The pros and cons of selling directly to readers

In no particular order...

1. 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 :).

It's tough to overstate the importance of the payment timeline to your ability to grow your business.

Unless you've already built a very strong author brand, it's damn near impossible to sell books in meaningful quantities without advertising.

Ad costs are charged to your business or personal credit card.

If you don't pay off those ad costs every month, you'll accrue interest charges, which are usually exorbitant.

If you're waiting up to three months for Bezos to send you what's left of your royalties after he takes his slice...

You're either stuck paying your advertising expenses out of your own pocket, or you're stuck paying ridiculous interest costs.

This makes it exceptionally hard to scale a profitable business when you have to wait three months to get a return on today's advertising investment.

Selling directly to your readers fixes this problem.

2. 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.

My story above about the Zon Bot's random unhappiness with me is nothing compared to some other situations you've undoubtedly heard of.

Million-dollar-a-year accounts have been suspended without warning or recourse.

Amazon has done great things for authors, but they're not always a reliable (or even ethical) business partner.

Selling directly to your readers is a great way to reduce your exposure to their algorithmic policy decisions.

3. Surprisingly, 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," and we've seen it in 100% of cases with authors making less than $3M per year on amazon.

Cross-channel effects mean that when you advertise for your store, those ads generate 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.

It's a multiple-six-figure-per-year windfall for authors who are selling directly to their readers at scale.

It's how multi-seven-figure author Rachel Hanna increased her take-home income by roughly 40% last year. 

4. Direct Sales allows YOU AND THE ADVERTISING PLATFORMS to know exactly who your paying customers are.

This is crucially important.

When a reader buys one of your books from Amazon, Amazon doesn't share any of their information with you.

You don't know their name or email address. Sure, a small percentage of readers will see the back matter and follow the link to join your email list...

But it's a small percentage, which means it's not a reliable way to determine your advertising effectiveness.

Worse, your Meta ads account doesn't know which characteristics describe people who are likely to buy your books...

So your ads won't be served nearly as effectively. The result is that your advertising costs to earn a new customer are often double what they would otherwise be.

In an industry as competitive as ours, this inefficiency often means the difference between success and failure.

5. Direct Sales allows you to advertise to a much higher quality audience.

Just about every year, I spend thousands of dollars testing all of the available advertising channels to see if they produce book sales at a profit.

Every year for the past 7 years, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) ads have won, and by a wide margin. 

No matter what you might have heard about whether Facebook ads "work" or not, or whether or not you agree with their politics, etc, they're still the best in the business for our purposes.

Meta allows you to run advertising campaigns with various objectives. They charge you less money for less valuable objectives (such as viewing your video, clicking on an ad, signing up for your email list, or viewing a landing page).

And they charge you more money to find buyers for your books.

They do a very good job of not giving you more than you pay for. You can try advertising for lower-cost objectives, but these rarely result in book purchases.

Knowing the difference between a purchaser and a "mouth breather" (technical marketing term, lol) is how Meta pays their employees and prevents shareholder mutiny.

So if you want purchases (you do :), you need to run a campaign designed to bring in purchasers.

And in order for these "purchase campaigns" to work effectively, Meta needs feedback regarding who purchased your books and who didn't.

When you sell directly to customers, your ecommerce store (read more about which one we use and why in this article) sends immediate feedback to Meta when an ad produces a sale.

This allows you to run a profitable business.

6. Your backlist is always working for you when you sell directly to readers.

Lee Savino writes spicy romance featuring "bad boy" male characters.

She and her writing partner were painfully aware that they only made money when they released new books.

Their backlist slipped back into oblivion between launches.

But when you sell directly to your readers, you have the luxury of presenting every one of your books to your new customers.

This means that your backlist is always making money for you.

Lee used our direct sales process to earn over one million dollars last year from her backlist sales.

7. You become part of a much more successful community of authors.

Dave Chesson is the founder of Kindlepreneur. He's a highly regarded voice in the independent publishing industry, and he recently released a study involving 873 authors who sell directly to readers.

(Roughly 2/3 of them wound up being AMMO authors, including 8 of the top 10 earners).

His data showed that authors who use Direct Sales earn significantly more money than authors who don't.

