The INDIE FILES: 5 Ways to Sell Your Books Directly

Is using direct sales the right new channel for your books?

By Kelly McClymer

Direct sales are a hot topic for indie authors right now and will only get hotter in 2024. The two main reasons are:

  1. Readers spoiled by the wide range of books available for purchase online are no longer hesitant to buy directly from indie authors who make it easy for them.
  2. Third-party businesses (some of them founded by authors) are making book sales and fulfillment easier for cautious or risk-averse indie authors to set up and run.

Direct sales channel opportunities

There are now five (or probably more) ways to sell your book directly.

  1. at a convention/conference.
  2. at a bookstore/library event.
  3. at a local outdoor/indoor marketplace.
  4. online from your webpage.
  5. online from a sophisticated storefront.

Many indie authors already participate in physical direct sales channels and benefit from the tools that have made online direct sales more successful (print book fulfillment companies like BookVault, for example). However, online direct sales channels have pitfalls: VAT and sales tax laws, shipping, and printing costs that are not worth the effort for readers averse to buying directly from authors.

Creating an online direct sales experience for readers

Many indie authors outsource the online reader experience to retailers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, and others). The book sales path looks like this:

Marketing/Ad > Author Website Book Landing Page > Retailer Sales Link > Retailer > Sale/No Sale > Pointer/Link to Author Email List.

The downside is that reader data belongs to the retailer, making it difficult to know who buys the books and how to reach them again. With direct sales, reader data is available for use, analysis, and future business planning.

The online direct book sales path looks like this:

Marketing/Ad > Author Website Book Landing Page > Direct Sales Page > Sale/No Sale > Reader Sales Data > Email Followup > Abandoned Cart Reminder > Fulfillment > Email Followup > Customer Service > Accounting.

The downside of online direct sales is that the author must do all the hard work. However, there are some “soft” online direct sales options.

“Soft” versus “hard” direct sales

“Soft” direct sales methods provide authors with valuable reader contact info but circumvent part of, or the whole, sales tax/payment collection issue by using a third-party subscription/payment system that collects and pays out sales taxes. For example:

  • Patreon collects/pays out subscription fees from patrons to a creator and collects and remits VAT/sales taxes; the creator receives a 1099 tax form at the end of the year. Patreon also fulfills digital products while leaving physical fulfillment to the creator.
  • Kickstarter collects payments and provides backer names through a communication interface limited to backers. Shipping, backer VAT, and sales tax accounting are left entirely to the Kickstarter author to manage.
  • Payhip processes payments and fulfills digital downloads then gives you the information you need to determine the tax payments charged based on locality (VAT, state/local sales tax, for example). However, you must file appropriately and remit the taxes due to each locality.
  • In some jurisdictions, Gumroad will process payments, fulfill digital downloads, and collect and pay sales tax.

A simple “hard” online direct sales channel can look like this: create an order form; take payments with a processor like Stripe or PayPal; fulfill digital orders from a site like BookFunnel, and physical book orders from an inventory in your basement, garage, or office closet; and keep an up-to-date spreadsheet of sales and tax data for your end of quarter/year tax accounting.

A more robust (and expensive) online direct sales channel may look like this: create and split test a book landing page optimized for your readers; set up an ecommerce platform like Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, or others. These platforms were developed to boost sales conversion of general product online sales, and now authors are making them work for books. These are sophisticated sales tools and require more upfront investment in time and money. Many authors wait to set these up until after they’ve built up a simple direct sales process that helps them understand what/when/why readers buy their books.

Why do all this when the retailers will do it for you? Remember:

  1. You have more control of price, reader data, and sales data.
  2. You don’t have to pay retailers 35–40% of your revenue.
  3. You don’t have to wait weeks (or months) to get paid.

Ok. Those who prefer to let the retailers do this work don’t need to read on. But for those of you who are ready to invest the time and money to set up an online direct sales channel, either simple or robust, there’s more to understand.

Direct sales bring risks. Authors can lose time and money in several ways:

  1. by creating landing pages that don’t do a good job selling the book.
  2. by making the checkout process difficult (a buyer wants clarity with as few clicks for their purchase as safely as possible).
  3. by paying for more sophisticated tools that have a steep learning curve.
  4. by running ads or sales pages that don’t convince readers to buy the book.
  5. by failing to connect all the pieces of the direct sales machine—there is a reason why Amazon confirms every point of your purchase (and spends a lot of time optimizing sales pages) all the way through the shopping cart and confirms what and when you’re getting it.
  6. by failing to know and follow the tax laws that govern your sales (and your buyers’ purchases).

Conclusion

The bad news is that direct sales are still a lot of work and upfront risk, even though they offer a direct line to your readers when they work. The good news is that third-party companies are doing what they can to make it easier for authors. For example, TaxJar integrates with your sales platform to keep track of VAT and sales tax. BookFunnel, which many authors use to deliver free or promotional copies of their manuscripts, now offers integrations with storefronts as simple as Gumroad and Payhip or as sophisticated as Shopify or WooCommerce. There’s a great article about the process here: Deliver Ebook and Audiobook Sales | BookFunnel Author Knowledge Base.

An author who wants to experiment with expanding out from an author table at an event may choose to set up a Patreon or a simple direct sales channel online and know that anything that doesn’t sell at their live event can be sold through their online channel. An author who is willing to invest upfront in an online sales experience for their readers can have a sophisticated direct sales machine up and running quickly (time to profitability is another story).

Kelly McClymerUSA Today bestselling author Kelly McClymer has been an indie author since 2009 and loves exploring the ways she can connect directly to her readers…when she isn’t busy hiding in her well-decorated cave, communing with her storytelling muse.