kickstarter. Use the book that Russell Nolte and I co-authored called Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. Pre-buying books also means you might need insurance, a place to ship, and a place to store. #9: Delivering your products to customers. It's true, you'll have to figure out shipping to have a website store with physical products of any kind. If you live in the United States, you'll likely want to become very familiar with media mail rules to see what can and can't be shipped alongside books to qualify. Even small items like a bookmark can disqualify you from using media mail,, and that is going to affect the types of bundles you put in your store. If you are outside of the United States, you may have a special discount on book shipments that is worth investigating. No matter where you live, a lot of your buyers are likely to come from English-speaking territories like the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. You'll need different shipping rates to handle each of these scenarios. International shipping is expensive, and you need to account for that in your sales process. Before you put an item in your store, you'll want to figure out how much it costs to ship, which could be a determining factor in whether you even offer the product. Is anyone going to buy the thing at the price you need to charge to make a profit? Will people pay to ship heavy items overseas? These are questions worth asking, and this is why most authors need digital products to balance out the profitability of their store. Lots of customers expect free shipping when shopping online. Are you going to attempt to offer it in certain scenarios, or as a coupon? How do you handle expectations around this? Finally, printing rates, shipping rates, and more are changing rapidly, especially during the global pandemic. What may be viable now may not be viable in the future. You'll need to stay up to date on these things and change your pricing accordingly to ensure you are staying profitable. #10: Changing and Balancing Pricing on Retailers. While you likely won't have to change the prices of your digital inventory like ebooks and audiobooks, to sell print books for a profit, you can't sell like a traditional publisher does, where volume, distribution, and publicity is key. You have to sell print books like an entrepreneur, which means for most authors who set up their website store, their pricing model on print has to change. And if it changes a lot, the pricing on ebooks and audiobooks might have to change too to get into alignment with their print pricing. This is aggravated by the moving target around costs of paper, shipping, and more. During the global pandemic, you need to charge more than you think for your books, and you will never compete with a retailer like Amazon. If someone can get the same product for cheaper or with free shipping from Amazon, they will. How are you going to balance your pricing? In general, I think this is a good thing. Many independent authors price their print books too low to begin with in an attempt to compete with traditional publishers. This is an overflow from ebooks where independent authors actually can price competitively compared to traditional publishers. In print, we simply can't. The math doesn't work. So don't price your print book as if you can undercut or match traditional publishing standards. You simply can't. #11: Dealing with customer support. If you sell direct to your readers, you will be responsible for all customer service and support requests. Plus, you will have to set return policies and deal with chargebacks when a customer circumvents customer support and requests a refund through their credit card company. Luckily, you will get very few of these emails at first, and eventually you can hire someone who works 2 to 5 hours a week to handle support requests. This is a small price to pay for the potential rewards you can gain from having a website store. Why sell direct? I've given you some of the challenges you may run into while attempting to create your website store, so now I wanted to give you all the reasons that the headaches I listed above are worth the hassle. This work is important, and I truly believe your business depends on you being willing to deal with some headache. Remember, the industry is shifting anyway, whether you move with it or not. The decision is not yes and no. It's more like now or later. Here are some of the important reasons that you want to start selling direct from your website. Number 1: Diversification. You've already written the books, so why not make more money from them? Nothing is stable or foolproof in the publishing industry, so it's really important to be developing multiple income streams at once. After going to all retailers, website sales is the easiest platform to start building sales and additional income streams with. Another way I think about diversification is that selling from my own website forces me to get more creative about what I offer. Often when those offers perform well, I can port them over to retailers in some fashion. For example, if a physical boxed set with a custom box and separate bounded books in the series was selling well on my website through a preorder or ongoing, I would be interested in taking that same offer and putting it on as many retailers as possible. I could ship some of my box sets to Amazon's fulfillment warehouse and sell them on Amazon too. I wouldn't, however, think or plan to do that without testing them on a website and with my fans first. I believe that having a website store is going to organically lead to more experimentation, which leads to greater diversification everywhere. What's good for your direct sales can improve your retailer sales too. Number 2: Greater freedom. When you sell direct from your website, you have complete control over all aspects of the sales process. You can do anything you want with your listing product page sales page. You can add images, longer samples of your work, review quotes, and more to the page if you know or think it will help your book sell better. Sell the way you want. You can offer limited edition products only available for a certain period or only having a certain number of copies. Sell offer prices far over the limits on retailers, discount to any price you want, and more—anything your imagination can come up with. Sell whatever you want. You can sell all sorts of things: non-book items, merchandise, workbooks, which distributors like IngramSpark usually consider low-content POD, PDF printables, and more. Forge your own path. You can quit the things you don't enjoy doing and focus on the ones you do. You can zig while others zag, lowering your competition in the areas you are focusing, and you can pave the way for success with a way of selling before others catch on and catch up. To me, freedom means truly feeling like an independent author, not relying on anything or anyone to keep my business afloat. I want to be unbreakable and unshakable. I want to have a foundation that no one can take away from me. To me, selling direct through a website is the first step to that. Number 3: Bundling. Bundling is a critical way to grow your business, and retailers have very few tools to help authors bundle their work across formats, series, and more. For example, authors can't do a fairly basic bundle of an ebook and its audiobook. Authors have found a way to work around the lack of bundling options, but workarounds are never going to convert as well as the real thing. I believe this lack of bundling on retailers is a huge reason why authors as a whole aren't making as much as they could be or want to be. In every other industry, bundling is used to sell a lot more at the point of sale, so customers don't have to remember to come back, make another purchase decision, pull out their credit card again, and take action again, even if it's just a few clicks. As authors, we are used to this. There are likely some of you reading this who think I'm being silly or petty about how underserved we really are in this area and how it's hurting our ability to grow as an industry. I want to be very clear, no retailer owes us any of these tools. I'm not suggesting that. What I want to impress though is that these factors are likely real and far more pronounced than any of us can imagine. As some anecdotal evidence, notice that all other industries around us—coaches, online teachers, software developers, creators from so many other fields—are selling higher-ticket items in bundles and more easily hitting 7 figures or more in their businesses. I have spoken to people in these other industries who can't imagine the hoops we jump through just to get a reader to remember to buy book number 2 after they've already bought book number 1. No business owner thinks, I really want to sell 50 items to people for $4 at a time over the course of several years with no great mechanisms to get people to keep buying. The hoops are there, we just accept them. We don't have enough direct sales authors right now to know the difference or what we're missing, but soon enough we will. I think we may be surprised by how much easier it is to scale when we are selling a complete 10-ebook series for $40.50, then upgrading people to the audiobook versions for another $30. It's definitely a lot easier to send advertising to a well-designed offer like this. #4: Higher profits per item. You can not only sell your bundles for a higher price, but you can also get higher profits per item. Retailers generally take 30% of the royalties of any sale you make. Your website doesn't. You will pay up to 5% in payment processing fees, and you'll likely have some fixed costs around running your website and store, but you have roughly 95% of your revenue to play with for scaling purposes. You can put the extra percentage of that you gain toward advertising to scale faster. Or you can pocket most of it and spend your effort scaling through free traffic means, which takes more time. #5 Data. One of the greatest challenges of working with retailers is that they own the majority of the sales funnel. They own the part where you collect whether the potential customer clicked on your product listing or not. They own the part where you collect the buyer's name and email address. They own the part where you follow up with a potential customer for cart abandonment and for more sales of other similar products, and many other parts that are critical to the sales process. When you sell direct on your website, you own the full sales funnel. Yes, you have to build it, but then you get to use it to make better decisions about what to do next and to scale faster. There are 3 very important pieces of this sales funnel that you want to get your hands on. Website tracking: You can use your website tracking information to understand what parts of your message are resonating with potential buyers. You can also do things like send cheap traffic to your website from social media like TikTok, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, and more, and use Facebook's website pixel to then follow up with advertising on Instagram and Facebook. Buyer intent tracking: As potential buyers click around on your offers, they may add things to their cart, favorite things, or save things for later. You'll also be able to see the exact path they are taking through your product and sales funnels, depending on where they click. You can use this to build email follow-up sequences, cart abandonment sequences, and more. Email list of potential and actual customers. No one can buy anything from your website without giving you an email address. If they buy a physical product, they have to give you a mailing address too. That means that if you sell something from your website, you will know exactly who bought it, and be able to target them even better for the next thing they can buy from you. It's much easier to get someone to buy the whole 10-ebook series, for example, if you already know they bought book number 1. The same is true for your general list-building efforts. While independent authors have some fantastic ways to build their lists, BookFunnel, StoryOrigin, Viral Giveaways, Backmatter, and more. One way that authors tend to miss out is simply optimizing their website for email list signups and sending more traffic to it. Outside of the indie publishing world, this is the top way that creators and artists build their email lists. Having a well-optimized website plus a store to follow up with is a killer business model in the digital space. #6: Sell intangible and hard-to-value items that you can't sell on retailers. There are some things that you'll never be able to sell on retailers. These include: Tuckerization: selling character names in your story. Personalization: adding a small personalized note to the buyer with signature. Acknowledgement: adding names to a thank you or acknowledgements page. Commentary: Sharing the why or the behind the scenes of your book, often chapter by chapter. Presence: Getting on a private live streaming event or even hosting something in person. Again, retailers don't owe us anything, so this isn't a complaint but rather an observation. What interests me about it is that readers are willing to pay extra for these things, and most authors need to be using all the tools at our disposal to make more money. These are all things you can sell on your website and to your email list as add-ons or as products themselves. Picture a world where you sell someone your print book with add-ons around personalization and commentary, then send them a follow-up email to invite them to a paid private event to discuss the book with the author and other fans. Other artist and creator professions like filmmaking and theater have all sorts of VIP upgrades and personal screenings, but we as independent authors are not doing this with our We should be. Direct sales on a website can get us there. #7 Easier to scale. When you combine the last 4 points: ability to bundle for higher revenue per item, no retailer fees for higher profits per item, all of your data, selling bonus stuff that is impossible to sell on retailers. You reach the point that is incredibly important to your success, which is that it's easier to scale your business. You can afford to spend more in advertising to get a sale, and as you do that, you collect a ton of data on your ideal customers and build a lasting foundation that you'll always be able to make money from. I believe that for many authors who are simply never going to hit critical mass on retailers because their books are too niche or whatever else, Selling direct through a website and other means may be the only way they're able to scale and turn their writing business into a long and successful career. Number 8: Establishing the front end of an ecosystem. A lot of authors are interested in events, direct sales, and fan-backed funding through platforms like Kickstarter, Patreon, and Substack. These platforms are not going to be a maybe or nice to have for long. Someday, as competition grows, they will become a must-have way to build a readership and find more fans. I see all of those things working in an ecosystem that website sales and launch funding sites like Kickstarter are the front end of. In order to sell through events, book signings, and your own website, you need to hold inventory. Kickstarter is a no-risk place to fund your inventory production costs. You can fund a big investment in your company, like if you want to start attending live events and need table materials, or if you want to start direct sales but need to pay for warehousing. We authors normally fund this out of what should be our profits. Once you have extra product, you need a way to keep selling it. Your website and in-person events are an obvious place to keep moving your merchandise along, In order to get someone to buy direct from you over and over again through a subscription on Patreon or Substack, you need to get them to buy from you once. Your website or Kickstarter is the perfect place to establish that relationship and bring your casual readers deeper into your world so they become the kind of true fans that want a subscription from you. There's an ecosystem of direct sales that all ties together in many disparate places that authors want to be and build. Your website is a gateway to more direct sales income streams. In order to make these direct sales pieces work for you, it helps to buy in and put into place the entire ecosystem under which other creators like artists, comic creators, webtoons creators, and many others are currently thriving and finding new ways to make a living. Additional Resources. Subscribe to The Author Analyst. Direct sales and all of the Big Five retailers are changing all the time. Meanwhile, this book gets updated every 2 to 5 years, and a lot can change in that timeframe. This is a place where I can offer my news, analysis, and opinion on happenings in the industry, and I'm usually able to break news long before news outlets do. For authors who are going aggressively wide in subscriptions and memberships, this publication takes a deep dive into everything about serialization, fiction apps, and subscriptions and memberships. AuthorAnalyst.substack.com. Join 2 mini courses on the topic. If you want to follow along with the 2 major types of website sales I discuss in this book— landing page sales, special offers, and a website store— you can get my mini courses on the topic here. https://theworldneedsyourpassion.com/product/website-sales-special-offers/ https://theworldneedsyourpassion.com/product/website-sales-website-store/ Takeaways: Direct sales through your website is going to be a hassle. It's going to feel like this to-do item that probably isn't going to pay off right away. There are going to be challenges that you don't have to deal with when working with retailers. Do it anyway. Work through the challenges, because direct sales is an important part of digital entrepreneurship and will open doors and opportunities that might surprise you. For many authors, direct sales will be the path to turning their writing efforts into a career that supports them and their families. This is especially true if you're an author who has done a lot of marketing on retailers and hasn't ever found your tipping to the point where it feels profitable and sustainable. For other authors who are successful on retailers, direct sales will be another income stream, or really, set of income streams, as a website store is just the beginning, and will build more foundation to balance the risks and sudden income drops that come with selling through retailers. Either way, it's a good investment of your time, energy, and money. In the coming chapters, we'll dive deeper into the "how" of setting up your store and making it successful and profitable. Task Checklist. Consider what challenges are still holding you back from selling from your website. Join a community and ask a question to help you work through those challenges. Think about what you could gain and how you could transform your business with website sales. Does anything stick out that could motivate you to take action in the next week? Chapter 3. A Basic Website Setup. I've given you exhaustive lists about the pros and cons of setting up your website store, so now I'm going to assume that you are continuing to read this book because even after all of that, you see value in selling direct to your readers. In this chapter, I'll explain the basic setup you need to sell direct to a reader. The Basic Setup. There are 5 things that you must have to do direct sales from your website. Number 1: Product Page. You must have a landing page or website page to list your product. On this page, you'll put an image of the book, the book's product description, and a button or link leading to payment. This page could be hosted on a platform, or it could be hosted on your own website. We will discuss each of these and the options in more detail in the chapters on special offers and web store setups. Number 2: Payment instructions. On your product page, you'll usually have a payment button that leads to PayPal or a Stripe integration. Some authors also just use a form submission for the product page and send a PayPal invoice manually. I've shared many of my recommendations for taking payments in the chapter on special offers. Number 3: Fulfillment system. Once someone purchases your product, you have to deliver that product to them. For digital products, you can use a company like BookFunnel for ebooks and audiobooks. You can distribute other types of files through Dropbox, which gives you a link to share each file. If you're selling a course or a bundle of media, you may want to use course software like Teachable. If you are shipping physical goods, you can use a dropshipping system. Dropshipping is when a company fulfills an online order for you on your behalf, and I give you more information about that in the chapter called Selling Books and Related Products. #4: Customer Support System. Retailers handle customer support for you, but when you sell direct to readers, you'll be handling it yourself. You can expect a higher volume of emails to respond to, including questions about How to place an order. How to track an order. How to access a file. How to get— make a return or exchange. How to get a replacement for missing or damaged shipments. You may also have to handle less pleasant customer support, like chargebacks, when someone requests a refund through their credit card provider, citing that they didn't receive the product. It rarely happens, but everyone who does direct sales through their website eventually gets one of these. Customer service and support can seem daunting, but there is one little phrase that will help you significantly: "It's company policy." Regular businesses have policies in place to handle support requests efficiently and fairly. They state these policies upfront. You may be an author and solopreneur or small business owner. But you should also have a policy for all of these scenarios. When a new scenario comes up, create another policy and add it to your website so people know about it from the beginning. Creating a policy is like setting a boundary for your business. It will make everything go more smoothly and set expectations upfront so negative scenarios happen infrequently. And the good news is that you can create any policy you want as long as it's fair to the customer communicated upfront, and legal, of course. Think about how you want or need to do business through your website so you can communicate your expectations and abilities kindly and professionally. There is lots of icky mindset stuff that can get in the way of having good customer support on your website, like feeling frustration, rejection, fear, anger, resentment, and more. I almost always recommend that creatives completely outsource their customer support to a personal assistant or other team member in order to completely avoid the bad feelings, and more importantly, to avoid saying something unprofessional in response to your customers. #5: A plan to collect taxes legally. The bottom line on taxes is you need to hire a tax advisor or preparation service. Nothing in this book is meant to be legal or financial advice, and taxes are going to depend on your locality, so you need someone familiar with your local laws. In general, you only pay taxes when your business has a nexus in a location. Nexus is established in a number of ways, including but not limited to where the business is located, what you sell in each area, and how much you sell in each area. You may find additional ways that your business is establishing a nexus in various countries, states, and towns all over the world. It sounds complicated and overwhelming, which is why you must hire an accountant who has experience in digital businesses and, if possible, in publishing. Unless and until your business has nexus in various places, you cannot apply to that place to collect taxes. Additionally, you never want to collect taxes from a customer in a specific area without being registered to collect taxes for that area. If you collect taxes in a place where you aren't registered, you could be accused of tax fraud. Additional Resources. While I don't give any tax advice and cannot help you regarding your taxes or sales tax, I do want to give you a few potential tools that may be worth looking into. Quaderno: https://quaderno.io/ Avalara: https://www.avalara.com/ TaxJar: https://www.taxjar.com/. Takeaways. You really only need 5 things to start selling from your website: a product page, a way to take payments, a way to distribute your digital and physical products, a way to handle customer support, and a way to collect taxes legally. Everything beyond these 5 things is complexity, that you don't necessarily need to get started with selling on your website. Focus first on these 5 things, and you can start selling sooner. Task Checklist. If you know the answers, write down: how you intend to host product pages, how you want to take payments, how you hope to distribute your books, how you will handle customer support requests, and how you plan to collect taxes legally for your specific location and situation. If you don't know the answers to these questions, that's okay. Write down the questions you have about each of these 5 sections. Now you have a list of questions to research for next steps. Come over to Advanced Direct Sales Strategies for Authors on Facebook to ask your non-tax questions. As noted, we will not answer any tax questions as we are not licensed professionals nor in your locality. No content in this book should be misconstrued as tax advice. https://www.facebook.com/groups/directsalesforauthors/ Chapter 4: Choosing Your Special Offers Setup. You may have picked up this book thinking it was mostly about website stores, and we will get to those in the next chapter. In this chapter, I'm going to start with a basic building block of a website store: a landing page or product page. If you can master a special offer on a landing page, you will be much more successful at managing multiple offers and product pages through your website store. What is a special offer? A special offer is basically a focused offer that only puts a few products in front of a customer at once. It differs from a website store because you are directing your readers toward the thing you want to sell them. If you were to just send them to your website store, they may browse the store however they like, without a goal or clear yes or no decision in their mind. Special offers are primarily done through landing pages on your website. They can be evergreen or time-sensitive. You can push them to just your email list, which honestly I recommend. I would not get into advertising without testing my messaging with my email list first. Or you can push them to a larger audience and include social channels and advertising. Special offers are really flexible, and they are also a place where you can get creative about how you present your work. I love putting together special offers because I have a lot of control over my messaging, imagery, and more. What technology options are needed? Special offers really only require a web page, a payment processor, and a distribution processor. An offer can be created, paid for, and fulfilled with something as simple as a web form, PayPal invoice, and link on Dropbox emailed to someone. If you want to get fancier, you have several options: landing pages, I use Elementor and Elementor Pro for WordPress. Everything I use is on WordPress. Writer MBA also sometimes uses OptimizePress or Themify. Checkout pages. I have a website store set up through WooCommerce on my main website. I run all of my checkouts through that storefront. Writer MBA uses ThriveCart, which is fantastic for digital-only products that use order bumps, upsells, downsells, post-purchase offers, and more. I cover these terms and what they mean in the chapter called Advanced Website Setups. If you are using Stripe, few people know that the company also has a cool product called Stripe Checkout which looks fantastic. It can't do as much as ThriveCart, but it's a solid option if you aren't ready for ThriveCart. I also think PayPal invoicing is perfectly fine to use when you are getting started. It doesn't need to be complicated. Finally, many major form companies integrate with Stripe and/or PayPal's payment gateways, so you can take an order and charge for it in one place. I used Wafoo for years to direct sales, even offering a 9-book fiction series through them back in 2016. Distribution. To me, there's only one amazing game in town for distribution, and that's BookFunnel. I sometimes use Dropbox links as well. I also use BackerKit specifically for Kickstarter, so a lot of my books go out that way, but I still include BookFunnel and Dropbox links in my distribution since I'm working with other authors for the most part. On the print side, I also order books from Mixam, Lulu, and IngramSpark to be shipped out, usually using Uline boxes and ShipStation to track orders from multiple outlets. I go over distributing print books in the chapter called Selling Your Books and Related Products. There are dozens, if not hundreds, more options to use for each of these categories, so find something you and your audience are comfortable with and give it a try. Why are special offers valuable? I want to highlight the value special offers, because they are so much easier to get started with when it comes to website sales. Setting up a shop is daunting, ask anyone who has done it. In some ways, the best place for authors to start is with special offers because they teach you so much about messaging, imagery, driving traffic, payments, distribution, and customer service. Here are some serious benefits of starting your website sales efforts with a special offer: You don't have to set up a full web store. Web stores are challenging to set up and can take days, weeks, or months to get operational. They can also be expensive to set up, run, and maintain throughout the year. Special offers allow you to get website sales without having a full-blown storefront. You can sell things you can't sell on retailers. Website sales increase with exclusivity. One of the challenges of selling through retailers is that you can't usually sell bundles of things that people really enjoy buying, like ebook and audiobook bundles. You can monetize your current email list and social accounts. You likely have readers on your email list who have nothing left to do but buy your next book release. These readers may spend more if you give them something else—special print editions, book boxes, gift sets around holidays, and more. Likewise, you have casual readers or freebie seekers too. There are different offers you can create that may attract each one to spend more with your business. You can set up early access pre-orders. Some authors set up pre-orders just for their current audience to get the book early. They then go on to have a second launch on retailers. This gives them two chances to talk about the book or series and extends the time between releases. I. You can capture more customer data. If your audience is on social media, you want their email address. But even if your audience is on your list, you may want their phone numbers or mailing addresses. A special offer could be one way to capture that information. You can make money on demand. My business partner Russell and I often use the term money on demand to talk about how you can make more money whenever you want. Special offers are great to have in your back pocket for these times. If you need to make up some revenue in one month, you can put together an offer and set a goal of 10, 50, 100, 1,000+ sales, depending on the audience size you currently have. This is a huge mindset shift that puts you in control of your business rather than being at the complete mercy of third parties. This can truly be a mindset shift that helps you algorithm-proof your business. You can also use special offers for printed products, which has even more benefits. You can create a limited-time promotion with deadlines. You can create an offer that requires your potential buyers to order by a certain date so you can hit fulfillment goals like printing or shipping. You can test an idea before pursuing a physical product idea and sinking cost into it. You can check to see how many people are interested and will give you money for something. You can take the money up front. Since you are only holding money for a short period, you don't have to invest your own money to order the products up front. You don't have to hold inventory long-term. You can buy close to what you need to fulfill a promotion without having to estimate and then figure out how to sell the rest of your inventory at a later date, storing it in the meantime. Potential projects for your direct sales special offer. What should you launch as your first special offer to your audience? Here are 5 things that I think make a lot of sense to set up as special offers. Whether you plan them as a launch or an evergreen landing page that you are sending ongoing traffic to through advertising and other means. Number 1: Launch of a pre-order or new release. A launch of a pre-order or new release is probably the easiest first effort in website sales. That's because it's a completely new product for your entire audience. The upsides to launching your books exclusively on your website for a short period weeks or months depending on what you be comfortable with, is that you get an extra 25-30% in royalties, you have to pay payment fees to your payment processor, which are usually around 2.9% plus $0.30 in the United States, and you can get your money fairly quickly, most direct sales payment systems pay out in less than a week, compared to retailers which take 1-3 months. It also rarely hurts your retailer launch, especially if you are not focused on sales rank, only a fraction of your audience will buy direct from you. The downsides of this strategy is that you may not have a new release coming up, and you are usually only going to be marketing to your current fans. This isn't an ideal strategy for finding new readers for the most part. There is also a switching cost for readers that you found on other platforms. Why should they buy direct from you? There's a whole list of psychological triggers that you can use to come up with reasons. I've dropped this list for your convenience into the chapter called Messaging for Your Website. Number 2: Launch of a backlist book in another format. A launch of a backlist book is one of the easiest ways to expand the profitability of your backlist on both retailers and through direct sales. The upsides to launching your backlist books is that you can make small tweaks—new covers, bonus scenes, or content—and additional artwork, different format, omnibus or bundling, and more, and make additional money from your already created content. It's also a great way to capture more lurkers on your email list who either missed the launch the first time around or will be attracted to a new format. For example, some readers collect hardcovers, and some readers prefer to get a whole series at once instead of individual books. The downsides of this strategy are that you will need messaging that addresses previous buyers so as not to be accused of dipping, making someone pay for essentially the same product twice. For example, you may have bonus content in a backlist launch, but this penalizes readers who bought the book on retailers the first day. You may not want to make those readers buy the whole book again just to read an extra chapter or scene, so you'll need to decide how to address this. Alternatively, you can segment your email list. Number 3: Evergreen list builder or customer builder. A customer builder is a break-even offer that you don't make profit on, but rather use to pay for advertising. You get paid $20, then you put that $20 back into the advertising to the offer. Along the way, you are collecting customers or warm and hot leads in the form of email addresses. The goal is to build a list of warm leads at no additional cost that you can then sell to later. The upside to launching a special offer that builds your audience is that you can build your email list while also selling a product, while also breaking even on your advertising costs. Now that you have a new audience member, and more specifically, a new customer, which is worth far more than a new audience member, you can sell them something else. You were able to find that person sustainably, without strain to your finances, and you can now make offers to them. Further, you can set this type of special offer on autopilot by driving traffic through advertising, so you are not putting daily energy into building an audience. It's all happening in the background. The downsides are that you'll need to work on your advertising skills to make this type of special offer work. It focuses almost exclusively on driving cold traffic to your offer And it can require rigorous testing and some financial investment to get an offer like this working well. The landing page needs to convert, and the advertising needs to convert too. That may take some time. I consider this a more advanced special offer for this reason, but I also wanted to include it in this list. Conceptually, whether we want or not, as authors, we have this type of special offer in our product mix already. We may be using permafree or discounted books to try to hook readers into a series. We understand the concept of loss leaders. And whether we set up this offer as a special offer or not, we are going to have loss leaders in our website store, just as we do on retailers. It's important to understand this, and be conscious of it, because so many authors don't realize that most profitability comes from the second thing the reader purchases from your website. The first purchase might be profitable as well, but it at least needs to be break-even to be sustainable. #4: An exclusive product. An exclusive product is something that can't easily be offered on retailers. It could overlap with one of the other special offer examples, but it is unique in that you are not able to sell it at retailers easily. An example in my own business is that I want to start selling tarot decks from my website store. I even have one sitting on my hard drive right now that I haven't had the chance to set up yet. Decks are not currently in print on demand, though I hope they might be someday, so if a reader wanted one, they would have to go through me. Other examples of an exclusive product might be comic books, graphic novels, artwork, merchandise, and more. Digital examples, which might be something you start with, might include annotated books, screensaver or lockscreen art, or audio commentaries. And finally, you could offer bundles of books that aren't possible on retailers, like a print, ebook, and audiobook bundle for the same title. The upsides to an exclusive product are that your readers can only get it through you. If it's something they want and are excited about, then they are likely to pick it up. This is also a great way to excite your readers and bring them deeper into your fandom. And these extras are really useful to have in your product line if you get into subscriptions or launch crowdfunding through a platform like Kickstarter. The downsides are that since the physical products are not in print-on-demand, they might be harder to obtain and keep in stock. You may have to do small print runs and hold inventory. For digital exclusives, most readers are not as willing to pay for them, and you can instead use them as upgrades to your regular ebooks, audiobooks, and print books. #5: A seasonal product. A seasonal product is something you offer for a very limited time to help readers celebrate the season. Like an exclusive product, this could overlap with other special offer examples. The upsides are that you probably already have seasonal products in your product line. For myself, I found seasonal products in all 3 of my product lines. I have a book called Novel Writing Prep, which has an audience year-round, but sells best in September, October, and November right before and during National Novel Writing Month. I have a Twin Soul or Soulmates book about healing your romantic relationship that can easily be slotted into a Valentine's Day promotion. In fiction, I have books about witches, which make a ton of sense in the spooky fall months, and are especially great for the annual Witchstarter promotion on Kickstarter. The downsides to a seasonal product are that you are promoting it for a short time, and you really have to get the timing right. Delays will not be good, as many holidays are time-sensitive, so you have to pay attention if you are ordering products. Additional Resources. Join my mini-course on the topic. If you want more on landing page sales and special offers, you can get my mini-course on the topic here. Https://theworldneedsyourpassion.com/product/website-sales-special-offer/ Takeaways: A special offer is a building block for your website storefront. It allows you to focus on selling just a few products at a time. You don't need a ton of software to set up a special offer. Pick a landing page tool, a payment tool, and a distribution tool, and you are off to the races. There are tons of reasons to start with a special offer instead of a web store. Special offers are the training wheels for your web store and allow you to take action quickly. There are 5 recommended options, with some overlap, to create a special offer: frontlist launch, backlist launch, audience builder, exclusive product, and seasonal product. If you don't have an idea for what you want to do, pick one of these and just get started. Task Checklist. Choose a special offer that works with your product catalog and feels doable. Choose tools to set up that special offer. The best tools are the ones you already have access to or accounts with, but that is easily followed by tools you feel comfortable and confident with. Get to work setting up your special offer and focus on it being functional. You can send the offer to your email list and they are able to take action on it. You will be learning and iterating as soon as you take action, so don't try to get things perfect. A special offer takes time to hone. Chapter 5: Choosing Your Web Store Setup. Now that we've covered landing pages and special offers, let's talk about setting up a store on your website. In this chapter, I'll offer the top website store solutions that are ideal for independent authors right now., as well as the many add-ons that you'll want to implement over time to make your website store a sales machine. Because we're talking about multiple platforms, I've kept the specifics around recommendations very general, and have not pointed you to any specific add-ons for your store. The best thing you can do is decide what the specific thing is that you want to do, then search for an add-on that seems to fit all or most of your criteria. There are no right answers or perfect implementations, unfortunately, but if you know what you want to do, you can seek out author groups on Facebook like 20 Books to 50K or Wide for the Win and ask for recommendations. You can also hop into my group that I share with my co-author Russell Nohulty called Book Sales Supercharged: Advanced Book Marketing for Authors. This is a very good place to ask for recommendations on setup. I have a degree in computer science and have been building websites since 2007, so there's a good chance that I can help or at least point you in the right direction. Join here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/booksalesupercharge/. And finally, we have a Facebook group dedicated to advanced direct sales topics called Advanced Direct Sales Strategies for Authors, which you can join here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/directsalesforauthors/ Technology Options for Setting Up Your Store. When authors think of setting up their website for direct sales, one of their biggest questions is usually, "What software do I use?" To me, there's no right answer. People often get caught up on tech when it likely doesn't matter. And we rarely choose the perfect thing to begin with anyway. Tech is also changing constantly, with software going out of date and competitors entering the space. When I'm looking at software selection, the factors I look at include: how stable the platform software is, so that I don't have to worry about it going out of date or the company going under; how well it integrates with my other software, Specifically, my email list and my fulfillment systems, but also my payment processing providers like Stripe and PayPal. Whether I think I can make my money back quickly. How my audience prefers to get content similar to what I'm selling. This helps establish trust. Several years ago, I had a nice WordPress plugin that allowed me to sell courses from my website. I did good business with it, and it was very affordable. I ended up moving to Teachable, however, mostly because it was a stable system integrated with everything, and my audience, authors, was more accustomed to buying premium courses from Teachable. Lots of people who bought the courses from my website asked me if they could buy from Teachable instead. So even though I was happy with my setup and it was a lot cheaper than Teachable, I ended up moving systems to build a greater sense of trust, and ultimately reach new audiences. Now that you know how I prioritize my recommendations, I wanted to offer you the 3 top platforms you can use to start your store: Shopify, WooCommerce, and Payhip. Number 1, Shopify. Shopify is one of the most popular platforms for selling, and not just among books. It's ideal for authors who don't want to host their own platform, yet want a lot of customization options still. If you are moderately tech-savvy but have no website development experience, Shopify is going to be the best hosted platform for ease of use while still having access to all the top apps, add-ons that you'll want to add to your store over time. When you use Shopify, a lot of the website maintenance and backend work of maintaining a store is done for you. Shopify also has direct support that you can contact to solve any issues you may encounter. The challenges that you'll face with Shopify is that it's pricier than other options, and if you don't intend to market and scale your store, it may be hard to cover the baseline fees to run it. It's not an ideal option for authors with a limited budget who intend to either test out selling from their website or who are hoping to sell from their website sporadically throughout the year, during a pre-order for example. And to be frank, this is about 90% of all independent authors. If you are an advanced or full-time author, Shopify is as solid an option as any, but most authors are not going to need all the bells and whistles that Shopify has and may not be able to justify the costs of it. Number 2, WooCommerce. If you use and like the WordPress blogging platform as the core content management system on your site, then I recommend using WooCommerce to extend your website into a store. Like everything else on WordPress, the plugin is infinitely customizable, and you can buy specialized themes to make your store match the rest of your website. You can purchase tons of plugins, add-ons similar to Shopify, to give your website store robust functionality that will help you sell more. I personally use WooCommerce, and the thing I like most about it is the ability to customize it exactly as I want, and the fact that the base plugin is free to set up and play with. I also like that it matches the rest of my website, meaning that I can use Elementor to create matching landing pages that lead seamlessly into my shopping cart. The challenges you'll face with WooCommerce is that you are responsible for hosting, technical support, server maintenance, and more for your store, just as you would be if you use WordPress already. You can outsource this to your designer, or you can do it yourself. Number 3, Payhip. Payhip is the current third most popular e-commerce solution in the independent publishing space. There is no comparison to Shopify or WooCommerce, which in my opinion are both ideal solutions for authors who want to grow and scale website sales. However, authors like Payhip for many of the same reasons they like retailers. Payhip is uncomplicated. Remember all the icky stuff we talked about earlier—dealing with taxes, setting up full sales funnels, figuring out payment buttons, and so on? Payhip does a lot of that for you, just like a retailer does. It also does some interesting things that some or all retailers don't currently do, like couponing, embedding to your website, integrating with your mailing lists, pay-what-you-want pricing, social discounts, and more. And it still gives you about 95% of your revenue on each purchase. The challenges with Payhip are the limitations. It can only do digital downloads, and while it does offer more options than many retailers do, it does not offer customization at the level that Shopify and WooCommerce do. In the near future, Payhip may have an integration with BookVault, which handles print book dropshipping., but that may not be live at the time of this writing. You can think of Payhip as a hybrid solution, sitting somewhere between retailers and your own custom website store with Shopify or WooCommerce. Still, it's popular because it may be a great way to get started, and they do have a free tier, so there's no harm in setting it up as an experiment. #4 Other Options. There are also several other options for selling direct, like Squarespace and Wix, And if you have your website built on these platforms, then it may be easiest to upgrade to their shop options. In fact, whatever your website platform is, you can look into whether they have an add-on for your current setup. This is the easiest way to make sure your store integrates with all of your other tools, as a store without automation is probably not going to be fun to run or make your customers who expect instant gratification very happy. I want to add that you don't need a store platform to get started selling direct. Some authors use a free Google Form to take information about the order, then use PayPal's invoicing system to manually send money requests. They fulfill the orders themselves from a spreadsheet. While this is not automated, it's also an uncomplicated way to get started. Remember, you can change your mind about your platform at any point. So don't be afraid to start on Payhip to test the waters, with the hopes of graduating to Shopify when your store takes off a bit more. Use the solution that is perfect for you for the next 6 months, and worry about what happens years down the road when it's more imminent. If you are worried about investing too much energy into any one platform, remember that you can even hire someone to move all your products over for you in the future. The greater risk is in not starting or waiting for the perfect solution. So just pick something and work with its limitations for the time being. One final note: there is definitely some toxicity around choosing a website platform in the author community, and varying thoughts on ones that make you a serious author or not. There are always going to be people who think that their platform is the only way,, but trust your own gut. Don't let anyone spew their own trauma at you to guilt you into choosing one platform over another. You have nothing to prove to anyone, and you do not have to take on the labels that people try to assign to others. Your marketing and sales chops are going to be far more important to your success than a tool is, so do what's right for you and keep reading, because we will get to the marketing and sales portion of this book. Add-ons you'll want to consider. For Shopify and WooCommerce, you can find all sorts of add-ons. Shopify calls them apps, WooCommerce calls them plugins, that will make your shop run a little better. As an author, there are several categories of add-ons that you want to consider getting. While I don't list any specific recommendations, it is fairly easy to find the most popular plugins that have the functionality in each of these categories for either Shopify or WooCommerce. Nonfiction authors, coaches, internet marketers, dropshippers, and other major industries that focus on online sales have already been selling direct for a decade or more. These industries have paved the way for us authors to the point where we truly do have all the tools needed to easily get a very nice website store up and running. Here are some of the categories you may want to consider add-ons in. Number 1: Pre-orders. You definitely want a plugin that allows you to take pre-orders. Ideally, the way this functions is that you take the order and the credit card information and charge the order when the content or product ships, just like a retailer. In general, you don't want to collect money on items that are going to ship 6 months or 12 months out. Number 2: Bundling. One of the biggest downsides to retailers is the inability to bundle products. As an author, you can basically only list a book for sale, and it's hard to list a bundle of books, especially priced over Amazon's ceiling of $9.99. Yes, you can create a large ebook file and call it an omnibus, but to what limit before you hit pricing ceilings? Usually, 3-4 book bundles on Amazon, and 6-7 book bundles on other retailers. Even though the other Big Five retailers—Kobo, Barnes Noble, and Google Play Books—allow you to price books higher without any drop in royalties, there are still limits to how much readers will tolerate when all the books nearby are $9.99 and below. Additionally, some readers will always prefer 5 files to 1 huge one that may be more difficult to navigate. Retailers definitely do not offer a way to bundle obvious things together. Like a print version, ebook version, and audiobook version of the same book. It's also impossible to sell things like actual print boxed sets, where the books come separately in a custom-fitted cardboard box with beautiful art on it. If you are a nonfiction writer, an obvious bundle might be the book plus matching workbook. You especially want to be able to do all of these things you can't do on retailers on your website. These are unique products that readers must come to you for, and this will make them more valuable, as well as help you train your readers to buy direct from you. When you bundle items, I encourage you to maintain separate SKUs for each item primarily due to fulfillment. You might be using different fulfillment services for digital versus physical products, or for books versus merchandise. A plugin that allows you to build bundles of individual items is going to save you a ton of time and hassle on the backend. Number 3: Upsells and also bots. One major benefit of selling direct is the ability to gather data, which you can then use to find upsells. Upsells are smaller items that you can persuade your audience to add to their carts when they put something else in their cart. For example, if someone wants to buy book 1 of your series, you may offer to upgrade them to books 2 and 3 on their way to their shopping cart. Or you may try to offer someone who bought books 1 to 3 an ebook to upgrade, so they can get the audiobook versions too. #4 Couponing and Bonuses. Most systems will have some sort of built-in couponing tool, but I recommend looking for add-ons that can do a bit more regarding both couponing and bonuses. These are the two best ways to get people to buy now: offer them a discount with a deadline or offer them a bonus with a deadline. Naturally, couponing works a little better— people love deals— but bonuses can work well too, especially if the bonus is a good one. For couponing, the most popular option is going to be a coupon discount, usually 10-20% off, in exchange for joining your email list. Make sure you promote this as a popup on your store. Another way you can use couponing discounts is to track affiliates. You can offer an affiliate a coupon for their audience and send them an affiliate fee for any sales they end up making. Bonuses are often not discounts, but they are frequently still executed via a couponing mechanism. I tend to prefer bonuses because they protect your pricing and train people to buy at a regular price. Bonuses can be additional items, but they can also be a bundle version of something like buy one, Get One BOGO. You can also put some of your worst-selling physical products, your overflow inventory, in a mystery box and offer that as a bonus if someone buys $50 or more. You can also offer free shipping at certain spending inflection points, which is always going to be a popular offer. To get a sense of what retail businesses do to bring people to their websites for direct sales, you may want to do some online shopping. I mean, in the name of research, of course. What does the retailer try to push you toward? #5 Email and Fulfillment Integration. As I mentioned, automation is key to successful website sales. I highly recommend integrating your software so that when someone buys something, they get added to your marketing email list and potentially an autoresponder funnel based on what they bought,, and their items get added to your fulfillment systems, which are largely automated as well, to the extent that they can be. These two pieces of integration are key to scaling your website sales, and I would personally pay extra in add-ons to make sure this works smoothly. #6 Advertising Integration. Many authors want to sell direct just to their current fans and readers. If you want to grow your sales on your website beyond your current fan base, however, you're probably going to be using advertising to do so. It's worth making sure you're tracking your data well so that you can understand which products are your best sellers to cold traffic and which advertising narratives are going to produce the most converting traffic to your website. #7. Checkout and cart abandonment. The point of sale is one of the most important parts of your process. A good checkout process with guest checkout options, different shipping and delivery options, and more can make or break your sales numbers, and cart abandonment follow-up can help you recover sales that are at the tail end of the sales process. You've done the work and gotten these potential buyers far into your sales process, so don't abandon them, and they won't be abandoning their purchase. Build your website store slowly. You are not going to get all of these pieces together in a single day or even a single week, Nor do you need to. I recommend getting just the 5 basics set up and operating smoothly first. This may take you a bit of time anyway. After that, I would slowly start to integrate the additional add-ons, if you are on a platform that supports them. To me, the most important thing you can do is get email integration, your front-end marketing, hooked up, as well as fulfillment integration, your backend delivery hooked up. Next, I would focus on bundling, as that will give you a bunch of new and higher-priced products or SKUs in your store. Bundles are going to be one of the biggest ways you scale your store sales, especially when you consider the cost of advertising. From there, it comes down to your personal preference. Whatever you decide, remember to take it slow. Every income stream takes time to build, and while you can think of your website store as one income stream, It's also useful to think of your website store as multiple income streams. Every product or category of products is another income stream that you are learning to build. Different customers will like different things. It's important to dream about and understand all the possibilities. And then it is more important to implement the most basic setup you can come up with and get your first sale. Additional resources. Join my mini-course on the topic. If you want more on setting up your website store, you can get my mini-course on the topic here: https://theworldneedsyourpassion.com/product/website-sales-website-store/. For specific recommendations on add-ons for your particular setup, join and post in our Facebook group dedicated to advanced direct sales topics, called Advanced Direct Sales Strategies for Authors, which you can join here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/directsalesforauthors/. Takeaways. I prioritize my software in various ways, but you may not prioritize the same. What's most important to you in a website store? Follow your gut as you read through the descriptions. There are many add-ons you'll want to consider, and we will continue the discussion in the following chapters. The most important thing you can do is not get overwhelmed because you are going to be adding these pieces to your web store one add-on at a time. Don't get peer pressured into a piece of software. The tool is far less important than your ability to do great things with it. Task Checklist. Decide on your priorities for your website store software. Choose a software platform to set up your website store on. Decide what add-ons you need. Each one costs money, and you'll have to choose between various implementations based on what you are trying to do. Make a plan to build your storefront. What is the first and most basic iteration? Get down to the core of what you really need to consider it a success. You can always add on later, and you don't need to follow anyone else's timeline but your own. Chapter 6: Advanced Website Sales Concepts. I've talked about some of the more advanced website sales concepts already on a very practical level, but in this chapter, I want to formally define and clarify them so that you have a clear framework and language for understanding website sales conversations moving forward. This can help you understand what's what as the conversation about website sales and direct sales develops within the author community. It will also help you understand the rest of the book. Buyer Intent Concepts. Abandoned Cart. Over 50% of potential buyers abandon their cart at the point of checkout. An abandoned cart sequence is used to recapture the sale when someone goes through the cart process but never puts in their credit card information. Usually, this is done via email. Both Klaviyo and Drip do this for you, and it can also be done through retargeted advertising. Retargeting. Some advertising platforms, primarily Facebook, have what is called a pixel, a bit of code you drop onto your website that tracks people who land on your pages. You can have your website person do this for you if you don't know how. The pixel is used to create Facebook audiences of people who have engaged with your content. You are then able to "retarget" this audience with a unique set of ads that acknowledges where they are in the buyer intent process. Because they already showed interest in you or your product, you may not need to introduce them to you again. They are no longer cold traffic. Instead, they are warmer traffic, so you might now instead show them ads centered around reviews and testimonials, or you might offer them a sample of the product. Samples can be in the form of video, or a teaser, or an excerpt. Conversion Advertising. When you start running ads to your landing page, or for some people, website store or product page, though I personally find that much more challenging, you want to focus on conversion advertising. Again, you will need a Facebook pixel. With conversion advertising, you can set specific intent around what the pixel tracks to show Facebook what you consider a successful ad target. For example, if your aim is to get an email address, you may want to use the pixel to track that the person landed on the email page and submitted their email address, which took them to a thank you page. Facebook would know that the goal is not successful until the person hits two specific pages. When the goal is successful, Facebook now knows to optimize the ad to find people who look like the person who just hit the targets you set. You can use this idea to track sales as well. You want the target to get to the confirmation page after purchase. In each case, a conversion ad is going to give you more of the people who will take the same actions as those who have succeeded at hitting the goals you set. Any website sales strategy needs to primarily use conversion advertising rather than traffic advertising, which is a popular and suitable choice for ads to retailers. That said, I'm wary of using conversion advertising that only targets completed sales. While I am a huge proponent of getting more sales now or sooner, rather than in the long term, I also know that most potential buyers are not ready to buy now. At best, your total audience has 1-5% of people who are ready to buy now. The other 95%+ need to be nurtured in some way, and finding ways to engage with them, usually by capturing their email address, but can also be done over social channels or even retargeting ads, is a smart way to keep your sales funnel flush and full over the long term. The people who are ready to buy now are low-hanging fruit. With our Kickstarter training, we have taught this same concept. Using conversion advertising to just go after sales is a lot like sending one email at the beginning of a launch. When we teach Kickstarter, we encourage authors to instead make the case for their book over time via an email sequence. During this email sequence, they can use different appeals, specifically excitement, objection, and psychological trigger appeals, to build a case for the sale over time. I go into greater detail on the framework around excitement, objections, and psychological triggers in the chapter on messaging for your website. Don't get me wrong, we also want to send a ton of people to a launch on the first day it's live. But there will always be a large chunk of people who simply aren't sold right away, or who are busy and need to be reminded frequently. And then, there are always people who will be motivated by a deadline too. My company, Writer MBA, has a ton of data on this. In a well-done Kickstarter campaign, only about 30% of backers from warm-to-hot lead lists, social media, and email, come in on the first day. These leads have already received an entire month of pre-launch content also. The other 70% come in throughout the campaign. So if you didn't make the case for your book, you would end up with a much smaller campaign. The same concept works across all direct sales. Cold traffic versus warm and hot traffic is going to convert at closer to 1-2%. That means the other 95%+ need to be warmed up for a significant period of time over the course of months and multiple strategic touchpoints that make the case. Tripwire. Sometimes called a self-liquidating offer, SLO, this is a small offer that essentially helps you build your email list. It's a break-even offer that you make to your target audience, not for profit, but to pay for your advertising while building your audience at the same time. You make a profit from a tripwire or SLO by selling something else on the backend. This is usually done through an email sequence. In nonfiction, this might be offering a small course on the front end and offering a consulting call on the back end. In fiction, it might be offering your best-selling bundle of books on the front end and offering an upgrade to your whole catalog, or special edition hardcovers, or a book box on the back end. Selling Concepts. Cross-Sell. A cross-sell is selling a second, complementary product when someone shows intent to purchase a first product. Some specific implementations of that include putting together a bundle of books, using a customers bought together style of plugin or add-on to your web store similar to what retailers use, or offering an order bump, a specific complementary product featured on the cart page that you can add to cart easily on the cart checkout page. To me, cross-sells are specifically characterized by finding individual products that sell well together The goal is to increase the cart order size and amount spent per customer. One thing to be aware of regarding cross-sells is profitability. If you are using advertising, then the first product placed in the cart is often more of a loss leader and is paying for the ad. That means you need to choose order bumps wisely to get a profit. You may even need the order bump itself to maintain breakeven. I see many individual products that are not profitable, specifically merchandise, being used as order bumps. Upsell. Sometimes confused with a cross-sell, an upsell is selling an upgrade to a product. The classic example is upgrading a soda at a fast food restaurant. You can get a large for 25 cents extra. A publishing example might be upgrading an intent to buy a paperback to a signed and dedicated copy, or special edition hardcover. Some specific implementations are using pricing tiers on a landing page, similar to your favorite software services, or using variants, like different formats, on a product page. Another distinction I see with upsells is that the idea is to present multiple offers at once and let your potential buyer choose or opt in to the one that best suits them. The question becomes not, will I or won't I, but which one? And psychologically, this is incredibly powerful. To me, the most important thing when upselling is to increase the amount of profit you make. An upsell to a product that has the same profitability or a worse one is a waste of energy and a threat to the original sale. For the most part, there may be reasons to do it besides profitability, but usually you are trying to get a 2 to 4x increase in profit and not just more revenue. While cross-sells have several implementations in a web store, I find that landing pages are the best way to implement an upsell. We are all familiar with the way software companies price their products in a pricing table comparison, usually with 3 to 5 options and one highlighted as being the most popular or the best value. This is also the general tiered model on Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites. Along with subscription sites like Reem, Patreon, and more. When putting together a tiered pricing model, use the 1, 2, 3, 4x increase guidelines. Put simply, this is the first tier at base pricing, the second tier at twice the first tier, the third tier at 3 times the second tier, and the fourth tier at 4 times the third tier. Formulaically, it looks like this: Tier 1: x. Tier 2: 2x. Tier 3, 6x or 2x3. Tier 4, 24x or 6x4. Other options can work too. On Kickstarter, due to the number of tiers you often have, 10 to 20, I often tell people $5 minus $25 increment increases for under $100, then $50 increases until you get to $250 or so, then much larger increases beyond that. Does it really matter if it's an upsell or a cross-sell? I don't think so. You can use these two concepts to create offers, and you can combine them or daisy chain them together to create more complex offers and cart sequences. Downsell. A downsell is basically what you use when someone says no to the upsell or sometimes the cross-sell. It usually makes the assumption that price or quantity is the issue. So the downsell will usually be priced at a fraction of the upsell offer. An example of a downsell might be that someone doesn't take a full bundle of a 10+ book series, but they will take the first few books in the series. The language around a downsell is to minimize the buyer's risk. Most books don't talk about downsells because they are really just scaled-down upsells. You are still trying to get the potential buyer to purchase more in one go, but you are asking for less from them, possibly after they've already turned down your first offer. Post-purchase. A post-purchase is an offer that is made immediately after the initial purchase transaction is complete. The buyer would have to authorize a second charge. But that's okay, because the goal of a post-purchase offer is to capitalize on someone's spending mood and the fact that they already have their credit card out. They are ready to buy, so you may as well try to convert them again. You can have a cross-sell, down-sell, or upsell post-purchase. When people talk about cross-sell, down-sell, or upsell singularly, they are usually referring to and assuming pre-purchase, before we run the credit card. A post-purchase offer might be a different, but related series, or your full catalog bundle. Even though the books are all over. For example, you might bring someone in with your Christmas Cozy Mystery series. You might then say in the post-purchase offer, "Get my other 2 series for X amount." This would be a cross-sell post-purchase. Often, sellers try to sweeten the deal on a post-purchase by using key psychological triggers. 2 popular ones would be an extremely limited-time offer, or a never-to-be-seen-again wild discount. Remember, a post-purchase offer is trying to capitalize on the buyer's energy and mood to spend right now, so the best psychological triggers are those that give a compelling reason for "now." Repeat Purchase. The heart of any business is going to be repeat customers. It's something like 20 times easier to sell to an existing customer than it is to sell to find a new person to sell to., and I think this is what appeals to writers and authors most about direct sales. To me, the most important part of gaining a repeat customer is having their email address, adding value via an email sequence through nurturing, and having more to sell to them after the initial purchase. There are several keys to improving your repeat customer's experience: having a nice delivery method and follow-up experience, Convenient, fun, surprising, and delightful. Giving them time to enjoy and find the value in their recent purchase, and gently nudging them along in your email sequence if needed. Offering a preorder on the next book or other release. Bringing them deeper into your fandom—not your audience of readers, your fandom of readers. The Novelist's Dilemma. I recently wrote an essay about the novelist's dilemma and thought it could be helpful to excerpt here., as it ties many of these advanced concepts together nicely. Back in 2018, I stood up at the Selmore Books Show Summit in front of 500 fiction authors to talk about direct sales and gave them a concept called the Novelist's Dilemma. This is a challenge that's going to become a more prominent topic as the industry gets excited about direct sales. Back then, I predicted that direct sales would be more prominent in fiction in 5 years. It's 2023, so we're pretty much on track. What is the novelist's dilemma? It's the idea that we, as fiction writers, simply don't have enough to sell to our readers. Let's say you have 25 books. You are offering an ebook bundle of 8 to 10 books at a good discount through your web store. You make $20 to $30 from this bundle. But what next? You have maybe another bundle, maybe a second small bundle, to sell to this customer that you just gained. Let's assume they expect a deal again. So now you're getting about $50 total from this customer. And then what? That customer has your entire catalog. They will maybe buy your next release at $5, but then what? They will maybe buy their favorite book in paperback, which is not that profitable for you to sell, or audiobook, but then what? Maybe they will buy some merch from you, also not very profitable, but then what? The lifetime value (LTV) of your customer is still max $50 to $75 if you stick to mostly profitable digital items. Ebooks, audiobooks, or it goes up to double that if you sell not very profitable physical goods, but all that extra money is pretty much eaten up by COGS anyway. Fiction advertising is incredibly cheap right now. But advertising tends to get more expensive over time, as competition for the same targets takes over. What does the math look like in 5 years? I can tell you what it looks like in nonfiction: $5-50 per lead acquisition depending on what you're doing. The novelist's dilemma is that the LTV on an ebook-only catalog is not sustainable And when you add in physical products, the profitability sinks, so you need to be careful to prioritize profitability. Do the math for 50 books, 100 books. Your max LTV doesn't go over $200 to $300. In nonfiction, the current LTV for my company is probably $10 minus $20K at least. And this is probably well below the average, especially when you throw the coaching and consulting industries into the mix. But still, those are far easier numbers to build a direct sales business from. The Novelist's Dilemma isn't actually new, and it is not just a challenge in direct sales. It was even more true for retailers. We simply couldn't do much about it, because retailers don't have easy ways to increase your LTV, besides giving them more $5 ebooks to sell. Hello, 70% industry-wide burnout. A lot of what I'm seeing in direct sales right now is actually just recreating much of the same environment we find on retailers. Only the gatekeeper is Facebook advertising. The big and improved difference is getting the sale money directly in a few days from the point of purchase and collecting the customer data. And this still doesn't necessarily solve the novelist's dilemma. It helps, but it isn't the full solution. What is the answer to the novelist's dilemma? Put simply, true fandom. Fandom is built the easiest through a few things I can think of. Launch crowdfunding. With Kickstarter, we teach how to drastically increase your $$$$ per reader, while still staying at 50% profit with fiction. Instead of getting $5-10 per reader on a book launch, you can get $25-50 per reader on average. With special editions, you can do even more—$75+ per reader, though watch your profitability. And you don't necessarily have to run a Kickstarter; it's just a good way to test things. Kickstarter is really just a starting point or mechanism to think in these terms, If it's working on Kickstarter, it makes a great ongoing offer for website sales that increase your LTV too. Subscriptions and Memberships. With a subscription, you are selling both content and experiences. The emphasis is very much on experiences though, and this is useful for fandom. Same as Kickstarter, you are able to upgrade readers into higher monthly tiers, plus you are getting paid each month rather than one time. Kickstarter is a pretty quick payout, though not easy, while subscriptions are a slow climb and also not easy, but what I like about subscriptions is how they snowball over time into something substantial. Your tiers are also a great place to find workable ongoing offers for website sales that increase your LTV. Live events and signings. There's nothing more valuable than in-person, human connection right now, This is a place to build your fandom and find people who will support you at a deeper level. It builds fandom fast, and it can quickly increase your LTV, though you need critical mass for profitability. The direct sales conversation currently focuses heavily on website sales. Website sales are fantastic, and they don't automatically build fandom. They can be used to build fandom, just like retailers can. But they aren't necessarily the best mechanism to do so, unless you understand fandom, and set your website up to focus on fandom in that way. How to Build a Fandom. Fandom is not just about having data, though that helps. It's also about getting readers to make deeper investments in you and your work in 4 areas: time, energy, money, and physical space. The 3 items on this list are some of the best ways you can build a fandom through direct sales. They have natural mechanisms that help with it. You don't even need to fully understand the theory or concepts in this post to start developing your fandom with these 3 methods. They are the solution to the novelist's dilemma and have the ability to double, triple, or quadruple the LTV of your business quickly, often within a year of making a concerted effort in one of these areas. I do not recommend attempting all 3 at once by any means. I am not an ads person or a web store optimization person. There are other amazing people for that. But I do know marketing, sales, and business. And at the end of the day, what authors call direct sales is what other industries just call sales. Additional Resources. Subscribe to The Author Analyst. This conversation continues and gets updated regularly on my Substack. I frequently write about direct sales across website stores, landing pages, launch crowdfunding, subscriptions and memberships, and live events and signings. AuthorAnalyst.substack.com. Join 2 mini courses on the topic. If you want to follow along with the 2 major types of website sales I discuss in this book— landing page sales (special offers) and a website store— you can get my mini courses on the topic here. Https://theworldneedsyourpassion.com/product/website-sales-special-offers/ https://theworldneedsyourpassion.com/product/website-sales-website-store/ If you have questions about The Novelist's Dilemma, join and post in our Facebook group dedicated to advanced direct sales topics. Called Advanced Direct Sales Strategies for Authors, which you can join here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/directsalesforauthors/. You may enjoy some of my other books that guide you through how to get started on these direct sales channels. Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter: Book Sales Supercharged #9, co-authored with Russell Nohalty. Get Your Book Selling at Live Events and Signings, Book Sales Supercharged #10, co-authored with Russell Nolte. Get Your Book Selling with Ream, Book Sales Supercharged #19. Get Your Book Selling Direct to Readers, Book Sales Supercharged #20, co-authored with Russell Nolte, pre-order. Get Your Book Selling with Subscriptions and Memberships, Book Sales Supercharged #21. Preorder. Get your book selling with Substack: Book Sales Supercharged #23. Preorder. Takeaways. Some important buyer intent concepts you'll want to learn and think about are: abandoned cart, retargeting, conversion advertising, and tripwires. Some important selling concepts you'll want to learn and think about are: cross-sells, upsells, downsells, post-purchase offers, and repeat purchase offers. The novelist's dilemma is the idea that we as fiction writers simply don't have enough to sell to our readers. The answer to the novelist's dilemma is to build your fandom. This can be done through 3 direct sales channels: launch crowdfunding, subscriptions, and live events and signings. Task Checklist: Decide whether you need to focus on buyer intent concepts or selling concepts next. Which will benefit you more, faster? Add these concepts to your plan for growing your website store or landing page special offers. Consider where you land on the Novelist's Dilemma. Does your catalog fit the examples given? Are there ways you can plug the leaks in your business, especially if you are a fiction author? Consider the solutions to the Novelist's Dilemma. Are these a part of your long-term strategy to make both your website sales and direct sales in general work for you? Chapter 7: Important Nuances to Direct Sales. This chapter might as well be called "You Have a Website Store, Now What?" While so many authors focus on the discussion of what software and tools to use and how to set up their store, few have much idea or experience around getting their current readers to start purchasing from their store or finding new audiences through direct sales. To explain what I mean, I have to continue the conversation we had in Chapter 2, and hopefully go deeper into the nuances around direct sales. As a recap, let's talk a bit more about catalog sales versus direct sales as defined below: Catalog sales: You participate on a platform that owns the customers, sales funnels, product funnels, and more. Direct sales: You own the customers, sales funnels, product funnels, and more. Understanding catalog sales versus direct sales is going to be key in understanding how to market your books differently based on where you are trying to sell them. Catalog sales versus direct sales. In working with authors on direct sales through Kickstarter, at live events and signings, and through their websites, one key finding I noticed is that there's a huge gap between how authors think about sales on retailers, catalog sales, and how authors need to think about sales when they start to sell direct to their readers, direct sales. Let's dive deeper into these two opposing concepts. Number 1: Catalog sales. When you are preparing your product for catalog sales, you are trying to get your product to fit the aesthetic of the catalog. You have to make your catalog page, your product page, look like all the other pages in the catalog. The catalog itself curates the information on each page so that the catalog can look cohesive, uniform, and branded. The great thing about being a part of the catalog is that the catalog brings a lot of buyers to you. They handle huge chunks of the sales process like helping you build your product page, fulfillment, customer support. If they're good, they also handle huge chunks of the marketing process like finding new leads, algorithmic visibility to their current audience, email outreach and follow-ups, cart abandonment, and more. But the challenging thing about being a part of the catalog is you must follow their rules and regulations. You can only upload certain products in a certain way, and those may not be your most profitable or easiest-to-sell products. You don't usually even know. On book retailers, there are so many products that we as independent authors still can't even list through regular publishing programs like Kindle Direct Publishing, BN Press, and several others. A few that stand out to me: Book bundles, ebook. You can't offer 5 different ebook files as one sale on any of the platforms. The closest thing is that there is a buy-all button on Amazon's series page or creating an omnibus as a single book listing. Book bundles (print): You can't offer several print-on-demand books in a bundle, much less in a box set like traditional publishers do. Book bundles (multiple formats): You can't offer the ebook, print book, and audiobook as one. There are other wild ideas that you can only sell direct too, like: Autographed copies. Personalized copies. Character names, Tuckerization. Finally, in order to make any real money and scale through advertising, most authors agree that you must have read-through from book number 1 to the rest of your series. You specifically have to count on each retailer's mechanisms for getting readers through the individual pieces of your bundle of books. This varies from retailer to retailer and is getting better, But many retailers will still happily sell someone else's book to your readership if it converts better. This makes it impossible for all hardworking authors to do well on retailers. It's a natural competitive environment, and at times, winners-take-all environment. As you can see, there are benefits and downsides to retailers, which is why your business will be stronger if you counterbalance that with: Number 2: Direct sales. When you are preparing your product for direct sales, you have a blank slate and the possibilities are endless. The greatest things about direct sales are: you can sell anything you want. You can sell low-content journals and planners not usually allowed on retailers, sell the same book with different titles or branding, sell your friends' books in bundles with yours, sell book boxes and other merchandise bundles sell your time and energy, sell something you're going to deliver on later, sell your Substack subscription, and so much more. If readers have been asking you for something that you can't set up as print-on-demand, direct sales is the way to go. You can price any way you want. You can charge 37 cents, offer free downloads, price bundles at $89.99, charge extra for personalization, offer buy one get one or free gift with purchase, Give away free shipping on $50 or more. Set up pay what you want. The possibilities are truly endless. What fun things can you offer that your readers might be interested in? You can set any policies you want. You set the policies around returns, refunds, and so much more. So if there is something you want to do that is legal and ethical but that isn't allowed on other platforms, your website store is a great place to house You can build any product, sales, and marketing funnels you want. You have the data to do sophisticated things, like send a follow-up email to push your 10-book bundle to anyone who downloads your free first in series. You have the ability to offer a small upgrade to the ebook and audiobook editions when someone puts the print edition in their shopping cart. You can drive your marketing traffic and actually figure out what converts to sales for you. So you aren't wasting money. All of this is incredible and easily powered by technology solutions that are already available. But the challenging thing about direct sales is that you are in charge. You have to be strategic about setting up these product funnels and marketing sales funnels. You have to be willing to connect the dots and take the reader down the buyer journey you have crafted for them. You have to pull and study your data regularly so you can refine your