It was during his research for that article that he became an AMMO customer and affiliate. His research told him that a) Direct Sales works, and b) AMMO is the go-to resource in the space.

But keep reading, because Direct Sales isn't all rainbows and unicorns. 

The list of costs and drawbacks to Direct Sales isn't nearly as long as the list of benefits.

But each of these costs requires real consideration before you decide whether to start selling directly to your readers.

1. Direct Sales involves A TON of technical work.

I've never heard anyone who sells directly to their readers say that it's easy.

I certainly don't think it's easy, and I invented the process that produces $25M per year in extra book sales.

And I'd be extremely surprised if any of the unedited AMMO author reviews and interviews even remotely suggested that direct sales is anything other than a significant investment of time and effort.

If you don't have much experience using web tools (landing page builders, email service providers, advertising dashboards, etc), you'll face a steep learning curve.

This is because, when you sell books directly to readers, you become an ecommerce entrepreneur.

You're responsible for assembling your infrastructure and keeping your store operating and updated, and you're also responsible for all of the logistics associated with printing and shipping the physical copies of your books.

(See this article for a thorough discussion on which formats to sell directly to your readers)

If you don't have experience with this, you don't yet know what you don't know.

Again, the workload is not trivial.

However, I worked 7 days per week for the past 7 months to build the most comprehensive and straightforward set of click-by-click Direct Sales instructions in Author Marketing Mastery through Optimization Version 4.

This will make things easier... but not easy. :)

2. You still have volatility and third-party risk.

Selling directly to readers means that you're no longer 100% reliant on Amazon's good behavior.

But it does not mean that you are 100% independent.

You'll always be dependent upon advertising platforms, payment processors, ecommerce store apps, landing page builders, email service providers, printers, shipping companies, and the like.

Among these, the ad platforms are the source of the most frustration. This is due to the size and complexity of the advertising market, and the exposure to broader business trends that participating in an advertising market always entails.

There are significant ups and downs, and this requires you to develop and exercise substantial strength of character. This is true of all entrepreneurial pursuits.

3. You're responsible for customer service.

When you sell via the retailers, you don't have to bother with answering customers' questions or tracking down wayward book shipments.

You don't have to handle returns, complaints, one-off requests, misunderstandings, mistakes, or random internet ire.

But you have to handle all of that when you're running a Direct Sales operation.

Of course, we've seen most of these hassles many times inside our author community, and we know how to help you set things up to minimize their frequency and impact.

But running a Direct Sales system will never be a hassle-free endeavor.

4. You have to carefully track and improve your business's performance.

There's an author in our community who was selling a LOT of paperbacks.

She was a regular on our coaching calls, so I asked her, "How is your profit margin on these paperbacks?"

"Good," she said.

"Show me," I said.

Turns out, she hadn't been accounting for the cost of printing and shipping her books!!

Yep. Ouch.

The credit card bill arrived, and she found herself in a bad spot.

It was this experience that prompted me to create one of the most important tools for authors who sell directly to their readers:

I used my nerdy background to build a spreadsheet that I call the "Ledger of Legends."

AMMO authors spend 10 to 20 minutes per day to enter their business's performance numbers, and the spreadsheet does two things:

1. It calculates your profit or loss.

2. It tells you which sales and marketing assets to iterate in order to improve your results.

The Ledger of Legends is a tremendous asset (Kate Swed calls it "by FAR the most amazing tool I've seen for running my author business")...

But it only works if you fill it out every day :).

That's plenty to consider.

I've given you a lot to think about, and now I want to give you some resources to help you consider the pros and cons in a rational and well-informed way.

I mentioned that entrepreneurship demands a lot from your character.  I view character as a set of mental and moral skills, and this article outlines the seven skills that all of our seven-figure-per-year authors possess.

I also mentioned web tools. Here's the list of the essential web tools we use in our direct-to-reader bookselling system.

In order for your Direct Sales system to be profitable, you'll almost certainly need more than one title. This article gives you our current recommendation for how many books you'll want to have before starting on your Direct Sales adventure.

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.

To discover how you can save a ton of cash on your AMMO V4 enrollment, click the big blue button: