Which book formats are best for Direct Sales?
"Direct Sales" just means your customers purchase from a store that you own.
You can sell directly to your readers while you're also selling through Amazon, B&N, Kobo, etc.
In the AMMO community, we've been selling directly to our readers since 2017, and our proprietary direct-to-reader bookselling system is responsible for $25M per year in additional book royalties for our authors.
When you "sell direct," proceeds of your customers' purchases go directly to your bank account, usually by the next business day.
(Which is a lot sooner than the three months it can take for Bezos to pay you :).
Selling directly to readers is a great way to take control of your career.
It gives you more independence in a world where baffling Amazon policy decisions and account suspensions happen all the time.
And selling directly to readers is also the most reliable way we've discovered to increase your retailer sales and royalties.
It's due to an age-old marketing phenomenon called "cross-channel effects."
What it means is that advertising for your store generates sales and profit through your store (obviously that's the main point)...
And it also increases the number of books you sell on Amazon, Kobo, B&N, and all of the other places out there where you might be selling your books.
Even though your ads don't even mention the retailer sites.
But be aware: selling directly to readers is a lot of work, even if you're following our step-by-step process to set up and optimize your direct-to-reader book sales system.
(In that regard, it's just like everything worthwhile that I've ever done in my life, LOL).
And one of the first questions you'll need answered in order to get started is this one:
This isn't a trivial question, because each format you sell directly to your readers comes with its own pros and cons.
(In case you haven't seen it yet, this article walks you through the six components of our AMMO Direct Sales System, and describes how Ben and Patty Wallace used the process to sell $212K worth of their books in their first six months as AMMO authors.)
Selling directly to readers isn't a walk in the park, so you don't want to sign up for more ongoing effort than necessary.
But you definitely need to offer the formats that customers want most.
So let's cover some considerations for each, then I'll give you our conclusions at the end.
When ebooks and e-readers first came out, I did what I normally do:
I resisted change.
(Sorry. Still human after all these years :)
Then I realized that I could carry as many books as I wanted around with me on all of my business trips.
And I could instantly see the definitions of the (many) words I evidently still hadn't learned.
"Goodbye forever, dead trees," I thought. "In the next 15 minutes, everyone on Earth will be reading ebooks."
Which did not turn out to be an accurate prediction.
But... 30% to 36% of US readers have read at least one ebook in the last year. (source: wordsrated.com)
And annual ebook sales regularly top $25,000,000,000 ($25 freaking billion dollars), which is roughly 19.5% of the total publishing industry revenue (source: statista).
Many ebook fans are diehard ebook fans for life.
If we ever want to reach them, we need to sell ebooks.
Fortunately, selling ebooks directly to readers turns out to be a relatively simple process, and we cover all the ins and outs of selling ebooks efficiently and profitably in the Direct Sales for Authors module inside of AMMO V4.
So we need to sell ebooks.
But should we ONLY sell ebooks?
Consider:
Depending on whose math you trust...
Physical books comprise 68% to 80% of all annual book sales.
And many of our AMMO authors ONLY become profitable when they offer paperbacks (and often hardcovers).
So it's a no-brainer: you should definitely sell physical copies directly to your readers.
But running a web store that actually sells and delivers physical copies directly to your readers... that's not really a no-brainer.
It's hard.
You have to do math in order to figure out how much to charge for your books.
Otherwise you can quickly lose your shirt.
(But I built smart tools for you inside of AMMO V4 that do all of the math for you, so you'll have a crystal-clear understanding of your cash flows with each sale you make).
And while the printing, packaging, and shipping approaches that our authors take depend mainly on the page count of their books...
Which is a function of their manuscript's word count and the book format and font size they choose...
I give you guidelines for how to approach this set of decisions inside of AMMO V4.
Which leaves us with the newest addition to the publishing scene:
Many die-hard book fans are also very busy people.
They spend endless hours commuting to work, traveling on business, and chauffeuring kids around town.
Many are voracious audiobook listeners.
And audiobooks have a tremendous operational advantage over the other two formats:
Audiobooks sell for double, triple, and sometimes quadruple the price of ebooks.
And their fulfillment costs are roughly zero.
So audiobooks usually generate significantly more profit per sale than any other format.
And the audiobook market share continues to increase. It's now up to 12% of the publishing industry's annual revenue, according to Statista.
And as with ebooks and paperbacks, I'll walk you through setup, sales, and fulfillment of your audiobooks inside of your direct-to-reader sales system in AMMO V4.
Based the on the hundreds of authors' Shopify store dashboards and Meta ad accounts I've seen over the past year or two (we offer live, personalized coaching for life when you pay in full for your AMMO V4 membership), and based on what I'm seeing in my own testing, here's my recommendation:
At a minimum, sell paperbacks and ebooks directly to readers.
If you have the rights to your audiobooks, sell them directly to readers as well.
And here's a "pro tip" in three parts:
1. Create ads that feature images and descriptions of your paperback books, and point those ads to a dedicated paperback sales page.
2. Create ads that feature images and descriptions of your ebooks, and point those ads to a dedicated ebook sales page.
3. Create ads that feature images and descriptions of your audiobooks, and point those ads to a dedicated audiobook sales page.
And as always, we cover all of this in step-by-step and click-by-click detail inside of the Direct Sales for Authors module, contained inside AMMO V4.
If you'd like a more detailed walkthrough of our direct sales process, check out this brief article.
If you'd like more information on the market testing process that routinely cuts advertising costs in half, check out this article on "Click Testing."
Click here to watch unedited, unabridged author interviews to help you decide of AMMO is a good fit for you.