automated systems. You have to do the work that retailers normally do for you. And that's where most authors struggle to make their website work and scale. Because this process requires more complex marketing, sales, and product efforts than most authors are doing to get retailer sales. That means that your email marketing, social media pushes, and more that work for retailers are not likely to work well for direct sales. The solution to this is mapping out your product funnels and sales funnels. This will give you a task list of marketing materials you need to put into place to succeed with direct sales in a bigger way than tacking it on to your current retailer marketing efforts. Do you really need to change everything for direct sales? The question I get most from authors after giving them this spiel is some version of, What if I just want to give my readers another option to buy the books? It's true that if you just want to add a direct sales link to your list of book links where readers can purchase from, you are likely to get some sales from them, especially your fans who want to support you. I think this is a great way to get started with direct sales, and if this is what you have the time and energy for, I would say, yes, definitely, set it up and do that. As I said before, I think it's worth setting up a website store regardless of whether you want to use it to find new readers. There are still benefits to doing so, like: listing products that you can't list on retailers, better royalty rates—35-70% on retailers versus 95% direct—knowing what your readers are buying from you, separating your email list into buyers and non-buyers, and targeting them differently. Having the ability to follow up on downloads and sales to get repeat customers for higher-priced offers. Most authors will do a big push to get their store set up and hit this stopping point, which is a great stopping point to get to in your first effort at making this a success. After you are comfortable and have tested all your sales and fulfillment processes, you may be ready to keep going and look at how to scale your website store to find new readers. To me, this is where a website store and direct sales in general becomes even more powerful. I also like that this doesn't rely on the readership you already have and sell to at retailers. Lastly, I like that scaling your website store will actually create a natural overflow into your retailer sales as well. This happens because you are able to get more visibility, And there will always be people who prefer to buy from a known entity like Amazon. Crash Course in Direct Sales. The next two chapters are going to take us deeper into two really important direct sales concepts: product funnels and sales funnels. You've likely heard of at least one of these, sales funnels, but the way I'm teaching it will be a little more detailed than most of what I've seen taught in the independent author space. You may have seen these chapters before. I've included them in a few, a few other books that focus on direct sales, and I've pulled the chapters from two books I have in my Productive Novelist series. Product Funnels: Create and Prosper: Write Books You Love and Make Great Money Doing It, The Productive Novelist #11. Sales Funnels: Get Your Book Selling: Jumpstart Your Book Sales Without Launching, Scheming, or Hacking, The Productive Novelist #9. If you've seen these before and have already mapped out your product funnels and sales funnels for your direct sales website store, you can skip these chapters. If not, or if you feel like you'd like to review and revisit the content in this new context, then I highly recommend reading these from end to end. It will make your website store sing. Let's get to it. Additional Resources. Subscribe to The Author Analyst. I write so much more about direct sales versus retailer sales on my Substack. Make sure you dig into the archives to learn more about these concepts. There is a short trial, or you can become a paid subscriber. authoranalyst.substack.com. Grab these books from backlist. Product Funnels: Create and Prosper. Write books you love and make great money doing it. The Productive Novelist #11. Sales Funnels: Get Your Book Selling. Jumpstart your book sales without launching, scheming, or hacking. The Productive Novelist #9. Takeaways. Retailer sales are catalog sales. You have to fit your product to look like the rest of the products in the catalog to succeed. Direct sales is the opposite. You have to stand out and make your case to succeed. Because of these differences, you may need to adjust or relearn some of the book marketing you've picked up over the years. Task Checklist. Make a list of things that you think will be different, or even opposite of what you know about selling on retailers when you start focusing on direct sales. It can sometimes be difficult starting over, but how can you make this fun and easeful? Chapter 8: Ushering People Through Your Product Catalog. You've likely heard of a sales funnel, which is how a reader goes from your marketing materials to the purchase of a product in your catalog. In this chapter though, I want to talk about product funnels, which are a separate concept and something you'll want to understand if you are trying to scale your website store. A sales funnel is about how customers reach your product,, but a product funnel is about how customers move through your catalog of products. This is ideal for understanding how to build repeat customers, which is a critical effort when trying to scale your website sales. Your product funnel will give you a clear definition of how to upgrade your customers when they have already purchased something, or sometimes even as a suggested add-on in the cart, as well as what to offer them next based on what they already purchased. We will talk about sales funnels in the next chapter, and while these two different types of funnels are often confused or convoluted, it is important to map them both separately for each of your major product lines. For authors specifically, the best way to determine what a product line is will be to use the and/or test. It's very simple: is the reader more likely to want X and Y, or are they more likely to want X or Y? If it's X and Y, then those two items are probably in the same product line. If it's X or Y, then those items are probably in two different product lines. So if you have a military sci-fi series and a fantasy romance series, your readers probably want one or the other. These are two separate product lines. If you have a space opera series and another space opera series, Your readers probably want both. Or at least it's worth offering each series to the customers who have bought the other. So these belong in the same product line. If you have a huge catalog, there's no perfect way to delineate some of this stuff. If you have 100 books, you probably don't want 10 product lines, so I would loosen my criteria under the and/or test in order to keep my efforts manageable. Every product line serves a different customer and needs a full sales funnel, so you definitely want to limit yourself to just a handful when you are first starting to map these out. However you end up divvying it up, you want to draw a product funnel for each of your product lines. Keep in mind that if you have never done this before, you're just guessing at what people might like. As you build your website store, you'll be able to collect actual data on what people like and do, This data is gold, and you can then revise your product funnels to better serve your customers' true needs, which will also help you maximize your revenue on your website store. Product Funnels. There are 5 sections to your product funnel for each product line. Number 1: Traffic. Traffic is not technically a part of the product line, but I like to include it in my product funnel so I can capture conversion rates and predict the expected value of my product funnel. For most of my product lines, the front end of my product funnel is books and book bundles, and the traffic I send is advertising-focused. I also like sending free social and blogging traffic to my website, where my free offering is optimized for email signups and where my Facebook pixel is capturing information and finding new readers from it. It. Number 2: Free offering. The free offering is a freebie in exchange for joining an email list. You can also offer a freebie that doesn't require an email signup, but does require hitting the website for traffic that you will then capture with your Facebook advertising pixel for remarketing purposes. You can have many free offerings, and ideally they are a small and easily consumable sample of what you have to offer more more of in your product line. For nonfiction, this is usually a sample of just a few chapters for one of my books. For this particular book, I have a free book at the beginning of the Book Sales Supercharged series which attracts people to the entire series. That book is called Get Your Book Selling Wide and is available for free in ebook through my website and on all retailers. Check the price match if you are buying from Amazon. For fiction, this is often a first-in-series free, a prequel novella, novelette, or short story, or the ability to read for free elsewhere, like in Kindle Unlimited or through serialization on a website or an email. Number 3: Tripwire. The tripwire is an offer—you usually have several of them—that simply gets people in the door as customers to your store. In many ways, this is the baseline product or set of products that is not necessarily that profitable,, but does get people off the freebie fence. You may have heard that the gap between a $1 purchase and $10 purchase is much smaller than the gap between a free download and a $1 purchase, and it's true. At its lowest pricing levels, this is what the tripwire is designed to do. At its higher pricing levels, a tripwire is designed to pay for the costs of finding new readers and customers. When used this way, they are sometimes called self-liquidating offers, or SLOs, which means that in nonfiction, it can cost $40 to $50 to get a single sale of a tripwire from one ad to a cold audience. So you usually see these offers priced between $25 minus $90. Tripwires are usually completely self-study and hands-off, so they can be automated. Most sophisticated marketers have a basic tripwire in the $27 to $47 range and also offer upgrades at the $77 and $127 levels. You'll see this same concept of upgrades in the section on premium offerings. For nonfiction, this book is what I would consider a tripwire. It helps the reader understand why direct sales is important to their career and gives them instruction on how to get started with one of the easier direct sales methods. Ads, by setting up a website store. It's a modest price for a ton of value, and many readers will be able to set up and succeed with their website store based on the book alone. I also have two other tripwires that are steps up from this book. One is a bundle of books on direct sales, which includes books on Kickstarter, events and signings, selling in print, book launches, and a few others. And the second tripwire is the full bundle of books in the Book Sales Supercharged series. This is 16 books total, and will include more books in the future. This bundle borders between the tripwire and core offering, but if someone purchases and likes the full series, they are very likely to eventually purchase the core offering or even premium offerings in the future. For fiction, my tripwire offer is several of the starter books for my flagship series of 25 planned novels. A book bundle of the first 5 books is my top choice, as book number 5 closes out a cycle of the story and ends on a cliffhanger I know many readers will want to continue through. Other tripwires include ancillary series bundles that are similar in genre and theme, and that are set in the same world with some crossover characters that the readers might be willing to follow. #4 Core Offering. The core offering is actually the offer I like to start with when I'm mapping out my product funnel. The core offer is the main thing you want people to buy from you in this product line. You may have a few of these, but I don't recommend it, and most 7-figure entrepreneurs seem to agree that focusing on selling their core offer at first was the way that they reached 7 figures. For the product line that this book falls under, the planned core offering is a program on direct sales. Selling direct from your website store is part of direct sales, but it's not the only thing that authors want to learn about right now. Because it's nonfiction, my core offering is a little higher than what I would try to filter people to for fiction. I want to be clear that your core offering is the thing that matters to you most. It's the thing you want people to buy the most, and it's the thing you talk about the most. My co-author Russell Nohulty and I recently ran a Kickstarter project for one of the books in our series, Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. Our core offer for that campaign was also a group program related to the book. We were very serious in promoting that program, made it a great value for customers, and focused a lot of our attention afterward on the program and making people happy in it. Because we were focused on it, we enlisted about 70 people into the group, many of whom went on to have successful Kickstarter projects. Your core offering will likely be priced a little higher than you are comfortable with. It should be something that feels like a strong value, but that is also for the serious customer. It is not for the dabbler, or the semi-interested, or the curious. It is for the person who knows they want what you can offer. For fiction, I have a core offering of a flagship series that has 25 planned books. For now, I'm offering 10 of those books, as that's what I feel I can accomplish in 2022, between what I have written already and what I still need to write and release. I will keep adding books to the core offering every year and continue to raise the price appropriately. For your core offer, I encourage you to pick something that you know you'll be able to promote over and over again for the coming years. The most successful authors I know do this. The most successful coaches I know also do this. On retailers, you don't necessarily need a flagship series to do really well, but with direct sales it helps a lot more. If you struggle to write long series, I would also consider offering a book box as your core offer. If you have a popular trilogy, for example, you could put that together with a few high-margin merchandise items, like enamel pins or 5x7 prints, and ship that as your core offer. #5 Premium Offering. The premium offering is exactly what it sounds like. This is a high-ticket item that very few people will end up buying. But when they do, it's a really good and profitable sale for you. You can have several premium offerings, sometimes at ascending price points. We did this during our Kickstarter campaign and had premium offerings that were 50%, 100%, and 150% more than our core offering. Those premium offerings sold well because people were already bought into our core offering and then wanted to upgrade to get even more from us. I highly recommend using those percentages to come up with a few premium offerings that build on your core offering. For fiction, because I write fantasy in a large world, my premium offerings largely center around my fantasy catalog in the same world. Everything I write on the fantasy side— I also write some sci-fi— goes into this same world, and many of the characters cross over between series. This makes it fairly easy to have a mega bundle of the world as a premium offering. Not many will take me up on it, but it doesn't matter. It makes my core offering look like a great value, as well as a reasonable investment, because people like picking the medium option. It serves as an upgrade from the core offering. It helps bring people into the fandom, and it gives completionists a way to dive really deep into my work. No matter how intense it is or how much it costs, I'm looking at some of you with huge 50+ book catalogs. You should always have a premium offer that is absolutely everything you've ever written or published. Some people really want to buy it, even when it's thousands of dollars. You can do this in multiple formats too, and there will be a handful of people who say yes. The last thing I think most premium offers should include is a cool bonus that can't be purchased separately. Things like high-end print maps of your world, limited edition board games, extra exciting content, special editions of books, and more do very well inside premium offerings. Your fans who have disposable income will usually want to upgrade just to get the cool thing that no one else is getting. Anything you can add that is numbered, limited, signed, handmade, special editioned, or impossible to purchase separately is a good contender for making these premium offerings shine. To me, the most important thing with these product funnels is that the lowest end of the product line sells someone into the next column of the product line and on and on all the way up to the premium offerings. As a creator, it's cool to know that you can create offers at each of these levels and let people self-select appropriately according to their needs and budget. It's cool that a book at the free offerings tier might sell someone into a bundle, In this way, the product is actually the marketing too. This happens to be something that independent authors are exceptionally good at understanding and implementing. When you start bringing people in at the lowest end of your product line, not everyone will end up at the premium offerings, but a few will. And many others will end up at the core offerings. A large number of people will stop at the tripwire, which is also great because hopefully they paid you to help you find your audience. You can also offer them something of comparable value from another product line you have. Many, many people will stop at the free offerings, and that's okay too. The tripwire has paid for the costs you spent to acquire these people, and they get to stay on your email list and social media channels where you can keep telling them about your core offerings in hopes of converting more of them. You can also retarget them and lookalike audiences for them on your social advertising accounts. You can even convert them to helping you in non-monetary ways, like as evangelists, reviewers, social sharers, giveaway spreaders, and more. I never mind the free offering takers in my business because I know I can either convert them over time or use them to scale my audience more. The value of mapping out your product funnel. Now that you know the 5 columns of a product funnel, I want to explain how you can use this tool to improve your website store. Add revenue to your business. This is the most obvious one, as your product funnel will tell you exactly how to upgrade, downgrade, and follow up with customers and potential customers. Identify gaps in your funnel, which usually points to a gap in revenue. Without mapping your product funnel, it's very easy to accidentally put nothing in one of the 5 columns. Mapping it out will make sure that you are not missing any easy and obvious revenue sources within your product line. See your customers flow through your business. Customers rarely jump straight to core or premium offerings. You have to entice them over time. Getting clear on your product funnels will make it easier to predict the conversion cycle between your different columns. How long does it take for someone who downloaded your freebie to go on to buy your bundle? And how many of them do so? You'll be able to gather data and put numbers on these questions, which will be much easier to do when you know the plan for how you wanted to bring people through your product lines. Calculate conversion rates between your products. This helps you easily calculate expected revenue per customer, per freebie downloader, and per traffic source. If you know that you send 1,000 people to your website, 100 download your freebie, and 20 go on to buy your core offering, you can figure out the profitability of sending that traffic to your site. How much can you spend to acquire a customer? Knowing these numbers is critical to scaling your business strategically. Earn consistently month to month and year to year. Your product funnel is the plan for your product line. You can pour traffic into the front end of your product funnel and see how much people buy. There is always more traffic, so you can very literally control your earnings once your product funnel is profitable and you've tested various sources of traffic. Make easier decisions about new ideas, products, and services. A product funnel is a great way to visualize data and can tell you what products and what price points are missing from your product funnel. It can also spur you to build bundles that can sit in the core and premium offering columns. Focus on creation. Product funnels bake in the marketing to each product. So if your freebie is book number 1, the product itself is what is marketing and selling book number 2. While most authors easily see this example, it's a basic one, and a product funnel can help you map out higher complexity in your product funnel. 3 steps to mapping your product funnel. Once you have a rough idea of your product lines, you can get a piece of paper, turn it to landscape, and draw 5 columns delineated by 4 lines down the page. Step 1: Map your columns with dollar-dollar-dollar ranges. At the top of each column, you will write, in order, one of the 5 sections of your product funnel: Traffic. Free Offering. Tripwire. Core Offering. Premium Offering. If you'd like, or if you have a lot of products, you can turn some of the columns into sub-columns. For example, you may want to turn the Tripwire column into Low-End Tripwires and High-End Tripwires. The same goes for core offerings and premium offerings. Next, you can add the pricing range to the top of each column. I like to start with the core offering and work my way down to tripwires and up to premium offerings. You may have a different preference. Starting in the core offerings, I try to come up with something close to $80 to $100 for fiction. I probably double that for nonfiction, depending on the product line. I know some fiction authors are still picking their jaw up from the floor at my $100 core offering suggestion, but this is not meant to be something that everyone can afford. You have tripwires and free offerings for that. This is instead something that is highly profitable, and that will get you to your financial goals easily. I like to keep this offering an easy number, like $100. That makes it easy to calculate my monthly sales goals. If I want to make $2,000 from my website store this month, I need to sell my core offering to 20 people. Once you have your core offering price range decided, you can easily calculate your tripwire and premium offering price ranges. Customers tolerate a max of 3 to 5x difference between columns. So if my core offering is $100, I'm looking at a range of $20 to $79.99 for my tripwires and $100.01 minus $500 for my premium offerings. I want to be clear about what this means. Everything under $80 in my product funnel is a lead magnet, loss leader, or audience scaler. Yes, I'm in the book business and I still make money on many of my tripwire ideas,, but as I start scaling, that gap will close and it will cost me more and more to find more customers. So while I definitely make good money on my bundles right now, I'm also aware that they are not my true core offer as I scale my audience. These numbers are approximations rather than exact ranges at this time. Every offer needs to be evaluated on 3 things: how profitable it is. You don't want your tripwires to be more profitable than your core offering. Or your core offering to be more profitable than your premium offerings, otherwise you are losing money when you upgrade people. How it compares to your other offers on your website, as people will want to upgrade or downgrade according to their interests. How it compares to your catalog listings at retailers, people do not want to get gouged and will comparison shop. If it's not cheaper or more compelling to buy direct from you,, they will buy from the trusted retailer entity instead. So as you start to plan your offers, you'll need to adjust your pricing ranges for each column to accommodate these 3 points. Step 2: Fill in your columns with appropriate products for your business. Now that you have your pricing ranges determined, you can create your offerings. I've given you several examples of how I think about this for my own catalog. Book, and I share a list of additional examples later in this chapter. As I mentioned already, you want the products to build upon each other. People who buy your core offering should also be able to bundle in your tripwires, either at no additional cost or at a small upgrade—call it the deluxe version of the core offering. Streamlining your product line in this way will make it easier for your potential customers to spend more money with you sooner. Moving from left to right, you also want your product offerings to whittle down for the most part. I prefer one core offering with a few upgrades at 50%, 100%, and 150% more. I prefer one or two outrageously high premium tiers. I prefer a lot of tripwires and even more free offerings. I like to have a lot of offerings on the front end, so I have lots of different things to market. And can switch between them on both retailers and direct, especially with fiction. I'm much lighter on the freebies in nonfiction. You don't have to do it this way, and you may have good reason not to based on your catalog, but your product funnel should have a heavier front end than back end. As the prices go up, you don't want any analysis paralysis that will keep people from saying yes. Step 3: Connect each product funnel with arrows. In this step, we get specific with the exact path we want a potential customer to take through our product line. Ideally, you've set up core and premium offerings that stack upon the free and tripwire offerings so that someone can upgrade themselves right into the things you really want them to buy. But also, not everyone is going to upgrade themselves right away. Many will first buy a tripwire, then consider the core or premium offerings if they like it and need more. The arrows don't just show the path, they show the math. Every single arrow is a conversion percentage that shows how many people moved through the product funnel and how many people dropped out. These estimates can be rough at first and can be filled in more specifically once the data from actual sales starts to come in. The arrows will also show you the true entry points into your product funnel. Sure, a lot of them will be the free offerings, but you'll also find that some people are happy to jump straight into the tripwire without looking at a free offering first. Creating this plan for offerings, and connecting the path using arrows, can help you understand things like how many ads you need to put up and where they need to be pointing to. Common Differences in Product Funnels Between Catalog Sales and Direct Sales. Before we leave this chapter, I wanted to go back to how direct sales product funnels will differ from retailer product funnels, and why. Number 1: No Core Offering. Authors don't need a core offering on retailers, because the retailer has the core offerings already. Our books are the free offering, and the tripwire for their product funnels. There is no one specific retailer for which this is true for. All of the Big Five ebook retailers—Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, and Barnes Noble—all have their own core offerings that are not about books. These can include pay-to-play advertising services, point systems, reader subscription services, storefronts, e-reader devices, other non-book-related products, and more. This is not to say that they don't make money on books. —because they probably do. It is to say that they have a larger purpose around building their audience and selling to them. At retailers, we can be successful without having a core offering because the retailer also handles a lot of the marketing to their current audiences for us. Since we don't have to bring our own traffic and audience, it's actually significantly cheaper to sell on a retailer compared to direct sales. When you do direct sales, the traffic you drive is expensive and you need to have a core offering to make the numbers work. Having a core offering actually works well on retailers too, and many of the most successful authors are clear on their core offering at retailers, usually a bundled omnibus of books. But it's not a requirement at retailers, and most successful authors don't seem to have it. Number 2: Low-end product funnels. A low-end product funnel can happen if the pricing ranges are too low, hence why I suggested that fiction authors have a core offering closer to $100. It can also happen if the front end of the product funnel is too cheaply priced for scaling. Finally, it can happen if there aren't enough products in the funnel, or if those products hang out primarily in the free and tripwire offerings. What happens in a low-end product funnel is that people run out of ways to spend their money with you. They've bought everything you have to offer, and now there is nowhere for them to go except potentially to someone else's fan base. On retailers, authors can survive with low-end product funnels like ebook trilogies or standalones because again, retailers have their own core offerings and also own