Selling Books Directly To Your Readers
Independent authors certainly have a love-hate relationship with Amazon. There's no getting around the fact that Amazon is THE number one stop for readers looking for books. As hard as it can be to get your book noticed on Amazon, there are strategies to work your book up through Amazon's rankings. Having your book on Amazon comes at a cost, though. You pay a hefty commission to Amazon–essentially, Amazon makes more per book than you do for the book.
The best way to keep the lion's share of book sales is to sell books directly to readers, via your own website or in-person events. Companies such as Women in Publishing Summit sponsor Vervante, will help you put a shopping cart on your website and distribute your book to readers. It is important to note that if you have your book on Amazon, AND you are selling directly from your website, to abide by Amazon's pricing policies, namely that you cannot sell your book cheaper on your website than Amazon.
Benefits of Selling Books Directly From Your Website
- You can build relationships with your readers. When someone buys your book from Amazon, there is no way to follow up with them or add them to your mailing list. When they order from you, you can capture their email and send a personal thank you!
- Higher profit margins. You can sell your book at the same price as it is listed on Amazon, but pocket more money from sales.
- You can create your own attractive sales page, with your own branding. Whether you design your page yourself, or use an out of the box solution such as WooCommerce or Shopify, you have creative control. The best part is that Vervante works with many of the available e-commerce solutions out there.
There is more work involved in selling books directly from your own website, but in exchange, you get to keep more of your hard-earned sales!
Join us on Thursday, October 17th for a free webinar with Cindy Tyler, CEO of Vervante.
Cindy Tyler is founder and owner of Vervante, a publishing and distribution company with a 17-year track record. The Vervante team provides services for authors and infopreneurs to create and distribute books and a wide variety of products quickly and easily. Best of all, they do so without hidden fees or any hassle. Before launching Vervante, Cindy had a 17-year career with Xerox as a highly successful account manager. She then worked for a start-up company in Silicon Valley building a print on demand business before “print on demand” was much of a concept. Several corporations were early converts to the concept of printing their books on demand rather than using traditional publishing methods. The startup company went public and was then bought out by Barnes&Noble.com. Shortly thereafter the dot-com bubble burst and the company was shut down. Within a few weeks, Cindy started Vervante and she hasn’t once looked back.
Learn more about how Vervante can help you sell more books, and participate in a live Q&A with Cindy!
If you can't attend live, we'll send you the replay.
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I love this post! It’s something I’ve been focusing on for the past year. I started my company’s Shopify last August and sales aren’t where I want them to be but I love the personal connection I make with readers and the branded sales page. So going forward, I am working on getting readers to see how Amazon takes so much money from indie authors like us and that’s why they should buy directly from us. Our company tagline is even “Ink With Us” to drive that point home. And honestly, if you have someone who really wants to support your work, you’ll find that they want to buy directly from you. I had a reader ask if one of my travel guides was on Kindle and I told them no but explained why and the reader bought my travel guide anyway . So it def works. Thanks for sharing this post!
So glad you found this relevant! Educating your readers is a great strategy!