MBA1520 Q&A Wednesdays: I Want To Sell My Books. Do I need a Website?

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It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Promote perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O welcome to the 100 arm Quick Easy wins for your business on the Daily with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask just email me over@omar100mba.net Today's question is from Ferris and Ferris asks, I want to sell my books online. Do I need a website? Ferriss writes in and says hey Omar, love the show. I'm a fiction writer and I want to sell my ebooks online but want to find out if I actually need to build my own website or can I just sell them directly on Amazon? Would really appreciate your insights. I'll be looking out for your answer on Q and A Wednesday. Thanks Farris. Good question Farris. A lot of people have this question not only just for books but but for anything that Amazon will offer any kind of product. Amazon makes it super easy for authors to write their books and self publish them on Amazon now regardless if you choose to sell them on Amazon or on your own website. I believe you should have your own website so you can control the narrative, you can control your brand. I'll talk about what that means. Many authors will be very successful on Amazon, but they still build their own website to be able to drive traffic to Amazon and make sales. I'll get into why this is important as well as what's the easiest way for you to build your website to sell your ebooks. We got a lot to cover, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Farris is a fiction writer. He writes his own books. He wants to make them into ebooks and sell them online. He's not sure if he needs to even have a website if he's just going to sell them on Amazon. I want to first just talk about selling your ebooks. Amazon's definitely a big option. There's an option a lot of people go with because you can self publish with them and they will will fulfill even physical books. So if you want to sell your books on Amazon as physical books, they'll self publish it for you, print the books and send them out to your customers. Now, ebooks are totally different. So obviously you're selling like a Kindle version. You can also sell that on Amazon. And they're also going to take a fee, but not as high because obviously this is a soft product. There are a lot of options when it comes to self publishing, especially if you're publishing a physical book like a paperback or a hardcover. But many people go the Amazon route because it's very streamlined and it's quite. Now, when it comes to ebooks, you could sell your own ebooks on your own website and save the cut that you're gonna give Amazon by selling it on Amazon. Now, obviously the advantage of Amazon, even with ebooks, is that you're going to get exposure and you're in that marketplace. So what do you do? Well, my recommendation is if you're gonna sell physical books and you need them to be printed, Amazon's a good option. I would sell on Amazon also the Kindle version, but on your website you can direct them to Amazon for the physical copy. And for the ebook, you can pocket that money and sell it right on your website. It's no different in terms what the customer gets if you sell it electronically for your customers right on your website or via Amazon. So you might as well save that fee that Amazon's gonna take from you. Now, there's some really easy options to sell. Digital downloads. One of the ones I really recommend is is podia, podia.com mba and get a free trial over there for 14 days. And you can literally just, you know, charge for your book. They can download the book, nice and simple. They even allow you to create your website, your pages, and sell that right there. You can promote your brand, you can promote your business. Now, what's great about using something like Podia to sell your book is that you have your own space on the Internet. You have your own website where you can really start to grow your business and grow your audience and grow your brand. You can start building articles, you can start building pages about pages. People can book you for speeches, people can learn more about you and the stories you write and are not just left with what's on the Amazon page, the description of the book. They can learn more. You can put videos up there. You can engage with your audience. So I highly recommend you do this. You have a separate website. You can use a platform like Podia to sell your product as well. And this makes it super simple for you to be able to control the narrative, control what people think of you. And if you don't give them the information, if you don't give them the content, they're only gonna be left with what they have on Amazon, which will also include, you know, the reviews on Amazon. This doesn't have to be a fancy schmancy website. It could start out with just one page just to get the ball rolling, and you could basically put it together in a weekend. And then you can link to your physical books that you sell on Amazon straight from your website. And you can also sell your ebooks from right there on your website or if you choose to, you can also, you know, say that there's a Kindle version on Amazon as well. If you're an author, you need to build an audience of readers, people that are interested in you, and it's gonna take you a whole lot longer if you just hope that people read your books and recommend them to other people. You want to be able to reach out to people with some really good content on your website. And eventually you can start blogging, you can start writing articles, you can start shooting videos like I mentioned, and this will be found on a Google search and people can learn more what you write books about. You can teach people about the next book you're about to release. You can walk them through that process. You can show them behind the curtain and really get your audience involved and excited about your books.

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So in today's Q and A Wednesday, Ferris was asking, hey, I want to sell my fiction books. Do I need a website or can I just sell them straight on Amazon? I recommend having a website having a presence online. You can still sell it on Amazon and you can actually sell them on the book on your website before they go to Amazon and you can control that path and they can go straight to Amazon off your website via a link. You can also sell your ebooks if you want yourself if they're ebooks. And you can use a platform like Podia to do both your web presence, your website, as well as your ebook sales. Now, one of the things a lot of great authors do is they sell packages with their books or they sell other products that your audience would be interested in on their website. So say, for example, you write fiction books, they're mysteries. Maybe you're really good at the whodunit type of genre and you want to sell maybe an animated series. I know there's a lot of authors that do this where they basically create a mini series, maybe a 10 parter with 10 different stories and and it's a video series and they just sell it as a package and it's just an animated series. They get an animator to come and make some animations and they do a voiceover. The author actually does a voiceover over the animations and then they sell this over and over. And you can do this Podia, you can sell access to these series. And a lot of readers love this because they are wondering, hey, what does Dr. Smith look like? The one from the novels I love. And you can put a face to the name with the animation and then the voiceovers and the intrigue and the music. A lot of different products can be sold off your website because your readers love your books. And that way you can expand your revenue and you can then continue to have that funding to continue to write great books. That's what's awesome about business. When you make more sales, when you make more revenue, it allows you to have a little bit more freedom and a little bit more creativity to make great books. Whereas to make great products or great art. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. If you love it, you hear hit subscribe right now so you don't miss a beat. By hitting subscribe, you get access to all our next episodes. Also, when you hit subscribe, you get access to over 1500 business lessons in our archives. So do that right now on whatever podcast app you like to use, whether it's Spotify or Apple podcasts or Stitcher Radio or on them all. Don't forget, if you have a question you want to ask, email me over at omar00mba.net and I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday, just like we did before Ferris today. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I'm a big believer that we're still in the early days of the Internet and a lot of people don't really value it as much as they will in the future. You should definitely have your business, your name registered as a domain name, and have a website. It's going to feel like your home in the future. Just like you feel you have to have a residence and an address where you live, the Internet is going to have a real estate rush as well. So grab your URL, register your website and have that. Even if you're not going to build upon it now. That way you have that name, it's going to be worth a whole lot more to you in the future. Thank you so much for listening in today. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication, and you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.