How to Sell Products the Easy Way

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Would you like to sell products the easy way? I talk to a lot of authors who would like to diversify their income by selling products online, but it feels too overwhelming. You have to think about inventory and shipping and customer service and sales tax. You have to figure out the sales tax stuff for when you file taxes every year. I know what that feels like. I recently went through the process for my book Broken Crayons Still Color. I wanted to have some products that I could sell along with my book. I have mugs, T shirts, necklaces. I have so many different types of products than I've ever created before. And I researched and I learned a process using a print on demand company. A print on demand company is amazing because it will take the orders, it will handle customer service. They will deal with the inventory, the shipping, the returns, the sales tax. Most of them will. There's a couple that won't. But if they're taking the money and they're dealing with all of that, then they take care of all of that. And so you can pretty much set it and forget it. You can set it into your automated system, which I call your author automation system. And we're going to be starting a new 90 day accountability group inside Author Audience Academy, all about the Author Automation System January 1st. Now, in that 90 day accountability group, you can also use the accountability to write your next book, to publish your next book, whatever you want to use. But this is part of the system is setting up an automated system. Set it and forget it and products is one step of the process. I'm so excited to share with you that I've created a series on Skillshare and Skillshare. I'm in love. I've recently gotten into art and so I signed up just to take all their art classes. And I don't know, I just decided I want to teach on skillshare as well. It's just such a fun, fun platform. And so I decided to create a series on how to create your own hand drawn coloring page designs. That's the first class. The second class just went live yesterday all about digitizing and vectorizing your designs. I had to learn a lot on that. And then my third class in the series is going to be all about how to sell that design on mugs and T shirts and everything with a print on demand company. The favorite company that I have chosen and I'm actually working on that class today. But you can actually take all of these classes for just 99 cents. You can sign up for Skillshare for three months for 99 cents. So you get all of my classes plus you get access to, I think it's thousands of other classes I personally have already taken, I think over a hundred.

I love it. But anyways, you can sign up@shellyhits.com Skillshare and get a hold of the new trainings that I've created there for you and let me know what you think. Leave a comment in the discussion, post your projects in the project area and I'm there to interact and answer your questions. So I'm excited about just teaching on a new platform. I'm excited about helping you diversify your income without the stress of taxes, without the stress of shipping and inventory, without the stress of customer service and just to be able to add value and add something really fun. Like the print demand company that I found actually does magic mugs, which they're the only company I found that does that. So that is so exciting and I'm just really excited, excited to share more of this training with you. If you're here on the replay, give me a reaction, let me know you're here in the comments. And is this something that you want to learn about? If so, I really encourage you to check out my Skillshare classes. Shellyhits.com Skillshare I just recorded all the talking head videos for my third class on skillshare. I decided, you know, I'm just going to hop on here and say hello and and see how you're doing and then I'm going to get back to the grind and try to finish out the class with the rest of the screen share tutorials. I don't have them. I just had them in here for props that I can show you. But if you go to my store, brokencransbook.com store you can see what I've created. I have T shirts and mugs that have my personal design on them or, or if you look at the introduction videos on the Skillshare classes, you'll see the designs I've created. I am so just excited to share the training with you all about not only how to create your own hand drawn designs, you can use those as coloring pages, as designs for many different things, but also how to digitize and vectorize those. In my training I share with you a free software you can use to vectorize your images and that was something that really took me a while to figure out the process, and then this third class is all about how to sell your designs on products, and pretty much the entire process can be automated once you set it up. So check out my classes@shellyhits.com Skillshare and I will see you next time. Gonna head off. Thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelly's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.