Hello Everyone,

We’re back with the final segment in our four part online bookstore series. In this installment, we talk about how to avoid the instant gratification trap selling books from your web site presents, and how to create a smart strategy that will serve you long-term instead.

Lesson 4: Smart Strategy Goes Beyond the Latte Fund

The marketing expert I mentioned in my first post claims that selling books from your own site will garner you more money, more contacts, and better market positioning. But is that really the case?

Let’s talk about this, and the bottom line issue, which, with book sales, is money:

1.) Time is money. How much of your time will you invest in setting up a credit card processing account, handling bounced checks, keeping your books stocked, buying or locating boxes for shipping, printing out or purchasing postage, tracking down wrong zip codes or mistyped addresses, transporting packages to the post office, and dealing with undeliverable mail? How much is all that time worth? Can you put a price on it? Or a price on hiring an assistant to do it for you?

2.) Money is money. Let’s say that once you get your PayPal code, or e-commerce cart set up, and all your items listed, you receive two book orders in a week. You’re one of the few authors whose contract allows you to purchase your books from your publisher and re-sell them on your site. You buy your books at a discount rate of $6 and you’re selling them (in order to be competitive with ‘evil’ online monoliths like Amazon and Christianbook) at $12/book. You’ve just made a whopping $12 in profit. Congratulations!

But wait.

What about the credit card or PayPal processing fees? Gotta deduct those. And the shipping and handling charges you paid the publisher to get those books in the first place? You have to deduct that from your profit. too. You also have to pay postage to ship these books to the customer. And set aside the sales tax for your state (you have been tracking that, haven’t you?) and sometimes your city, as well.

And you’ve just spent an hour fulfilling the orders, when you could have been writing. That’s one hour less you have to meet that big deadline. Was selling those two books yourself worth it?

3.) Sales Numbers are money. The books you purchase at a discount from your publisher do not count towards your sales numbers. Your re-sale of these books do not count towards your sales numbers. Every book you sell from your own site is one less book sale your agent can count when pitching your next project (if you’ve ever been turned down by a publisher for a new project because your last book sale numbers weren’t high enough, you know what this means.) And it’s one less book sale you can count toward your arrival at the blissful otherworld known as book-royalty-land.

4.) Word-of-Mouth is money. The more books you sell on Amazon or Christianbook or Barnes and Noble, the more credence these sites give your book. Which means they will display your book more frequently, and raise your book’s position in search results, which increases your book’s exposure. Every book you sell yourself subtracts from this. What is that subtraction going to cost you in the long term?

Amazon sends out New Product e-mails to past customers. I’ve received many of these. In these e-mails they tell me about new titles that might interest me based on my past purchasing history. I can’t count the number of times Amazon has suggested a new title or author to me in this way. Titles and authors I would not have known about otherwise. Free word of mouth marketing from the biggest bookseller in the universe. What’s that worth?

5.) More buyers are money. Steve Weber, of Plug Your Book, says,

“Many, perhaps most, online book buyers prefer purchasing at Amazon. So if they’re going to go there anyway, why not post an affiliate link so you can earn an additional 6 percent from the sale?”

I can’t help but agree. Amazon received 56 million visitors last month. More people know about, and are comfortable with Amazon purchases than with purchases made from an author site.  Christianbook received over 2 million visitors last month.  These are visitors looking specifically for Christian books.  An extremely specific target audience.

Amazon also offers the Customers Who Bought This Also Bought… feature to its visitors. This feature indexes your book’s key content, compares it to other books, and suggests it as an option to readers who wouldn’t know of it otherwise. These suggestions are offered to all of their 56 million visitors per month. How many of those 56 million people would know to look for your online store?

And Amazon gives authors a free Amazon Connect blog, right on the site. They promote this blog on every one of your book pages, and on the Amazon start pages of every person who’s purchased one of your books in the past. Direct marketing to your book buyers. And you didn’t even have to get them to sign up for your mailing list. To me, this is invaluable.

Click here to read our concluding remarks about the reasons selling books from your web site could work against you, and a great alternative to market your books.

And, in the meantime, remember:

Sell your work…not your soul

Posted on December 7th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: Web Wisdom