I don’t think of Substack as a good place to say, “I’m an author! Buy my books!” And yet it was because of Substack that I heard enough about selling directly to start my brain churning in that direction. And I’ve done it! My website is now ready for readers in the U.S. to buy any of the ebooks I’ve published independently.
It’s been a journey. And it ain’t over.
Reading Substack posts and calling in to special events offered by folks like Russell Nohelty and Ella Barnard, and exploring Facebook groups dedicated to authors who’ve taken this plunge, I realized something I’d never focused on before: When Amazon sells one of my books, they know who bought it. I don’t. This realization made me feel keenly a lack of connection to my readers. And I already knew that my financial take on books sold by any retailer was pennies on the dollar.
It was time for a re-think.
These retailers were not stealing from me. They were providing services: product listing, including various formats; fulfilment and distribution; payment collection and payout; limited customer support. Even so, they would not have had the product—my books—if I hadn’t spent a lot of time learning the craft of writing, writing the books, spending money on formatting and cover design, spending money on website hosting, and spending more money on whatever advertising I did. It seemed to me that I was getting the dirty end of the stick.
I am no technologist. I know enough about technology to be dangerous, not enough to be truly useful. But, I figured, as long as I’m a danger only to myself, why not try this? So I did.
I spent quite a bit of time investigating the options, and despite the high cost I decided on Shopify for web hosting and financial management. Bookfunnel was the obvious choice for ebook fulfillment, and I knew I was not ready (and probably never will be) for warehousing and shipping printed books. I’ll have to rely on retailers for that. I set aside for a later date the puzzle of which email delivery platform I’d use; I could handle only so much change, so much technology at once.
A short trip through Shopify convinced me that I would need help, so I hired a developer. (If you want to know who that was, email me and I’ll share her contact info, with a strong recommendation.) But I wanted to be able to manage the site myself, so even with her help I had a steep learning curve.
Aside from learning the ins and outs of Shopify, the hardest parts were getting my domain registration moved (kept getting a message that I could make the change on January 20, 1970!!!) and setting up the interface with Bookfunnel, which actually does its best to make things easy. If I weren’t such a bushwhacker (as in “When all else fails, read the directions”) when it comes to so many things in life, perhaps it would have been less stressful.
And I thought learning how to self-publish was a challenge.
Well… okay. It was.
Am I ready to declare success? As with any project, one must know what success would look like in order to achieve it. I would say I have reached the first level of success, which means that the site is ready for direct sales. It’s been a “soft launch,” and this post is the only announcement I’ve made so far. But it’s ready! And I think I know how to manage what’s there.
Next steps: Decide on an email delivery platform (Klaviyo is high on the list), set up an advertising budget, and generate some advertising.
As Russell Brand once said, “If someone’s advertising something, it’s not something you need.” Gotta get that man’s voice out of my head.
A real measure of success will be when I launch my next novel (sometime this summer, I hope), and I can use all my new technology to put together a campaign that reaches beyond my current small, loyal readership.
Will I recover my financial outlay from investing in this new technology? Probably never. But I will have made it possible to connect more directly with my readers. To me, that will be success.
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I’m an inveterate observer of human nature, writing novels about all kinds of people, some of whom happen to be gay or transgender or bisexual or intersex—people whose destinies are not determined solely by their sexual orientation or gender identity. Check out my work on my website.