a lot of the sales funnel. It's actually worth it to them to use our book content to get more people onto their platform. So they put in the marketing to keep their voracious readers happy. But with direct sales, it only gets more expensive to find new people in your ideal audience as you grow and scale. It's important to plan for growth of your direct sales business from the beginning. Since you are doing all the marketing yourself, you need to price for the real costs of finding an audience,, and you need to have robust product lines, so people have enough to buy once you get them in. 3. Poor conversion between columns. Similar to the other two points, retailers take care of a lot of the sales process for authors. This particularly includes conversion and follow-up. When authors step out on their own with direct sales, they don't realize how much of a lift things like algorithms, push notifications, series connectivity, email follow-ups, and cart abandonment sequences were helping their books continue to sell on retailers. All of this has to come from the author through direct sales, and many authors are not used to writing autoresponders that are specific to what is required for the sales funnel. Unfortunately, most of the content on email marketing for authors is largely focused on retailer sales, Direct Sales. If you are interested in email marketing that is focused on authors doing direct sales, I recommend my own book, Recruit Your Readers: Get More Readers on Your Email List Easily, Efficiently, and Ethically: The Productive Novelist, #10, as that book is rooted in digital marketing principles and takes a holistic perspective of the many ways that authors are forging their own paths to long careers in writing writing and publishing. List of products that might fit at each tier. I wanted to end this chapter with more ideas and examples of the types of offers you can list at each tier. Free offering tier: solo ebooks, solo print books, solo audiobooks, pay what you want book bundles, donations, character sheets, Development Diaries. Tripwire tier. Special edition hardcover with bonus content. Small bundles of ebooks, print books, audiobooks. Encyclopedia of World. High margin merchandise. Book tour tickets—may want to plan with other authors and provide affiliate links so they get a cut. Author-performed audiobooks. Audio commentary. Substack paid subscription for in-progress or serialized work. In-world objects like textbooks, board games, or tarot oracle playing card decks. Graphic novels. Character sketches. App membership. Core offering tier. Large bundles of ebooks, print books, audiobooks. Limited edition gift sets, digital or physical, around the holidays. A book box, digital or physical, with special bonus content in tangible form, like new print books, a letter between two characters, small objects or jewelry from your characters. A genre-specific livestream event for readers. You could even involve others and offer each participating author affiliate links for 10-25% of each ticket sale so they get a cut. Premium offering tier. Your entire catalog of books. A set of behind-the-scenes videos. An in-person retreat for readers to hang out with you and/or their favorite authors. You can give each participating author affiliate links for 10-25% of each ticket sale so they get a cut. Cruise, anyone? High-end original artwork of your characters or world. Maps, framed artwork, limited quantity posters, paintings. A themed dinner, dance, or other event for fans, and including a VIP meet and greet. Using sales funnels with product funnels. Now that you know what a product funnel is, in the next chapter, I'll teach my 10 Stages of Audience framework, which is my methodology around sales funnels for authors. I see the sales funnel mapping as a way to figure out what marketing materials you need to improve conversion between the different columns of your product funnel. For example, what marketing materials do you need to put into place to get cold traffic from advertising to convert to an email signup and freebie downloader? To me, the sales funnel can help you map out the narrative and provide answers to those questions. Use the sales funnel mapping when you want to improve conversion from your traffic sources to your freebie from your freebie to your tripwires, from your tripwires to your core offering, and so on. Additional resources: To read the rest of the book, the product funnel's information was excerpted from Pick Up, Create, and Prosper: Write Books You Love and Make Great Money Doing It, The Productive Novelist. #11 Takeaways: You've probably heard of a sales funnel, but it is different from a product funnel. A product funnel is about how customers move through your catalog of products. Your product funnel is important when combined with the concepts from the chapter called Advanced Website Sales Concepts. If you are trying to figure out how to cross-sell, upsell, downsell, post-purchase, and repeat purchase, you will have better luck if you deeply understand your product funnels. There are several reasons why product funnels fail., including no core offering, low-end funnels, and poor conversion from low-ticket offerings to high-ticket offerings. The Novelist's Dilemma is an important concept to understand when it comes to product funnels. If you are struggling to come up with higher-tier offerings, it is because you are facing the Novelist's Dilemma. As noted in a previous chapter, the antidote is fandom. When your fans invest time, energy, money, and physical space into your business, you will thrive. Retailers are strong at getting them to invest time through reading your books, but not the other 3. Other fan-based platforms like Kickstarter, Ream, Substack, and more can help you test and figure out your higher tiers. Task Checklist: Map out your product funnel or funnels. What have you learned is your free offering or loss leader, your core offering, and so on? Using your map, what problems do you see? There were 3 general ones listed in this chapter. Using your map, how might you now design more complicated funnels with cross-sells, upsells, downsells, post-purchases, and repeat purchases? Do you see the Novelist's Dilemma in your business? How will you fill the gap? Chapter 9: Ushering People Through Your Sales Process. In the previous chapter, I mentioned that the way I map out my sales funnels is to use my framework, the 10 Stages of Audience. I've excerpted the details of this framework from my book, Get Your Book Selling: Jumpstart Your Book Sales Without Launching, Scheming, or Hacking: The Productive Novelist #9. You can use the 10 Stages of Audience to come up with marketing ideas for your posts, videos, lives, stories, and advertising on Facebook. The 10 Stages of Audience. The idea behind the 10 stages of audience is simple. You have 10 stages, and portions of your potential audience are at each of the 10. Your job is to move your potential audience through the stages. All you have to do is build a bridge from one stage to another. Here are the 10 stages: Stage 1: Target audience—someone who hasn't heard of me but has read books similar to mine. Stage 2: Lead. Someone who has heard of me, reads books like mine, but isn't actively considering purchasing my book. Stage 3: Prospective Reader. Someone who reads books like mine and is actively seeking out more information about my books, like going to a product page or reading my blog. Stage 4: Trial Reader. Someone who had downloaded sample chapters of my book, or a full book if it's at the beginning of a fiction series, and is considering purchasing. Stage 5: Prospective customer. Someone who has read my product page and encountered a buying decision, either saying yes or no to purchasing. Stage 6: Customer. Someone who purchased my book. Doesn't mean they read it though. Stage 7: Reader. Someone who has read at least one of my books in full. Stage 8: Fan. Someone who buys more of my stuff. A repeat customer. Stage 9: True fan, someone who will buy everything I create just to support me. Stage 10: Evangelist, someone who shares my work with others and recruits new readers to me audience. Your audience will experience these stages in order. If you have gaps or conversion issues between any of these stages, you'll see that customers drop out along the path. To avoid that, You must create bridges between each of the stages. The bridges are your marketing and sales materials. This framework is going to help you identify where you have marketing and sales materials in place to move a person to the next stage. It will also help you identify where you don't have marketing and sales materials, or where your marketing and sales materials need improvement. The 10 stages of audience is your sales funnel. You may have heard of a sales funnel before, but considered it a confusing or tedious marketing strategy to get into place. Your 10 stages of audience sales funnel is like your dance card. Again, all you have to do is fill in all the spots, and when all the spots are filled, your book will be selling. Marketing is not a big scary thing, it's truly just getting materials in place. It's a checklist of to-do items. As long as you've overcome some of the blocks that are holding you back, you should be able to move through your checklist with some serious zen. Stage 1: Target Audience. In this stage, your potential reader is simply a person who reads books like yours. To find these people, you want to identify what genre your book is in, and also identify some similar books to yours that are already popular. So if your book is a romance, then your target audience is going to be romance readers. Simple, right? Or if you have a business book, you might be looking for people who read books like Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point. Because we're working with books, which are a well-understood product, we don't need to delve too deeply into any target audience exercises. Your audience understands the type of product you're offering, and all they're looking for now is, will they like your book? That's all you really need to think about. And because people's tastes vary so widely, you can stick to a fairly generic target audience for the purposes of this framework. You need 2 types of marketing support at this stage. To identify your target audience, identify your genre, or people who read books that are similar to yours. No matter what genre you're in, I believe you should be able to think of at least 3 to 5 fairly popular books that are like yours. If you struggle with this, think about the types of books you like to read, since those are the ones that probably inspired you to write your book in the first place. A way to reach your target audience and let them know about your book. This one is a little trickier because you need to be able to do this without alienating people. This will mostly consist of leveraging other people's audiences (LOPA). This could be as simple as reaching out to a similar book's author to ask if he or she wants to coordinate a cross-promo. Every time I review this material, I notice that I'm not doing enough to support this stage. If you're in the same boat, don't beat yourself up. Driving traffic to the top part of your sales funnel is one of the most challenging parts of this process that you will ever face. It's very common to mess this part up, or rely on traffic sources that are working one day and gone the next. Questions to answer: What genre or niche do you write in? What are some books that are similar to yours? What are a few ways you can LOPA that fit into your chosen strategies? Stage 2: Lead. In this stage, someone in your target audience has heard about your book. Book, typically just a mention or two. They may know your name and the title of the book, or they may just recognize the COVID They can hear about your book in a number of ways, including stumbling on your book in a store, whether that is a brick-and-mortar store or a retailer online. They can hear about your book from a friend, or they may even find out about your book through your own outreach efforts and marketing materials that you're putting out there. However they hear about your book, they suddenly go from being someone who was simply in your target audience and had no idea who you were, to someone who knows who you are and what you're selling. Even though your potential reader knows who you are, Stage 2 is still a very passive stage for the reader. Why? Because typically a reader needs to hear about your book multiple times from multiple sources that they trust before taking any action on their own to learn more about your book. Think about this in your own life. How many books have you heard of multiple times that you think you would probably like, but that you've never actually gone to Amazon and looked up? For me personally, there are hundreds of books like this. I'll hear about a book sometimes 10 or 20 times before I even think to go look at it on Amazon. And if I'm not looking for more information, what's the likelihood that I'll take action and purchase? Zilch. This doesn't mean that I'm not interested, it doesn't mean that the books aren't good, and it doesn't mean that I wouldn't absolutely love these books once I got my hands on them. It just means that finding this book at this time in my life is not high on my priority list. So it never gets done. Keep that in mind as you're going through these stages because you can bring a ton of awareness to your book, but it doesn't necessarily mean those people are going to buy, even if the book is absolutely perfect for them. You could be solving a huge problem they have, and they are not buying. This is a painfully common occurrence, yet when we are on the author's end of it, we feel terrible. We wonder why people aren't buying. What's wrong with us? Well, nothing's wrong with us or our books. Awareness doesn't easily convert to action, but it doesn't mean that we're the problem. At this stage, it can feel like there's not really too much that you can do. You've already told your perfect reader about your book, and now the ball is in their court, right? Well, not quite. The pieces of marketing support you need to put in place to help a reader overcome this stage and move on to Stage 3 are foster evangelists. We'll talk about these readers later in this section, but for now, know that once a reader hits Stage 10, they can and will tell other potential readers about your book. The reason that this is so powerful is because people are much more likely to buy your book when they get a personal recommendation from someone they trust. Another reason is because books suffer from what is known in the business world, as the network effect. The network effect is the idea that something is significantly more valuable when more people are using it. This pops up all over the communications industry. A telephone, for example, is much more valuable when everyone has one, because the whole point of the telephone is connecting with others. If you had a telephone in your house and no one else had one,, it would be worthless. Emails, fax machines, and even the internet are significantly more valuable because everyone uses them. It turns out that books are the same way—not quite on the level of communication devices but close. When you think about this, it makes a lot of sense, because books are always more enjoyable when you can talk about them with others. As much as you can enjoy the ideas in the book on its own, You also want to read books in order to build a shared language or shared world, in the case of fiction, with others. In some ways, a book is a communication tool, which is why it obeys the same rules as the telephone when it comes to the network effect. Raise awareness by putting out more and more and more marketing. Specifically, release the same message in different forms. Like I said before, Most people that are in Stage 2 need to hear about your book at least 2 to 3 times before they even begin to start looking for more information on it. This is less true for nonfiction than it is for fiction. Nonfiction has a benefit in that it's solution-oriented, so someone might have an urgent pain and may be looking for a solution. Your book might contain that solution, and then they won't have to hear about it so many times before they go out and look for more information on it. But for fiction, it really comes down to just getting your marketing materials in front of people over and over again, and trying to entice them into trying you. There are tactics at later stages that can aid with this. But the ultimate message here is that when in doubt, market more, smartly of course. Raise the priority of your book, in the potential reader's mind. The fastest ways to raise priority are: Add urgency. Add scarcity. Add desperate need. You will see this a lot, especially with book campaigns. Some examples are: Make the book free for a limited time, sometimes to the point where they lose access to the book if they don't read it by certain time. Put it on sale and give a really huge discount for short amount of time. Create something that is going to be out of date next year, like an almanac or a gift guide. Create something that's tied to an event. For example, if you have a book that teaches people how to take pictures of fireworks, then you'll probably see an uptick in purchases right before the Fourth of July. So, there are a couple things that you can do to raise the priority in your readers' minds, but it's not the easiest thing to do, and many of these tactics won't work on an ongoing basis. Each of these tactics is promotional in the sense that they are time and event-based. That means you can only expect short bursts of sales rather than consistent sales. There's nothing wrong with short bursts, especially if you have a promotional calendar. However, you don't ever want to rely primarily on event-based or time-based marketing. These produce sporadic sales at best, and create an artificial high that feels incredibly low when you fall back down. The tactic out of these 3 that you can affect the most is putting out more and more marketing. Luckily, we're going to be putting out a ton of awesome marketing for your book in the rest of these stages. Questions to answer: How can you add more marketing materials to this stage to get more impressions in front of your leads? What evergreen marketing opportunities do you have at this stage? What event-based or time-sensitive promotional opportunities do you have at this stage? Stage 3: Prospective Reader. In this stage, someone is actively seeking information about your book. For example, somebody who has heard about your book from a friend decides to look up your book online. Or, Somebody clicks through to your website after listening to a podcast interview you've done. However it happens, someone is trying to learn more about you and your book, whether that be on your actual product page on Amazon or any other e-retailer, on your website, through Goodreads reviews, or anywhere else you've put up information about your book. The mindset of this person is that they have probably heard mention of your book 2 to 3 times already, Often through recommendation. Remember, 85% of books are sold to recommendation or through word of mouth. This person is ready to pursue the opportunity to read your book, whether it's because they need it, in the case of nonfiction mostly, or whether they think it sounds entertaining or interesting. What you're going to need at this stage is a website landing page or author product pages on retailers where people can find more information about your book. The first thing they're probably going to want to do is look you up on Google. You want a place where you control the message. Others will share their own messages about your book as it gains popularity, so you need to be part of the conversation. The more you can share about your book on your website, the better, but at the least you want to have: cover image, title and description. Links to buy, information about you, any other relevant purchase information like whether the book is part of a series or not, your new release schedule—this is the number one question you'll get asked as you develop more series—your email newsletter signup, one of the most important marketing tools you have, good marketing material that creates desire for the book, This is the part where authors struggle most. Many authors are very good at delivering content that creates value, and not as good at delivering content that creates desire. The distinction between the two is important, but unfortunately, too nuanced to go into in detail and beyond the scope of this analysis. If you realize you need to learn how to write content that creates desire, start studying sales copywriting and marketing. You can also look at what other authors in your genre are doing to get ideas. The content used here can range from a number of different things: blog posts on your site about the topic, interviews that you've done, a book trailer, a really tantalizing book description that you've written, and so on. There are a ton of possibilities here. Questions to answer: Where can readers learn more about your book or series? Landing page, website page, etc. What are some pieces of content that you can use to create desire for your book? Stage 4: Trial. In this stage, someone samples your work. This stage is one that I consider optional because you don't actually need to have a trial or primer in place to sell your book. Lots of authors have succeeded without it. That being said, I highly recommend it because I think it helps bridge the gap from Stage 3 to Stage 5 quite nicely. The other reason is because I've noticed, not only with myself, but also in talking to other authors about their habits, that readers who go through Stage 4 seem to read the book that they eventually buy much faster. They also seem to go forward after they read the book through Stages 7, 8, 9, and 10. So in some ways, Stage 4 is a great supporting piece of marketing material for Stages 6 to 10. So what is the trial? Put simply, it's a sample of your work that's closely related to the book that the reader is actually going to purchase. That doesn't necessarily mean that the trial or the primer has to be free though. Lots of authors are very successful with a paid trial as long as the price is low enough. Right now, that typically means trialing with an ebook, and it's typically priced at 99 cents. You can try to price higher, but a $1 trial is common across so many industries that more people will buy at the lower price. The marketing support you need at this stage is a sample of your work that is either free or has a very low monetary barrier to entry like 99 cents. You want this sample to be something that is small and easily consumable. In this case, a huge book as a freebie is not necessarily ideal. You want it to be something that readers can get through quickly. Why? Because if they don't finish your trial, they won't buy your book. Something complete that produces a desired result or ends with open questions for fiction. At the same time, you don't want to give someone one scene and call it a day. Yes, that's small and easily consumable, but it's probably not enough to get someone hooked on your fiction. Give them a full story that they can continue if they are excited enough about the characters and concept. If you're writing nonfiction, the worst thing you can do is say, "Here's a 10-step framework, buy my book to get steps 4 to 10." If someone can't get a result with just steps 1 to 3, then they aren't going to be very impressed with your framework and won't necessarily want to buy the rest. Think if I had given you just the first 3 steps of this. Even if you implemented every single thing I said, you could still easily see no sales. The entire framework, or at least steps 1 to 5, are required in order to see tangible results. A sample that creates desire for your paid book. Don't use something tangentially related, but rather something that is closely related. For fiction, this could be something like a short story or a novella-length prequel to the series you're trying to sell, while for a nonfiction book, it may be a bonus audio that is going to create desire. It can be a delicate balance to create both something that produces a result, and something that creates desire at the same time. My best advice is to take a small but complete piece of your story or larger idea and make that a sample. Even though your trial or sample is yet another piece of material that you have to create, it doesn't have to be hard work. In fact, you can use a portion of your book just by pulling some of the best chapters in your book and bundling them together. You could also take the same content and put it in a different format, which is one of my favorite ways to create a sample. A great example of this is doing a short audio on one of the chapters in your book, especially if you have a nonfiction book. The reason that this works is because audio is very easily consumable. People listen to audio while they're jogging, while they're driving to work, while they're on the train, while they're waiting in line. And because it's so easily consumable, people are happy to listen to the audio and then go back and buy the same content in a book form so they can dive deeper into your lessons and insights. Even though it's the same content, you are providing two different experiences. This works well with fiction too, though in this case you often need to provide a whole story. I've found that a short story related to the characters creates desire to learn more about them, especially if you can evoke strong emotions in a short amount of text or leave the story on a cliffhanger or big reveal. I was able to do this with the first book of the Billionaire's Alibi series, which was only 20,000 words, or about 75 pages. The goal of the trial is to deepen your bond with her reader, to easily get your message in front of people, to remove unnecessary barriers to entry to try your work, and to get to know your readers better through their feedback. If you do these things, you can create desire that makes the pricing of your paid book less relevant. It's very simple: when someone really wants your book, they don't care if it's priced at $2, $5, or $10. Questions to Answer. What are some free or cheap trials I can offer to entice people to my book? How can I slice and dice small sections of my book to provide a complete yet enticing experience to the reader that will interest them in my paid book? Stage 5: Prospective Customer. In this stage, someone hits your sales page on a retailer and they make the decision to buy your work or to not buy your work. This stage is self-explanatory, and it's really encompassed by that moment right before someone purchases your book. They're going to make a decision to buy or not buy, and in some cases, they may make other decisions like putting you on their wishlist, putting you in their cart but never checking out, or not taking any action right then but keeping it in the back of their mind that they want to purchase your book eventually. What you need at this stage: An awesome product page that closes sales. To bring your potential reader through this stage, you need to have awesome covers, a great description, plenty of 5-star reviews and blurbs from people who like your book, an incredible sample, and if possible, also a sense of urgency on the page, though that's not always easy to do and you can't stay in an urgency state year-round. Kindle Countdown Deals is a great example of a short-term urgent state. You have a few options that may help you improve your product page. Study other product pages of successful authors in their genre, and make notes about the various elements on the page, like cover, reviews, and more. See if you can identify the successful elements, and attempt to mimic them using your own author style. Ask your readers what confused them most about your product page, if anything. Pay attention to the reviews on your product page. If you are below 4 stars, that may be an indication of where you need to improve. I've gained tons of insight from my own review section that led me to change my covers, text, and even the structure of my book. Ask another author to help you diagnose weak points on your pages. Usually, this works best if you talk to an author with a bit more experience than you. They can save you tons of time and wheel-spinning by providing answers quickly. Stage 6: Customer. In this stage, someone buys your book at market rate. This stage does not include anybody who acquired your book through other means like stealing, borrowing, or receiving your book as a gift. The whole point of this stage is that somebody is an actual customer of yours, and they've actually given you money in exchange for getting your book. I want to make that distinction clear, because I think that it gets a little lost at times. You should value a customer much higher than somebody who has gone through, say, Stage 4, where they've just merely sampled your work at a discounted rate. You may be thinking, "Hey, sales! That was my entire goal! Boo-hoo!" A lot of authors see Stage 6 as the endpoint, but it's truly just the beginning of the Back 5 Stages. Being a buyer does not make someone a reader. All you have to do to understand this is to look at your own buying habits when it comes to books, television, or movies. If you go through your own archive of media, you can probably find a number of books, DVDs, products, and programs that you've paid for but didn't ever consume. If you can't find anything in that stash, perhaps you have unused gym memberships, past grocery store purchases, rotted fruit and vegetables, clothes in the closet with price tags still on them, and any other bad decision that you've ever made with money. We as humans tend to buy more than we need, especially those of us who live in first-world countries. We often buy things that we think we want and that we never ever use. It's just human nature. So the same thing happens with books. Just because someone bought your book doesn't mean that they ended up reading it, and that, in my opinion, is a huge wasted opportunity. What you need in this stage is for someone to buy your book and open it. That's the entire goal of this stage because you want customers to read your books. A customer will never become a repeat customer unless they read your first book and then take a number of additional actions. We don't want them to buy and promptly forget about you. Questions to answer: How can you remind readers to read your book after purchasing it? Does the content of your book create that wow factor? Stage 7: Reader. In this stage, someone reads your book. It's really that simple. What you need at this stage: To give your reader a reason to complete your book. Again, all you have to do to know that this stage is hard to get through is to look at your past purchases. We all have books that we bought, that we started, that we never finished reading because we lost interest along the way or it was too difficult to comprehend. And even if someone picks up your books with tons of enthusiasm and dives in right away, you can still lose them. A book is long and a huge time commitment. Calls to action at the end of your book in the back matter. You might have a call to action for reviews, a call to action for email, and/or a call to action to download the bonus resources. You may want a few CTAs to be able to target people in different ways because people respond to different things, or you may have a specific goal in mind based on your strategy. Questions to answer. Are readers completing your book, and if not, what's stopping them? What calls to action can you use in your back matter to bring your customers and consumers of your work back to your email list where you can contact them again? Stage 8: Fan. In this stage, someone who has read your book takes positive action at the end of it. This can be anything including writing a positive review about your book at a retailer, Signing up for your email list, buying a second book, visiting your website and reading some the articles on it, or grabbing your bonus resources or extra content like deleted scenes, like interviews you've done with experts on the topic of your book, or like other short stories that you've written. What you need at this stage is more content, more books, more bonus resources, more interaction in a Facebook group whatever you can offer. So they've already read your book, and they've presumably enjoyed the book because they got to the very end and they didn't quit somewhere in the middle. You want to provide them with even more content that they can access on your website or your email lists so that you can stay in touch with that reader going forward. This is really important because anyone who's become a fan of your book wants to get more from you. And you need to have a great way to communicate with them in the future about things that you're doing next and other ways that you can help them. Questions to answer: What can you offer to someone who has read your book to keep them engaged and get them to share their contact information with you? What bonus contact or interaction do they respond to? Or do they just want the next book from you? Stage 9: True Fan. In this stage, someone has signed up for your email list or regularly checks your blog or Facebook page or whatever, and they want to buy your next thing, no matter what it is. A true fan is what businesses are built upon. It's someone who likes you, someone who tracks your movements online across multiple channels and interacts with you on whatever you're doing next. Your job now is to keep in touch with that person and to continue to provide them value while you're working on your next book. At this stage, the only thing you need to do is nurture that fan. Depending on your chosen strategies, you may want to continue to provide them with additional content that they may be interested in, updates on what you're doing, reminders to take further action that you would like them to take, like buy your next book, sign up for your email list, or share your post. Personal stories that help you for connection with the person, new books, products, or services. You can engage your fans in a number of ways: through personal emails, comments, and forums, by sharing videos and audio connection deepeners of yourself talking about the subject of your book, this one or the next one, by posting regular new content By writing more books. Questions to answer: What is the path someone takes to move from fan to true fan? What books do they read, in what order? What marketing materials do they consume? Which promotions or marketing efforts do they participate in? Stage 10: Evangelist. In this final stage, someone shares your book with others. This person is telling others about your book at every chance that they get and is bringing new readers with similar tastes from Stage 1, which if you'll remember is just being in your target audience and not knowing who you are at all, to Stage 2, which is having awareness of you. Evangelists can even potentially bring readers in your target audience to Stages 3, 4, and 5, where they seek out information about you and your book and get to the decision-making point. While this is labeled as Stage 10, in some ways it's actually Stage 1 because it is the beginning of a new cycle of somebody learning more about your book. At this stage, you are going to focus entirely on word of mouth, which means you need to activate your fan base. You can do that through content that is specifically created for sharing purposes, that your evangelist can share with others. Connection with the community and helping various people in the community who are excited about what you're doing and finding things that they can do together. Continuous calls to action that remind your evangelist to share your book. The reason you need all of these things is because an evangelist won't just talk about your book out of nowhere. Evangelists, as excited as they are about what you're doing, still have their own lives, problems, and drama. There are other things that they're thinking about at any given time. It's very easy to fall off an evangelist's radar, even though they loved your book and they're really excited to tell somebody about it. So what you have to do with activation is you just need to give them a reminder and a reason to talk about your book with others. Questions to answer: How can I activate my evangelists? How can I treat my evangelists to extra goodies that they will use in everyday life? Additional Resources. To read the rest of the book, The 10 Stages of Audience Information was excerpted from Pick Up Get Your Book Selling: Jumpstart Your Book Sales Without Launching, Scheming, or Hacking (The Productive Novelist #9). If you are looking for ways to build your email list creatively, check out Monica's book, Recruit Your Readers: Get More Readers on Your Email List Easily, Efficiently, and Ethically, The Productive Novelist. 10. Takeaways. There are 10 stages of audience that you need to pay attention to. You should find ways to be converting people at every step of the funnel. Task Checklist: Study the 10 stages of audience and look hard at your business. What are you doing to convert readers at each stage? Where do you find your stages of audience losing the most people? Where do readers get stuck in your funnel? Chapter 10: Selling Your Books and Related Products. You've created your store and learned the nuances of selling directly to your reader. You've mapped out your product offerings, and figured out the basic marketing plan and sales funnel to get people buying from you again and again. Now it's time to fill your store with your catalog of products, which likely includes some combination of ebooks, print books, audiobooks, and merchandise, as well as additional SKUs for bundles. In this chapter, I'll talk about the quirks around different items you can sell in your website store. Selling eBooks. As long as you are not in exclusivity agreements, eBooks are probably the easiest thing you can start selling from your store. You likely have an eBook file compiled for just about everything you have published, and because you have most of your catalog on retailers, you likely have product descriptions, reviews, and more than you can use to communicate the value of your eBook to potential customers. Customers. You can sell ebooks for $10 or less, which is the perfect price for a low-key buy. You have a lot of individual tripwires to play with, though I don't recommend playing with them all at once. It's good to rotate marketing efforts, but remember, you want your core offerings front and center in your store. The individual books are listed on the proverbial second page, allowing your core offerings to shine. You can distribute ebooks through BookFunnel or a link from Dropbox. The only quirk I've found when selling ebooks is that a lot of readers didn't want an EPUB, and a few couldn't figure out how to access it despite working with BookFunnel and instead wanted a PDF. To cut down on customer support, I recommend sending both without asking their preference. As with any digital product, there are issues with piracy, especially when sending PDFs. My suggestion is to make sure all of your books are up at all retailers, at least on pre-order, before selling direct, just so no one can fraudulently post your book and start earning royalties. I also recommend having a clear no-returns policy on digital goods, for your own protection. It doesn't mean that you can't offer a refund, but it does mean that you are not obligated to offer one. When I write my returns policies, I also say something like, "Because digital downloads are sent instantly upon purchase, we are not able to offer refunds. Please be sure you want to make the purchase before submitting your order." Selling audiobooks. Selling audiobooks is not much different from selling ebooks, and many of the same points around digital downloads apply. You can use BookFunnel to send out audiobooks. You may also send a link from Dropbox, but because audiobooks are usually a bundle of sound files, I find BookFunnel to be a much cleaner implementation, especially because it comes with its own player. While retailers won't allow you to sell AI-read audiobooks, programmatically read by artificial intelligence, you can sell these easily and cheaply created books from your website. Google Play currently offers AI-read audiobook creation. So check their terms to see where you can sell your books. If not, then you can create an AI-read audiobook using Amazon's free-to-use Polly service. Note: This program is built for developers and requires basic knowledge of speech marks. In addition to audiobooks, you can also sell other sound files, like an audio commentary. Selling Print Books. If you are selling print books through your website, you are doing it on pre-order, through a short print run, or through offset printing. Then you are either dropshipping those books to readers when they order, sending your product to warehousing services with Printful or Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), or fulfilling the orders yourself with the inventory you hold in your home or office space. Let's talk about each of these concepts one by one. Pre-orders. Many authors have gotten their start in selling print through a very basic system of preorders. They put together a print edition or book box for readers and create a form where people can indicate their interest in various options. They email their list and audience platform to share the form. They close the form and invoice readers through PayPal to collect payments. They buy the books and ship them to those who purchase them. You can make things much more complicated than that, of course. You can set up a website and hook it up to a distributor, which then prints and dropships the books to your readers, but you can also test the waters with the simple setup that I've described above. To us, this is the simplest way to get started, and is ideal if you're trying to understand the demand for your print books. Offset Printing Versus a Short Print Run. Print on demand is an option that lets your printer create one copy of your book quickly, based on demand, someone ordering it. This means you don't have to front any costs, and you just collect royalties, similar to your ebooks. The downside is that you have limited options for what you can print, and the costs are much higher to print books one at a time. Offset printing is when you buy books in bulk, usually at least 750 but often far more, at a significant discount. For special embellishments, you'll likely have to get an offset book printed. These orders can take weeks to arrive and have a huge lead time because they are usually printed and shipped from a country like China. You can order a print run of your books from: Fast print-on-demand copies: https://kdp.amazon.com/ Personal or early copies with no publication required: https://press.barnesandnoble.com/ Industry standard POD: https://www.inkgramspark.com/ Cheap, great book printing: https://mixum.com/ Pricier, fast, great book printing: https://www.48herbooks.com/ All the Bells and Whistles: https://printninja.com. Dropshipping. Dropshipping is when a company fulfills an online order for you on your behalf. Typically, you print and package the book and rent storage space in their facility, and when they receive an order, they will ship the package for you. You can usually take orders from several places that integrate with the dropshipper. There are a few companies that independent authors use. Printful. This company integrates with several popular retailers like Amazon and Etsy, and also integrates with several popular website store platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, and Squarespace. If you have books, bundles of books, or a book box that includes merchandise, you can ship your products to them using their warehousing fulfillment. You pay to rent space where they store your products, and they ship when you sell them. https://www.printful.com/warehousing-fulfillment. If you want to add merchandise to your website store, you can also dropship many different items from Printful. https://www.printful.com/sell-merch-online. Fulfillment by Amazon. Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) works similarly to Printful, but there are major benefits when you sell through them. While you can always get your books onto Amazon easily, FBA is ideal for books that can't be easily done through POD, but it can also be useful if you want to offer signed print copies of your books, an actual print box set, or bundles of products of any other sort. You can additionally dropship merchandise printed through Printful through your FBA account at Amazon. Finally, you can access Amazon benefits like eligibility in Prime Shipping, as well as outsource customer service and returns to Amazon's team. You can learn more here: https://www.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-Amazon https://www.amazon.com/b/i=utf-8&node=13245485011. Lulu. If you use Lulu for printing specialized books through POD, they have different paper options and bindings that are not available elsewhere. You can hook up your account to Shopify and WooCommerce through their custom integration app Lulu Direct. You could also plug into your own site using the Lulu API. BookVault. BookVault is a new UK company on the scene that it's similar to Lulu, but with slightly different printing and shipping pricing. Similar to Lulu, it integrates with major web store platforms that authors use like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Payhip. BookVault is fantastic for international shipping, and many Kickstarter people also use it for their campaigns. A few challenges with offering print books is that you have to factor in shipping costs, especially internationally. I recommend having a policy in place around where you will and won't ship to internationally. If you are fulfilling orders from your own home, you can get packing materials at Uline and get accurate postage through ShipStation or Pirate Ship. Selling ancillary products and merchandise. There are so many interesting things you can sell through your website store that might be related to your books. I recommend checking out Printful first, as they integrate with Shopify and WooCommerce. They have high-quality merchandise and prints that can cover a lot of the items you might be interested in. You are unlikely to make much money from selling print-on-demand merchandise, so I recommend limiting your products. Remember that profitability is important, and think about how products might ship. For example, breakable items like glassware and coffee mugs may be both expensive to ship and annoying to ship, especially when you have to replace a broken product. If you're intending to do it yourself, you must make sure that it makes financial sense to do so and that you are not losing money with each sale. You can also do a print run of a few high-margin, easy-to-ship items like enamel pins and prints. I think enamel pins work really well for symbols and badges, but keep in mind that if you are fulfilling the orders yourself, these will have to be shipped separately from books in order to qualify for the media mail rate in the US. When it comes to selling merchandise, most of it is not worth the hassle in terms of profitability. Focus on just a few items that truly enhance the excitement around your work. Selling Bundles and Book Boxes. Once you have figured out how to sell all of these things individually, you can fill out those core and premium offerings with bundles of your individual items. Most of your direct sales money will come from bundles rather than individual products. This is true on retailers too, actually. This means that your bundles need to be front and center on your website store., and you need to be focused on upgrading potential customers to bundles. A challenge with physical bundles is sourcing everything and then shipping everything, especially during a global pandemic when shortages abound and suppliers are dropping out of the market due to rising costs. I highly recommend getting a small print run of all the physical items in your bundle and figuring out a shipping container packing materials, and then the weight and price to ship to various countries around the world. Harmonious Catalog and Direct Sales. One of the biggest questions I receive on selling direct from your website is how it will hurt sales rank and algorithmic visibility on Amazon. Many of you will have built a strong business on retailers, and you want to add direct sales through your website as a supplement to what you're already doing. You may want to: Directly sell only a few things, especially if you have exclusivity contracts. Transition your readers slowly to buying direct, instead of at a retailer. Leave your retailer business as it is, but sell direct as an additional income stream. Find new readers or scale advertising efforts. Or some combination of all of these. Whether your sales rank takes a significant and damaging hit or not is going to depend on how popular your books are already in the store. If you are in exclusivity programs, then you aren't selling ebooks in your website store to begin with. If you are wide, you are going to have to be a wildly popular and successful author to be worrying about launch day sales rank, as you are competing with borrows from Kindle Unlimited. For most authors, it's not going to make a significant difference in their retailer sales or algorithms. In the case of a pre-order, where you are selling your book ahead of time direct to readers, with the intention of putting the book in exclusivity upon launch, there may be a little bit more of a hit to your sales rank. Again, it depends on how many launch day sales you would normally collect. For most authors,, I still think it won't matter or hurt your launch date. In general, successful authors in Amazon's Exclusivity Program find 70-90% of their readers are KU readers. That means that most of their sales rank comes from borrows, which means that those people aren't likely to buy directly from you or your store anyway. You're not risking much by offering preorders through direct sales. Additional Resources. Join the Direct Sales Accelerator. My business partner Russell Nohalty and I created a mega direct sales course called the Direct Sales Accelerator. It covers these advanced selling opportunities in detail, along with subscriptions, crowdfunding, live events and signings, and more. Many of these products overlap with other means of direct sales, and other platforms may be more useful for testing offers as well. As a bonus, you get my 2 mini-course guides for this book about special offers and website stores inside the course. https://courses.writermba.com/takeaways. eBooks are the easiest products to start selling, followed by audiobooks. The 2 most hassle-free ways to sell print books are to either set the up with print-on-demand, POD plus dropshipping, usually through Lulu or BookVault, or to take print book preorders and order only what you need. As you get more advanced with website sales, you may find cheaper alternatives in handling your own print runs, shipping books from your own home or warehouse, and upgrading readers from regular paperbacks and hardcovers to signed copies, dedicated copies, or special editions. You can sell ancillary products like merchandise from your storefront, You may be able to do some via print-on-demand, but other products, like decks or games, may require an upfront financial investment and holding inventory. Task Checklist. Make a plan around how you want your storefront to be set up. What can you do right now? How can you make it profitable sooner? Make a plan around how you want your storefront to grow. Where do you want your store to be in 1 year, 3 years, 5 years? As you learn how to improve your store through cross-sells, upsells, post-purchases, and repeat purchases, you may find that your website store and special offers dictate your production priorities. Allow for room to explore, and make this area of direct sales as fun as possible as you go along. Chapter 11: Messaging for Your Website. Because my direct sales strategy is rooted heavily in messaging, not testing, I wanted to share exactly how I craft sales messaging for my books. This works for special offers, products in your storefront, and more. The messaging in both cases should be the same. Before you start on this chapter, it helps to have a specific project that you want to work on, along with a place to jot down notes. Messaging in 3 Simple Questions. There are 3 simple questions I ask myself to come up with messaging for any product, fiction or nonfiction? What's exciting about this offer? What are the objections to this offer? What are the psychological triggers I can pull out of this offer? What's exciting about your offer? Put simply, what's exciting about your offer usually comes down to a handful of things. The emotional appeal, or the visceral appeal. For fiction, this usually comes down to imagery, cover or promotional imagery, and scenes that make the reader feel something. For nonfiction, this feeling usually comes down to telling a story that is either inspirational or aspirational, or preferably both. The Logical Appeal. For fiction, the logical appeal is almost always going to be a set of tropes and symbols. Is this an angel and a vampire falling in love with each other, Or is it a hard-boiled female detective solving a murder in France? The reader has to understand that they are logically going to like the book. For nonfiction, the logical appeal is data and anything else that serves as proof that they will get the outcome they want. The Promise: For fiction, the promise is basically the genre. Hopefully, you know what your genre is promising. A mystery promises a puzzle, A romance promises romantic love and partnership, and sometimes sex. A fantasy promises world-building, and a sci-fi promises a unique take on the future. For nonfiction, the promise is even simpler. It's "lose 10 pounds in 10 days," or, you know, something more realistic than that. The Sample Delivery. For fiction, the sample delivery is a snippet or teaser from your book that reinforces the 3 things above. For nonfiction, the best option is usually a simple task that will get the person the result that reinforces the 3 things above. An example might be: set a timer for 10 minutes and don't let yourself do anything besides stare at your screen to help people out of procrastination. I used this with great success to sell my book, The 8-Minute Writing Habit, when it first came out. If that is not possible, This might be another opportunity to offer a case study or story. Again, these 4 things do not change in any way across fiction and nonfiction. You may get a conversion with just 1 or 2 of these, but you'll maximize your conversion with all 4 of them. What are the objections to your offer? After you get people interested in what you're doing, now is the time to cut through objections. Objections. These come in a handful of categories. The Always Objections. No matter what you are selling, these objections will always come up in the consumer's mind. Will it work? For fiction, the buyer wants to know that they will get a complete story. If it's a novel, how many pages is it? Will it be full of errors and unreadable? For nonfiction, the buyer is even more skeptical and wants to know if the method works. You can overcome this objection in both cases with samples, examples, reviews, and testimonials. Will it work for me? For fiction, the buyer wants to know if they specifically will like what you have created. Do they hate first-person present tense? Do they hate the genre? Is there too much violence, or too much swearing, or too much sex? For nonfiction, they want to be able to see themselves executing the solution you are proposing. And if they can't, they won't invest. You can overcome this by getting these specific details into your copy, including your reviews, testimonials, and case studies. Why Now? For fiction, the buyer wants to know why they should buy now. Are they so hooked that they need to get the next chapter immediately? Do they need something to read that night or weekend? For nonfiction, this may be more about changing their own life. Maybe they have health issues that are a ticking time bomb, or their wedding is coming up, or their dog is looking shaggy and needs a groom. You can drop these ideas into your copy to spur people to take immediate action. And we cover even more of this in the psychological triggers section. The Unvetted Source Objections. When you sell direct, the buyer doesn't know you from Jane Doe. Since you don't have established trust like a retailer with a strong brand name might, you'll have to develop trust quickly in order to bring your readers into a sale. Getting the product: Will the buyer actually get the product they purchased? They need to trust and believe that they will. The best way to show people that your system actually works to get them their purchase is by offering the same system for your free books and other resources. Convenient: Is it easier, or at least not too much of a hassle, to get the product, or do they have to jump through a ton of hoops to download the books, sideload to their device, and more? Most authors use BookFunnel to handle ebook and audiobook distribution, and many use Lulu or BookVault to handle dropshipped print distribution. Authors also use Printful and other print-on-demand companies for dropshipped merchandise. Good experience. People differ on what they consider a good experience, and many of the metrics don't actually matter. This is truly just a gut feeling that people have. Did they enjoy buying from you? Was it easy? Was it fun? Did it make them feel supportive? Was it an even exchange? Would they do it again? You can't fully control how other people feel,, but you can try to make the answers to these questions a yes. Risk-free: Do you have a money-back guarantee, or can you borrow credibility and familiarity by accepting payments, like PayPal and credit cards, that allow the buyer to contest the charge on their end? Worthwhile switching costs: If the buyer is switching from a trusted and convenient source, like Amazon, what is their reason for doing so? Are you giving a fantastic and exclusive deal that can only be found through you? Are they supporting something noble by buying through you? The Niche Genre Objections. Every niche or genre has a list of objections that are specific to the space. For example, in fantasy, some of the objections include that women are treated as objects, or that fantasy has too much description. In young adult, people object to whiny main characters and chosen one tropes. You can go even deeper on this concept by comparing your books to others in pop culture through known objections. You might say, "It's Twilight but the vampires don't sparkle, they are truly dangerous." Fifty Shades of Grey built a multi-million-dollar franchise just from the idea of giving people the thing they craved from another series. The You Objections. Even if you sell buyers on all these other pieces, you still have to sell them on the uniqueness of the art. Why me? What makes you the ideal person to deliver this story? A lot of the time, you need to connect your own background and story to the book or series. For fiction, this is the emotions of the story. For nonfiction, this is the transformation you are trying to give readers. Why this book or series? This objection has to do with choosing your book or series over similar ones, at least in the now. You can handle this in numerous ways, but the main thing to remember is that this isn't about being negative on another's book. Many people will read multiple books in a genre or niche, so this objection is just about understanding and explaining where your book fits in the landscape. You might say, "For fans of X, Y, and Z books, this story combines A and B threads with C characters." The secret to addressing objections well is to spin them into benefits to the consumer. What are the psychological triggers in your offer? The No-Brainer Offer. To me, coming up with a strong value stack is the first step to using psychological triggers. When I started teaching Kickstarter, I taught students the Double 50 Rule which states: Create a tier that is double the value of what you are charging. This ensures that the tier is an easy yes for buyers and also ensures that if you have a tier that no one is backing, you have the data to justify removing it quickly. Usually it's something that no one wants. Ensure that same tier is at least 50% profitable, or put another way, costs you less than 50% of what you are charging to deliver. This ensures that you don't do a ton of work for very little money in your pocket. Pocket. It also means that even if you make a mistake, you have the money to cover it. With this really simple double 50 approach, we are usually able to get anywhere from 50 to 70% profitability on our campaigns, barring a few types of campaigns where that simply isn't the business model or purpose of them. So when you see one of our campaigns that hits over $40,000, we are keeping a large percentage of that. This rule is fairly easy to follow with a bundle or Kickstarter tier, but nearly impossible to follow with individual products on a storefront. Don't worry about doing this for individual products because you can't usually control the profitability on it. For authors selling from their website, ebooks and audiobooks will always have 90% or more profitability, while paperbacks and merchandise will usually have 15-20% profitability, since most authors will use print-on-demand to control upfront costs. There are many psychological triggers you can use to further lace your messaging and offer with stickiness. I've covered these psychological triggers in Chapter 6 of my co-authored book called Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter— There Are Many. I'm going to spell out the top 5 most useful psychological triggers for you, and then I've excerpted the section on psychological triggers from the Kickstarter book to help you go even deeper on messaging. You've probably seen these 5 key psychological triggers before, but let's spell them out here. Bonuses. Before you discount anything, I highly recommend keeping your price where it is and offering exclusive bonuses instead. Bonuses work almost as well as discounts in terms of conversion, especially when someone literally can't buy the bonus anywhere else. If you have a large purchase, you can also offer pay-in-full bonuses that encourage people to buy right now instead of taking a payment plan or buying slowly over time. Discounts: Readers love and understand discounts. They are well-trained on them because it's the primary mechanism that retailers use to drive book sales. Discounts. I try to caution heavily against only using discounts, because it's probably the most popular psychological trigger on the planet. It is going to be the most likely to lose its effect over time, and with copycats, and can become a race to the bottom. Deadlines. People take greater action with deadlines, so offering a real deadline, like a holiday shipment drop-dead date, or a cart or order form closeout, so that you can do a small print run can be great for selling books. The best thing about using a deadline in the book industry is that they just don't exist on retailers. The best deadline you might see there is on sale prices, but otherwise, books exist forever and ever. They are rarely taken away from readers, which means that if you can find unique and clever ways to do this on your website, readers are going to be very likely to respond. Bond. Instant Gratification: It is the mid-2020s, and our lives are so filled with convenience that everyone wants and expects to get things now. Many early access business models and subscriptions are built on the idea that the story is so hooking that people will pay to get it sooner, even if it will be free, cheaper, or more convenient to purchase later. If you use an early release model on your website and launch books there before you launch them at retailers, You can pick up and convert more readers to your website store because they are not willing to wait until it comes out where they normally purchase books. We discussed switching costs in earlier chapters, and this is the perfect example of how adding some psychological triggers to the mix makes the switching cost worth it in the reader's eyes. Exclusivity. We've talked a lot about exclusivity throughout this book, but if there's any way you can distinguish what you're selling from what's available available at other retailers, you are able to create much more loyal readers and buyers through your website. These 5 psychological triggers are repeated below, but I figured it would help to gift this chapter on psychological triggers so that you could tease out even more interesting potential messaging for your books. One rule of thumb I have about messaging is that every message eventually wears out and loses its luster. You have to keep mixing things up and testing new messaging and new ways to talk about what you are doing. When I am feeling stuck in that area, I go through this list of psychological triggers and let it help me brainstorm possible messaging that is a bit more of a reach, simply because the 5 psychological triggers I listed are so prominent in sales. List of psychological triggers. Psychological triggers are what copywriters, marketers, product designers, and salespeople use to persuade people to take action. They are the seasoning on your content that push buttons and create emotional resonance with your reader. They are useful for any type of writing, and the psychological triggers that we cover in this chapter are applicable to copywriting, fiction, nonfiction, memoir, book descriptions, publications, social media, and advertising—all types of writing that authors do on a regular basis. The 6 categories are: The X-Factors: Position you above or several steps ahead of your audience. Connection Deepeners: Position you as a peer to your audience. The Button Pushers: Encourage action at a subconscious level. Pleasure and Pain Inducers: Evoke visceral and resonant emotion. Core Wounders and Healers: Take the audience on a transformational journey. Emotional Fantasies and Nightmares: Allow the audience to explore a different life in safety. Kickstarter uses a bunch of these in its functionality, and you'll probably be using the rest in your sample content and your sales page. Let's break these categories down further. Number 1: The X-Factors. Having an X-factor for yourself, your product, your book, your name, or whatever else is going to create more sales. You want to use X-factors when you're placing yourself as a leader of a group or movement that a reader would follow, providing heroes to look up to and aha moments to your readers' lives, inspiring readers to listen or take action. This is going to be most important for a non-fiction book, where you are the person with the X-factor, but it can also be important in getting readers interested in your characters. Here are the 10 X-factors that you can add to your sales page, plus explanations for fiction and non-fiction—memoirs can use both. Direction. Fiction: Giving your character a clear goal or vision and setting them on the path. Nonfiction: Having a goal/vision for your reader and listing a step-by-step process that they can follow. Thought leadership. Fiction: Having your character express smart ideas to other characters. Nonfiction: Expressing new ideas in an industry. Relevancy. Fiction: Relating your story to something happening now in the real world through metaphor. Nonfiction: Relating your work or your campaign to something happening now in the real world and answering the question, "Why this? Why now?" Trendiness: Fiction and nonfiction: Catching a wave around a topic or trope while it's a hot topic among readers. Consistency: Fiction: Giving the character a personality and core values that will help the reader feel like they know them as a person. Nonfiction: Showing up regularly for your reader. Commitment. Fiction: Giving your character something that matters to them and that they can prioritize. Nonfiction: Honoring deadlines and promises to your reader, doing whatever it takes to get them results. Authority. Fiction: Giving your character a reason for people to listen to them. Whether it be experience, putting them at the top of the hierarchy, or through an institution that has its own reputation, that's extended to the character. Nonfiction: Listen to me because I'm at the top of a hierarchy, often gained through borrowing from branded institutions. Credibility. Fiction: Creating trust between the character and the reader, often by giving the character challenges that help them establish themselves as being able to lead or hold their own, in a fight. Nonfiction: Listen to me because you trust me and believe I know what I'm talking about. Often gained through either research or real-world experimentation. Alignment. Fiction: Making it clear why the character is chosen for the task at hand or why the two characters should be together. Often gained through backstory. Nonfiction: You are the right person to be sharing this because Often gained through backstory. Celebrity. Fiction: Giving the character a name or reputation that precedes them. Giving them a mythology that has other characters making interesting assumptions about them. Nonfiction: You are known for sharing this. Your name precedes you, often gained through previous successes and often making people ask themselves, "I wonder what they're really like." Number 2: The connection deepeners. Having a connection with your backers is kind of the point of Kickstarter, and also the way you build a fanbase that keeps coming back for more. You want to use connection deepeners when you're relating to your audience through story, character, or situation, helping your readers move forward from where they are at, usually not where you are at, helping your readers make a transformation without coming across as judgy, elitist, or out of touch. Whereas the X-Factors can probably feel a bit braggy and full of it to some of you, the Connection Deepeners are a balancer. As long as you use both in your copy, you shouldn't have any issues. And you need both, because if you are too much of a leader, then people won't relate to you, and if you are too much of a peer,, then people won't feel confident following you. These are once again going to seem more relevant to nonfiction, but they apply to fiction too. Here are the 12 connection deepeners that you can add to your sales page, plus explanations for fiction and nonfiction. Memoirs can use both. Emotion. Fiction: Offering more than rationale and logic for your character's intentions and actions, emotion sometimes rules our decision-making. Nonfiction: offering more than ration and logic for intentions and actions. Authenticity. Fiction: having your character share a genuine story that helps another character. What your character does when no other characters are looking. Nonfiction: sharing a genuine story or true love for helping others. Vulnerability. Fiction: Showing your character in precarious or deathly situations. Nonfiction: Offering details that are personal, could be judged, but are otherwise relatable. Tension: Fiction: Giving your character anxiety and worry about something to come. Nonfiction: Telling a story that keeps readers reading. Investment: Fiction: Seeing the character invest or go all-in on something that's not a sure thing. Watching a character take a big risk for an even bigger reward, which helps the reader get invested too. Nonfiction: Creating a personal investment in the character or the reader. Transformation. Fiction: Taking your character from point A to point B. Your reader comes on the journey and experiences the transformation themselves too. Nonfiction: taking someone from point A to point B or sharing how you did it. Community. Fiction: giving your characters a sense of community and others to fall back on when they are facing a challenge. Nonfiction: facilitating others to communicate with one another about the content. Interaction. Fiction: allowing readers to make decisions within the story Whether this happens in the story itself or through a relationship with the author, interactive stories are also growing in popularity thanks to mobile devices and fiction gaming apps. Nonfiction: Giving readers ways to have an effect on the content. Simplicity. Fiction: Making your story accessible and easy to digest. Nonfiction: Making your content seem accessible and easy to digest. Reciprocity. Fiction: Putting the character in a situation where they have to return a favor. Nonfiction: Giving your readers response in kind when they help you or communicate with you. Friendly competition. Fiction: Having your characters engage in a game or some other type of back and forth, as your reader will want to know who wins. Nonfiction: Playing fun games with your readers or getting them to play against each other for fun. Personalization. Fiction: Offering a way for readers to make some element of your story their own, which can happen with merchandise sales, special edition hardcovers, and so much more. Nonfiction: Offering a way for readers to make some element of the content their own. Number 3: The Button Pushers. Pushing buttons is generally looked at as a bad thing. Often this phrase is used when you are trying to capture attention and get a reaction. But that's pretty much what you are trying to do with a Kickstarter promotion. You want someone to look at your page and be so moved that they become a backer. Pushing buttons is good in sales and marketing because it means you are receiving a response to your efforts. You want to use button pushers when you're: Trying to get your reader to take action. Connecting at a subconscious level to help the reader take the next step. Encouraging the reader to keep reading. Button pushers are probably the most common tool used in internet marketing and direct sales, which have given them a bad rap. But button pushers are just tools, and it is your choice as to whether you use them for good or evil. There are so many gentle and subtle uses for button pushers, and if you are hesitant to use them, I encourage you to look for them in your favorite television show or book. Seeing them in the things you love will help you develop your own style for using them in your own work. Here are the 13 button pushers that you can add to your sales page, plus explanations for fiction and nonfiction. Memoirs can use both. Repeatability. Fiction: Teaching readers a shorthand to replay an emotional longhand, e.g., symbolism, tattoos, jewelry, or a phrase that a character repeats. Nonfiction: Teaching readers a shorthand to replay an emotional longhand, musical callback. Controversy. Fiction: Having your character share a sharp opinion that you know some will agree with, some won't. Having another character take the opposite stance of common sense and watching them clash. Nonfiction: Sharing a sharp opinion that you know some will agree with, some won't, taking the opposite stance of common sense. Social proof: Fiction: Having trusted or influential characters within a story stand up for your protagonist or side with them. Nonfiction: Sharing how many others took the action you want your reader to take. Exclusivity. Fiction: Giving your story some real-world insider information, like the inner workings of a drug cartel, or bringing your character into a secret society like a sorority or other type of club. Nonfiction: Creating small communities or secret bonuses. Scarcity. Fiction: Taking something away from your character if they don't take action, giving them a lack of resources as an obstacle or providing several terrible options. Nonfiction: event-based promotions, deadlines, limited seating availability, taking something away if they don't take action. Common enemy. Fiction: uniting a group of characters that don't normally get along against another person or group to get them to have unusual and surprising interactions. Nonfiction: uniting a group against another group to get them to take action. Anticipation. Fiction: giving readers a reason to jump into the next chapter, like a cliffhanger. Nonfiction: giving readers a reason to get to the end, completion bonus. Open loops. Fiction and nonfiction: leaving readers in a "will they, won't they?" Scenario: So that they can't stop until they have the answer. This sustained the television show Friends for many, many seasons and became the iconic example of an open loop. Surprise. Fiction and nonfiction: Doing or writing something that the reader couldn't have guessed but that makes sense in hindsight. Payoff. Mystery. Fiction: Giving your readers a puzzle to decipher about a character or something in the plot. Regardless of whether you are writing a mystery. Nonfiction: Giving your readers a puzzle to decipher. Secrets. Fiction: Giving your characters things to keep from each other and letting the reader know, watching as the two characters misunderstand each other. Nonfiction: Giving your reader something that no one else can offer them—trade secrets. Unpredictability. Fiction: Letting your character do something completely out of character, as a regular person might do, and explaining it later in the narrative so it all makes sense. Nonfiction: Not providing a schedule for specific events. Flash sale bonus. Fiction: Bonus and deleted scenes or epilogues. Nonfiction: Adding something that the reader wasn't expecting to the offer. 4. The Pleasure and Pain Inducers. Humans see the world in pleasure and pain. I had a good day or bad day. This sucks or it's awesome. I want to do it or I don't. People want to experience pleasure or pain when they read too, as these are the triggers for several other feelings: happiness, sadness, anger, worry, surprise. You can set the mood of your marketing or your story or express primal desires through detailed word imagery by understanding the pleasure pleasure and pain inducers. You may notice that a lot of sales tactics focus heavily on pain, or why you're not good enough as you are now. But you don't have to do that. You can also focus on pleasure, or the vision you have for someone. You want to use pleasure and pain inducers when you're: trying to induce deep emotion in people, hoping to hook readers and create emotional resonance between them and your work, Drawing readers into a fantasy or mood that can bring them pleasure or pain or both. We think of pleasure and pain inducers as the pepper of the seasonings available to you. Write your copy, then pepper in these words to amp up the flavor and make all the other seasonings work together. Here's an incomplete list of pleasure and pain-inducing words: wealth, millionaire, billionaire, rich, Hamptons, royalty, bougie. Food: Delicious, fluffy, creamy, sweet, salty, sour. Touch: Caress, soft skin, satin, silk, delicate. Sex: Sexy, steamy, hot, wild, XXX. Status: Elite, corporate, special, top expert, MD, royalty, crown. Danger: War, death, hunger, mission, adventure, trap. Competition: Games, selection, contest, compete, rivalry. Exotic travel: Beaches, ruins, cliffs, dunes, panoramas, breathtaking views, mesmerizing sights. Beauty: gorgeous, pretty, lovely, charming, enchanted, goddess, bombshell. Productivity: better, faster, smarter, habits, efficiency, output, best, reward. Romance: love, connection, soulmates, hearts, heavenly, oneness. Nostalgia: wispy, sentimental, black and white, idyllic, period, homesickness. Jealousy: envy, threat, insecurity, defensiveness, green-eyed monster. #5: The Core Wounders and Healers. There are only 6 major core wounds, with most other wounding or upset leading back to one of the main 6. You want to use the core wounders and healers when you're: trying to create transformation in others, forming a deep emotional bond between your characters and your readers, telling your own stories of trial and triumph throughout your life. Below I have the 6 main transformation arcs, as well as the popular fictional characters who have made those transformations. Rejection → Acceptance: Harry Potter, Bella Swan. Control → Surrender: Voldemort, Dumbledore. Abandonment → Integration: Elena Gilbert. Shame → Honor: Jon Snow, Edward Cullen. Betrayal → Devotion (Peeta Mellark). Injustice → Equality (Katniss Everdeen). What I've found most useful to understand around the core wounders and healers is that the most popular books really stick with the character's same transformation arc across multiple books. For example, Bella Swan goes through a rejection and acceptance cycle in every single one of the Twilight Saga books. In the first, she feels rejected by Edward Cullen before starting a relationship with him. In the second, he literally breaks up with her. In the third, he refuses to turn her into a vampire despite the obvious threat to her life. And in the fourth, he rejects her willingness to have their child and tries to abort the baby to save Bella's life. Jon Snow is another character who is a perfect example of this. In nearly every scene, we see him struggling with the shame-honor paradigm. Everything about Jon Snow, from the shame he was born with as a bastard all the way up to his final act, had to deal specifically with shame and honor as defined by the world. I encourage you to think about which of these 6 transformation arcs match each of your major characters, as well as how everything from their backstory to all their scenes scenes might support their character arc, providing evidence of the narrative that you want to tell. For nonfiction, you can choose yourself as the character, or you can choose your ideal target audience. For example, with a weight loss book, you might focus on emotional eating and choose the shame-to-honor transformation of healing the emotions inside you that cause you to overeat. You could also focus on a target audience of recently divorced or cheated-on women who are walking a betrayal-to-devotion transformation. The short-lived reality television show Revenge Body with host Khloé Kardashian took this approach. Or you could also focus on a narrative around control-to-surrender like the food freedom movement. There is no transformation narrative that is better or worse than another, and they are fairly genre-independent, trope-independent, and topic-independent. You can't really get it wrong. The most important thing you can do when choosing a transformation narrative, or noticing one you are already writing—and you're probably already writing one—is to get everything into alignment with the narrative. Double down on your narrative to make it more resonant with your reader. We used an injustice-to-equality narrative for our Kickstarter campaign. We talked a lot about how it's not fair that you can't write what you want and still make good money on it, and it kind of defeats the purpose of becoming a creative to begin with. We talked about how the business model of books doesn't favor offbeat books because the revenue per customer of the average ebook is so small that you need a ton of readers to make a book successful. We talked about how we don't want authors to be independent We want them to feel their independence, to write what they want, and still make a living from it. We framed all of this within the context of a solution, of course—Kickstarter. If you are writing nonfiction, you have to offer the solution your readers are craving, and it has to be a real solution too. None of what we shared is manipulative. These are our true lived experiences as creatives, and we've both got decades of business experience to discuss the market dynamics. And our solution is not snake oil. We have tested this multiple times and have the legitimate numbers to show that it's a very real solution to the problems we've laid out. We also have more solutions to this problem, because Kickstarter is just part of a larger ecosystem of direct sales, which is where we believe true creative freedom lies. These are our sequels to this book. If you are writing fiction and using this powerful category of psychological triggers, You usually want to show the character moving from a place of the wound to the healing over the course of a single book. You also usually want to aggravate the same exact core wound in a different way in the next book in the series. Look at any massive best-selling series, and you will find that the author does this incredibly well, as well as many other structural story pieces that are also done incredibly well. In fact, it's kind of fun to pick out popular characters in long series and figure out what their perseverant core wound is throughout the series, then find scenes in each book where this is triggered over and over again in different ways. The core healers and wounders will help you align to the universal transformation narratives that readers gravitate toward and resonate with. #6: The Emotional Fantasies and Nightmares. Unlike the core wounders and healers, which are transformations that help you change your reality, emotional fantasies and nightmares are actually transportations that help you escape your reality just for a little bit. People want to change their lives with the former, but they do not want to truly change their lives in the latter. They just want to escape into fantasy and nightmare while still staying safe in their current life and world. They want to explore a different life, while being able to come back to their real life whenever they please. You want to use the emotional fantasies and nightmares when you're: writing escapist fiction with fantastical adventures, outrageous conflict and challenge, and extraordinary worlds. trying to share your vision for someone with them in a safe way, without all the hard steps it will take. Talking to people about really difficult-to-understand or charged topics through metaphor to make it feel safer to engage with. The applications of this category of psychological triggers are obvious in fiction—who actually wants to be abducted by a vampire mob boss?—but this applies well to nonfiction authors too. It works best when your ideal reader is several steps away from achieving what they want. For example, if you are selling business consulting to an entrepreneur, you might share stories about 7-figure businesses that started at the kitchen counter with a pile of laundry and 3 kids screaming in the background. The fantasy is the 7-figure business. It feels way out of reach to the person sitting at that kitchen counter. But that person wants to explore the fantasy of it, without dealing with all the pain that probably comes with it. At least for a little bit. Eventually, they may move into wanting to make a transformation. But honestly, the amount of healing they'll have to do is not the selling point you lead with and doesn't always make someone want to get moving. They may not be ready to confront the things that are holding them back. They may not be ready to truly change their ways just yet. Give them the nightmare versus fantasy first. Then when they've agreed to formally work with you, give them the actual steps to transformation. For this category, there's not an easy digestible list of emotional fantasies and nightmares, but rather a process of analyzing the emotional fantasies and nightmares that you write about and that resonate with your readers right now. Like in other categories, we encourage you to identify what you are already doing well., then lean in or double down on it. The process is: Step 1: Figure out what emotional fantasies and nightmares your books hit on. You can do this through: Talking to your audience. Reading your reviews. Breaking down the topics or tropes in your genre and noticing the categories that they seem to fall into. For example, royalty stories fall into 3 narratives: ordinary girl to princess, princess to queen, and ordinary girl to superstar handmaiden. If you write royalty, you should know the why behind what people like about each of these three, because it's different and goes beyond royalty. Step 2: Go deeper into what resonates about that narrative. What are ordinary girl problems versus princess problems versus queen problems versus handmaiden problems? What does each have that is normal, and what are they going to get that's abnormal during their transformation? How does the abnormal thing cause tension in the story? Step 3: Tease out the visuals of these stories in the form of scenes. If you are nonfiction, you can think of these as stories, case studies, or even embodiment if you have been through the transformation yourself first. How can you write scenes or add chapters that fulfill those fantasies or nightmares? How can you write the fantasy of the characters normal and the nightmare of the characters abnormal that's coming their way? How do the fantasies and nightmares play out in relationships? Does the girl get to become the princess, but it's a nightmare for them? Step 4: Implementation and bringing the fantasies and nightmares to life. Choose visuals and samples of your work that convey these fantasies and nightmares. You can also work with some of the other categories we've discussed to flesh this out even more. Note: The visuals and the text need to go into your sample and on your landing or product page on your website. Although I used a fiction example, all of this applies well to nonfiction too. When we designed the campaign for this book, we wanted to make sure that we fulfilled the author fantasy of raising $10,000 $10,000 USD from a single book on Kickstarter, we ended up hitting $21,500 plus. Now we're working with our clients to help them get started on Kickstarter and achieve bigger campaigns as well. The fantasy, which feels out of reach to many authors, is $10,000 on a campaign. As we create more proof that we can help more authors get these results, we'll shift into looking at the core wounders and healers' psychological triggers. So we can incrementally move people along toward their goals. We hope we're doing this in this book too. This is not much different from what we do with our characters in fiction. The protagonist changes, but it's all a transformational journey. Additional Resources. It's really hard to teach messaging through a book, but I hope this chapter was helpful for you. If you want help creating or honing your messaging, I recommend a few options. Grab Writer MBA's course bundle. For the price of one course, you can get all of our main courses: Kickstarter Accelerator, Direct Sales Accelerator, and Go Wide, Grow Wide. These courses have more resources on coming up with great messaging for your marketing and sales copy. https://courses.writermba.com/ Work with me directly. I offer consulting. I get booked up fairly quickly, but you can grab some time on my calendar by checking out current packages, rates, and availability here: https://theworldneedsyourpassion.com/consulting. Follow along with my new book, Story Syncing. If you prefer a reading resource for learning about messaging, I'm writing a new book for creatives about telling good stories. It's called Story Syncing, and I'll be drilling down on each psychological trigger listed in this chapter. And so much more. I'm slowly working on this book over at my Ream subscription. https://reamstories.com/lovelightlioness Takeaways. There are 3 key parts to your messaging: excitement, objections, psychological triggers. Getting people excited about your work consists of emotional appeal, logical appeal, making a promise, and offering a sample. Dealing with objections someone might have to your work includes addressing the always objections, the unvetted source objections, the niche genre objections, and the you objections. There are 5 key psychological triggers you can use in your marketing messaging and your offers themselves. They are bonuses, discounts, deadlines, instant gratification, and exclusivity. There are dozens of other psychological triggers, and you want to use the list provided when you need to dig deep with your messaging and go past the obvious. Messaging does wear out after a while, with both your warm audience—your email list, your socials—and your cold audience—your advertising audiences. It's important to keep coming up with new ways of talking about your work. Task Checklist: Choose a project or product. List what you think will appeal to your reader and make them excited about engaging with you, your product, and your brand. List the objections and the way you would turn those objections into a benefit for your product. List how you can use at least one of the 5 main psychological triggers in your messaging and offers. Dig deep and consider what other psychological triggers you might be able to sprinkle in to uplevel your message and make it stickier and higher-converting with your audience. Chapter 12: Getting Your Messaging Out There. Now that you have your messaging spelled out in what should be solid detail, you're ready to turn it into copy that sells. Copywriting is an art in and of itself, that you can study separately if needed. There are certainly more elegant, personable, or clever ways to write copy, but at the heart of all copy is messages that resonate. In the last chapter, we found those for your books. So while you can absolutely test and tweak that messaging, and probably get optimal results, most authors are going to benefit greatly from just having these messages that resonate. And now you have that. So let's assume you are a good writer, and you're going to write those messages out pretty well. More of my philosophy on messaging. No unnecessary work. I want to build a library of messages that I can post everywhere. Same messaging on every channel. If it works in one place, it should work in others. I also want to acknowledge that for some people, coming up with messaging is what they consider a lot of work. My counter to that would be that I don't know any 7-figure author who does not have their messaging completely nailed down through iteration and testing. You can be fantastic at social media or at advertising, but if you don't have amazing messaging, you won't get the same effectiveness on various platforms. Standalone but in a series, every message is or at least should be capable of converting someone on its own. But when the messages are used together, they greatly increase the chance of converting someone. A consistent drip of digestible content can wear down someone's objections or skyrocket their excitement, and there will be people who convert on the 7th or 15th email. Hone and simplify messages through repetition. I'm not a huge fan of testing through advertising, though I know many are. And if so, have at it, as this could work for you. My approach is much more about getting that messaging in front of my current audience and seeing what they think and how they respond. I want to talk about something until I'm completely bored by it, and then test the winning lines and messages with my money on the line. To me, this is getting to 75 to 90% of the results and effectiveness, and then using advertising to hone the messaging further. One concern when working like this is that a warm audience is not necessarily going to respond to the same things as a cold audience, but what I've found is that the messaging framework I've outlined is very good at spelling out everything that is needed for cold traffic. I do want to say that this is just my philosophy and what I prefer as a grassland. You can take our Author Ecosystems Archetyping Quiz here. Https://author-ecosystem.com/. You may not be a grassland, so some of these points may not resonate with you. If that's the case, then what does resonate with you? Get clear on your own values around messaging, and feel free to borrow pieces of my philosophy while forging your own path forward using your unique skill sets. With all of this said, I have a 5-step process to turning my messaging into content that I can plug and play everywhere. Step 1: Get your messaging into multiple formats. Formats are the key for me to think about my messaging. The messaging is the core value, but the formats are the vehicles with which the core value is delivered. I visualize formats as little paper boats that I send down the river stream. All streams lead the reader to sales. Your content needs to be standalone in each format while also uniform and in alignment across the board. Here are the 5 formats I translate my content to: Headline: 10-20 words. A headline is something simple that gets to the very core of your offer. It might be something like, "The first 6 books in an angel royalty fantasy young adult series for 30% off." This headline includes the logical appeal, the promise, and the discount psychological trigger. Since a headline is so short, you obviously won't be able to get everything into a single headline. That's why you want to write multiple headlines and play with the messaging pieces I've laid out just like you might with building blocks. How many different building blocks can you use across 5 headlines? 10 headlines? You don't need a ton, but having a small library bank is a good investment. Short content, 50 to 200 words. Short content can be used for so many things: social media posts, advertising copy, product pages, and even emails. A lot of people debate whether short content or long content is better, and the truth is that both work because it's not about your preference, it's about your audience's preference. Using only the one you prefer is a disservice and costing you sales. I recently reminded myself of this, and since I normally share long content, decided to send a short (for me) email about an offer I was making. It converted a bunch of people quickly, possibly faster than several of my long emails had. But those long emails also converted people. You need both. Some examples of short content may include a book description, a review or testimonial, and a tidbit about your world, your characters, or the tropes in your story. Long content (200+ words): Your book is already long-form content. Examples of long form might be an emotional appeal that connects readers to your characters and story. It may also be a sample scene from your book. Imagery: Square, vertical, horizontal. I put my imagery in 3 rough formats with 1:1, 1:2, and 2:1 ratios. The thing I tell authors the most about imagery is to think in symbols. If I want to take my headline from earlier, the first 6 books in an angel fantasy young adult series for 30% off, and translate it to imagery, I can tell you that the image will have a teenage girl or possibly a couple, angel wings, a crown, and glowy shishti, a very technical term for magic sparks and lighting. I can also tell you that another image might have 6 book covers, set in context with either paperbacks or digital readers, depending on my target audience, and a big red circle or starburst that says 30% off. I will make several variations of this symbolically driven imagery in square first, and then translate it to landscape and portrait sizes. I may choose a teaser quote from a book and pair it with some of the symbolic scenery, the crown for example, for social platforms. I do use Photoshop and do a lot of this myself, but you could work with a designer or book some time with Hourly Concepts from Book Brush to get this work done for you by a professional design team. Finally, while this does seem like a lot of imagery, you can also use it on A+ content on Amazon, screenshot content on Apple Books, Kickstarter campaigns, your fiction subscription, your product images, your email list, your website, your social platforms, your advertising platforms, and more. Short video. Vertical, horizontal, short videos, 90 seconds or less, are all the rage these days with the popularity of TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Reels, and more. I think a lot of what I said about imagery also applies, but short videos also have many different formats and styling that don't require as much symbolism. The best way to learn the latest trends around video is to hop onto TikTok's #BookTok community. You can also make longer-form, 20 minutes or less videos, for a regular YouTube channel or advertising push. This first step is a process of honing your message in multiple formats, more than anything. Remember that the content of the message can do the heavy lifting, versus how you convey the message. The latter matters, but the former is enough to drastically improve most authors' sales processes. The last thing I'll say is that the length of your messaging and number of messages you may get in front of the same person depends almost entirely on your price point. If you are selling a $5 ebook, you probably don't need as much to convert the person compared to selling a $200 book box. Use your best judgment about how much you need, and feel free to start smaller since we are primarily selling books. With the novelist's dilemma in play for many of us in our businesses, you'll want to be thinking about how to get readers into higher-end tiers or products. In those cases, you'll have to stretch and push yourself to come up with more messaging that is still in alignment and uses as many building bricks as possible from the messaging chapter. Step 2: Create a landing page with everything on it. Now that you have your content in various formats, throw it all onto your landing page. Yes, seriously. I'm not so particular on order, as I like to leave room for creativity. But here is an order, if it helps you to have something to go by. Headline. Subheadline or a few sentences. Video. Buy button. Promise or simplified offer. Imagery used throughout. Emotional appeal. Logical appeal. Sample. Offer details. Psychological triggers. FAQ where you can handle objections. If you're not using a sales page, get as much of it onto your product page as possible. I have seen authors succeed with advertising sent directly to souped-up product pages but I prefer and recommend the landing page still. If you are feeling ambitious, you can create two landing pages, one that is short and one that is much longer. The short page should ideally touch on each of the building bricks of your messaging at least once through imagery, text, and video. The long page can be the smorgasbord of everything the reader needs to jump on board to your offer. You can target both at readers and see who converts to which one. Step 3: Create an email sequence with the key messages in it. Next, you can create an automated email sequence that essentially drips out the content of your landing page. You can also create a sequence that drips out more information that is not found on your landing page. The reason you do this is because people don't do a good job of reading your landing page. They skim it. They miss important information, and sometimes they ignore information when it's in a group that they will be more willing to pay attention to when it's isolated in an email sequence. Again, I think your emails can get creative with the building blocks, but if you want something instructional, this is the basic outline of a single email in this sequence: emotional appeal, logical appeal, Promise. Sample delivery, optional. Paywall to full delivery, optional. Psychological triggers. As you put this email sequence together, there's no set number you need to hit. It should be aligned to your price point, if anything. If you are selling a single book, you don't need 14 emails. If you are selling a $500 bundle, You probably aren't going to max out your efforts with only 1 to 2 emails. The email sequence is really simple: a few emails to get readers excited and ideally get them into your sample, a few emails to handle reader objections, several emails to get people behind your paywall. I encourage you to not worry so much about getting the right sequence or layout. Trust that this framework is designed so that each message could sell the offer by itself, and the cohort of messages will increase conversion significantly. Test this sequence of messaging with your audience first. This is just my opinion, and there are reasons you may not want to, but I think it's the fastest way to collect data on whether your messaging makes sense. If your sequence is working to get your people to buy,, then finding email addresses to run through the same sequence is fairly easy. BookFunnel, StoryOrigin, 1K subs per month. Viral List Builders, 3K, 5K subs. Giving away your free sample or first book. You can check out my co-authored book with Russell Nohalty called Get Your Book Selling with Cross Promotion: Book Sales Supercharged #11 for more ideas on how to build your email list and target audience. Sometimes people worry that they are building an email list of freebie seekers. Here's the thing: I know how to convert freebie seekers. It's the messaging framework I gave you in the last chapter. If you use that, you can convert anyone, even those who are imperfect for your target audience. A lot of the reason why authors struggle to make a free book list builder work with their audience is because they don't have the messaging framework in a nurturing email sequence after someone signs up. Authors are notorious for being ghosts until they have a new release. They then drop the new release with a cover and description and call it a day. This is not nurturing, nor is it a robust messaging strategy that will convert people who are on the fringes of your community right now. There are many amazing things going on in website sales in the author industry right now, And it is still my belief that the email list is the center of your website sales strategy. While you can target buyers on advertising platforms and send them directly to your product page on your website, less than 5% of your potential audience is going to be ready to buy now. You will get buyers, but what about the other 95%+ who might have bought in the future? I believe the email list capture with an email sequence is an essential part of your long-term system. In this system, a small portion of your sales are going to come from your current audience. A small portion of your sales are going to come from readers who are ready to buy now. A large portion of your sales, the majority, are going to come from cold traffic that you've captured to your email list and warmed up through an email sequence. Given this, I think the best thing you can do is optimize your website for list building rather than store sales. This is just my opinion and, of course, based on my preferred methodology. I had someone recently say that my preferred web store, WooCommerce, was built on a content marketing system, CMS, while Shopify was built on an e-commerce system. I replied, "Yes, that's what I want," because I believe so strongly that your shop should be a secondary stop on the road to getting someone onto your email list. List. I am willing to sacrifice a little buy now action for capturing more of my audience and nurturing them long term. Once you have completed this step once, you can create autoresponders for each major series in your catalog. Your product funnel should help you understand which major series should come first in each autoresponder. Your call to action for the whole autoresponder sequence should be to get the person into a bundle of the series. Step 4: Get your messaging into your social channels. Social channels are fantastic for testing your messaging because the bar to entry for getting data back is so low. Although some social media platforms like TikTok have been shown to drive some serious book sales at retailers, social media in general tends to be supportive rather than the thing that converts potential readers. That said, social media excels at several things that your email marketing and social advertising do not: Sharing and virality: When you make your content memeable for social, you give it a higher chance of spreading your brand. Ability to send multiple messages in a short period: Unlike on email, where you really shouldn't be sending out content every day, and definitely not multiple times a day, social media is more ephemeral and can handle your ongoing posts. This means you can try and try again at messaging. Less pressure to opt in as a follower. Social media is a way to collect casually interested parties who wouldn't otherwise be willing to give you their email address or other contact information. Easily and quickly digestible for the casual reader. You can slice and dice your email autoresponder sequence and share the same narratives through images, audio, and/or video. Schedule content to drip. If you created a promotion schedule, you can schedule those posts out ahead of time. Reshare a library of content again and again. Most social schedulers also let you keep a library of content that you can repost automatically over time intervals. Which means your social media is constantly working on your behalf to spread your brand and give a boost to backlist. It's okay if people see similar content again. Often, that's why they end up buying. Drive traffic to your ongoing efforts. On each piece of content, encourage readers to go to a sales landing page where you are offering the series bundle, or an email landing page where you are collecting leads for your autoresponder. Undersequence. To me, social media is amazing for testing, collecting casual readers and potential readers, and sending low-key traffic to your backlist over time. Every once in a while, you get lucky and have a viral hit too. Step 5: Test your messaging in advertising. At this point, you've tested your messaging with your email audience of readers, Your email audience of casual or lukewarm signups that you gained from list building activities. Your social audience of fans, readers, casual browsers, and strangers. My hope is that after sharing your message with these different audiences, and in several different formats, you have been able to really hone in on what potential readers are responding to. Now is when advertising makes sense. You have gotten your messaging to 80-90% effectiveness, so when you run your ads, they will be more profitable. You will want to lead with your stickiest messaging, and may want to try: Facebook ads. Pinterest ads for certain genres. Reddit ads for certain genres. Etsy ads, if you have an Etsy storefront. Facebook advertising is the top choice for many authors because you can incorporate the Facebook Pixel., as discussed in the chapter called Advanced Website Sales Concepts. Additional Resources. The following books from my backlist, some co-authored with Russell Nohalty, may be helpful to you on this journey: Get Your Book Selling with Cross Promotion: Book Sales Supercharged #11, co-authored with Russell Nohalty. Get Your Book Selling with Facebook: How to Use Facebook Profiles, Groups, Pages, Stories, and More to Market and Sell Your Books Book Sales Supercharged #12, co-authored with Russell Nolte. Recruit Your Readers: Get More Readers on Your Email List Easily, Efficiently, and Ethically, The Productive Novelist Book #10. Takeaways. Now that you have your messaging, there is an easy 5-step process to start sharing, testing, and honing that messaging with the world. Step 1: Get your messaging into multiple formats. Step 2: Create a landing page with everything on it. Step 3: Create an email sequence with the key messages in it. Step 4: Get your messaging into your social channels. Step 5: Test your messaging in advertising. Task Checklist: Decide on your messaging philosophy. Do you share many of my core values? Or do you have your own that will guide you? Get your messaging into multiple formats and build a library or bank of messages. Consider headlines, short content, long content, imagery, and video. Create a landing page with everything on it. Create an abbreviated or short landing page with just the most crucial and honed-in elements. Add as many messaging bricks to your product pages on your website store as well. Balance this with making sure your page is not too bulky. Set up an email sequence. Test it with your audience. Once your email sequence is working, send colder leads to it from various sources. Does the sequence still work? What can be tweaked for this lukewarm audience? If your email sequence is working, optimize your website for list building. It's easier to build a list through lead magnets than it is to build a list through sales., but you should be doing a balance of both if you can. Get your messaging into your socials. Take everything you've learned, and start working with advertising to drive traffic to your landing page or web store, one platform at a time. This book is not intended to cover advertising, and I'm not an expert in ads, so work with an ad consultant if that's what you need. Chapter 13. Next steps. The first profession I can ever remember wanting to have was to be an author, so I know how much a writing dream can mean to a person. I tried a number of careers before I got very honest with myself and accepted that I was meant to be an author. It took me years to make any sort of money at it, and then another few years to make a modest 5-figure-a-year income. With this series, I want to help demystify many of these platforms. With this book, I want to help more authors make more money at direct sales. Direct sales has always had a place in my heart, as it's where I started with both fiction and nonfiction, and it's also the path where I see more authors, especially those who have struggled at retailers, finding and forging their own unique way to success. This is the second edition of this book, with the first having been announced and sold in 2021. It may have been the first book on website sales that was directly targeted at independent authors. It was certainly among the first and the first that I knew of. This second edition has been updated to reflect how much independent authors have embraced having an online store as well as direct sales in general. I hope it has been helpful and inspiring to you. And has shown you what is possible for you when you embrace building a deeper relationship with your readers. What next? Please send your questions and suggestions to Monica's team at support@writermba.com or team@theworldneedsyourpassion.com. We will get your message to the right person. We'd love to help you out. Monica's Blog. I've been blogging professionally since 2006, and in the last several years have begun to collect all my work in one spot, under one brand called The World Needs Your Passion. This is the one place on the internet where I am not on-brand or niche-focused toward a goal. I bring my whole self to this blog, write about whatever I want, and share everything from my greatest lessons learned to best my business advice to my love of Lego, tarot, Taylor Swift, and more. It's also a place where I keep the footer fully updated with all my links to everywhere you can find me on the internet. Read this resource: theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Monica's YouTube channel. My YouTube channel is The World Needs Your Passion, and I teach people how to find, pursue, nurture, reignite, and even make money from their passions. I also teach people about entrepreneurship, creativity, business, writing, art, and more. You can watch my channel: youtube.com/theworldneedsyourpassion. Monica's Podcasts. I post new 20-minute episodes about publishing, going wide, serialized fiction, industry trends, and so much more on my podcast feed. TheProductiveNovelist.Buzzsprout.com. Russell Noholti and I also have a podcast for Writer MBA called Kickstart Your Book Sales. There are over 80 episodes here. KickstartYourBookSales.Buzzsprout.com. Follow Monica on Medium. I post regular articles about the publishing industry if you prefer to read about new developments. monicalenelle.medium.com. Take our Author Ecosystems Quiz. The Author Ecosystems Quiz will give you more self-knowledge and help you identify what type of publishing business model is going to work best for you. Are you a nimble desert, an expansive grassland, a rolling tundra, an interconnected forest, or a dynamic aquatic? Dig deep into the new methodology developed by USA Today bestselling authors Monica Leonelle and Russell Nohulty, creators of the Kickstarter accelerator Go Wide Grow Wide, Book Sales Supercharged, and more. https://author-ecosystem.com/book-sales-supercharged https://author-ecosystems.substack.com/. The Book Sales Supercharged Series. The Book Sales Supercharged Series focuses on each retailer, format, and platform, diving deep into everything you need to know to succeed in that particular space. If you want to dig into other direct sales platforms that are useful to authors, I encourage you to continue the series. I have books on several other direct sales topics besides selling on your website. Get your book selling on Kickstarter, Book Sales Supercharged #9, co-authored with Russell Nohalty. Get your book selling at live events and signings, Book Sales Supercharged #10, co-authored with Russell Nohalty. Get your book selling with Ream, Book Sales Supercharged #19. Get your book selling direct to readers, Book Sales Supercharged #20. Co-authored with Russell Nolte. Preorder. Get Your Book Selling with Subscriptions and Memberships: Book Sales Supercharged #21. Preorder. Get Your Book Selling with Substack: Book Sales Supercharged #23. Preorder. The series is available at all retailers. We are aggressively wide over here. You can find all the information about the series, plus grab the entire set of books in a bundle directly from my website, at a significant discount to purchasing each individually at retailers. Shop.theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Your feedback, please. Our goal for writing this book is to help get more authors up to speed on how to use Facebook to build their careers. We would love to know how we did. There are two ways to leave feedback. Reviews. If you loved this book, We can always use an honest review on our public retailer pages, where other people looking for the books can see what real people think of them. Choose your retailer and leave a review here: theworldneedsyourpassion.com/reviewb7 Feedback form. If you have anything you'd like to share privately, please feel free to fill out our feedback form here: theworldneedsyourpassion.com/feedback All answers are private unless you say we can use the responses publicly in our marketing materials. Spread the word. Can you think of 2 people who could use this book in their lives? Perhaps they are struggling on retailers and want to own their customer data and have greater control over their sales month to month. Or perhaps they're considering going wide and wondering how they will make the transition. Maybe they are an old hat at website sales, and are always looking for the little tidbit or trick that can propel their sales and reach even higher. If so, we would love it if you could connect them to this book, so they too can learn the ins and outs of website sales. Thanks again for reading. Be the igniter.