This month we’ve been discussing the Direct Sales model of book selling, as many authors look at alternatives to the downsides that come with using the big online retailers. As we’ve mentioned, selling direct isn’t for everyone, but there is a lot of potential for those that can make it work and are willing to put in the effort at getting it all running.

Ginger has been our guide throughout this journey, and in today’s blog he is wrapping up this series by sharing and analyzing the results he’s seen after his first month of experimentation. Not only does he provide some raw numbers, but he also notes a surprising result and discusses whether or not he is going to continue forward with the Direct Sales model in the future.  

---

As this is the final installment of a four-part series, I would urge you to start at the beginning (if you haven’t already done so). Part One is where I discuss the Direct Sales model in general, Part Two gives you some of my personal reasons for wanting to give this a try along with some of my historical sales numbers for comparison, and then in Part Three I went over what it takes to put it all together.

Today, I’ll be going through the results, and how it all turned out.

It took me nearly a month to set up my direct sales “funnel.” It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my self-publishing career – calling more on the skills I’d learned working for New York advertising agencies than any I’d developed in my career as a writer. Eventually, though, I was in a position to switch it on and see if all the hard work paid off.

I set my initial budget at $50 a day, which is far more than most self-published authors would be comfortable spending on a brand new advertising campaign. However, I felt confident in doing this because I knew that if I made any sales, I’d be receiving the money within a few days, instead of having to wait for 60-days-after-months-end. I gave myself a buffer, keeping $350 in my account to cover a full week of advertising, and then started the most difficult part of this process.

Waiting.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait long.

Direct Sales Results

The first day I started running my direct sales advertising, I got my first order. In fact, I got four orders that first day – more than enough to cover my advertising budget and bring in nearly double that amount in profit. Here’s what that looked like:

Order	Sales	Price	Royalties
#1	6 Books	$19.99	$19.11
#2	8 Books	$25.98	$24.93
#3	6 Books	$19.99	$19.11
#4	8 Books	$25.98	$24.93
		NET SALES:	$88.08
Facebook Advertising		COSTS:	$50.00
		GROSS SALES:	$38.08

As you can imagine, I was beyond excited. After riding the emotional roller coaster of Amazon self-publishing for years, I finally thought I might be back in the saddle and ready to bring my writing career back to its former heights.

That was until the day after, of course – during which I kept checking my phone every few minutes, but didn’t see any new sales coming in. Eventually, I received a single order for a bundle of books – barely covering half my advertising budget for the day.

Order	Sales	Price	Royalties
#1	8 Books	$25.98	$24.93
		NET SALES:	$24.93
Facebook Advertising		COSTS:	$50.00
		GROSS SALES:	-$25.07

Elation turned to despondency. Despite the fact that I was overall still in the black, I began to despair – thinking that this whole project was a waste of time, and my plans to dominate self-publishing through direct sales were a fool’s errand.

But what is a fool other than somebody who perseveres in the face of adversity?

I’d given myself a week of advertising budget to burn through, so I decided to ride out the entire seven days and just see what happened. The next day, as if to torment me, I received two sales of book bundles that almost exactly covered the cost of my advertising for the day.

Order	Sales	Price	Royalties
#1	8 Books	$25.98	$24.93
#2	8 Books	$25.98	$24.93
		NET SALES:	$49.86
Facebook Advertising		COSTS:	$50.00
		GROSS SALES:	-$0.14

And that’s how things continued. Each day I’d wake up and listen for the app on my phone to make a little “cha-ching” noise to confirm that I’d just made a sale. It was so much more anxiety-inducing than selling my books on Amazon – but also pretty exciting. My kids noticed that my eyes would light up every time my phone went “cha-ching” and started celebrating every time I sold some books.

I mentioned above that the hardest part of the process was waiting, and that remained true. I’d set up my ads, my landing page, and my checkout – so all I could do was wait for Facebook to bring customers to me. Whether or not they decided to buy my books was the deciding factor.

On my best day, I received seven orders for book bundles – making nearly four times what I’d spent in advertising for the day. On my worst days, I got just a single order – barely covering half what I’d spent. However, there wasn’t a single day that didn’t see at least one sale come in, and over the course of the month a pattern clearly began to emerge.

I was breaking even.

Before my $350 buffer ran out, I received payment for the books I’d sold – and that allowed me to keep on advertising. The good days and the bad days balanced each other out, until I found myself making a slight profit over the course of each week. It was just enough profit to pay for my email services, website hosting, and all the other components of my direct sales funnel – plus a couple of six-packs of Stella Artois to bolster my courage to keep on going.

In speaking with other authors who’d turned to direct sales, I discovered that I was actually doing a lot better than most people. It’s practically unheard of to make a profit in your first month of advertising. Normally, you have to tweak different parts of your funnel to dial in the process – and if I ever wanted to make some real profit, that was definitely a project I was going to have to invest some time and effort into.

However, direct sales worked. In my first month of advertising, I spent $1,362.77 on Facebook advertising $352 on website hosting and other services – yet brought in a total of $1,922.46 in sales. That covered all my expenses and provided $207.69 in pure profit.

So, that’s not a lot. The lakeside cabin in upstate New York would have to wait for a while. However, it did show that the direct sales model had promise – and I had potential to improve my funnel and increase that profit margin.

This month, I’ve continued advertising. The only difference? My daily budget is now $100 instead of $50. Thanks to continued sales of my books, I’m currently able to sustain this level of advertising without having to reach into my own pockets – but I’m not going to lie. Things get pretty close to the wire depending on how good each day turns out.

Lessons I’ve Learned

Here are the biggest lessons I’ve learned from running direct sales for a month:

It’s not easy.

You’re going to have to build landing pages, configure delivery systems, plug in a checkout system, and automate email flows if you want your funnel to work correctly. This is beyond the comfort zone of many self-published authors, so be aware of that before you start. You can certainly hire experts to build this funnel for you, but that involves a lot of initial expense with no promise of an immediate return on that investment. You have been warned!

Your books have to be good – and you have to have a lot of them!

Back when I sold radio advertising, one customer warned me: “It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on advertising. If somebody doesn’t want to buy your product, they won’t.” That’s the same in self-publishing, whether you do it on Amazon, or sell directly to your readers. You have to have books with great covers, killer blurbs, and compelling stories to make this profitable – and the authors with bigger back-catalogs normally make a lot more money. I embarked on this adventure knowing that I was selling good books. I had 12 novels in my series, and I’d already sold 70,000 copies of them through Amazon, so I was pretty confident I could make direct sales profitable. However, if your books aren’t ready for prime-time, it doesn’t matter what sales system you use. You’re going to lose money. Only embark on direct sales when you know that you’re selling books people want to buy.

You’re probably going to lose money at first.

Many other authors have told me that my experience with direct sales is pretty exceptional. Most authors lose money when they start trying to sell their books directly, and don’t become profitable until they’ve tweaked their “sales funnel” a number of times.

But you’re not “losing” money. You’re spending it.

If your ads initially run in the red, however, don’t despair. Even money you “lose” gives you a return on investment, as long as your advertising is driving traffic to your landing pages. The advantage direct sales provides is real-time feedback on which part of the sales funnel trips potential customers up. Do they scroll down to your sales button? Do they check out your sample chapter? This information allows you to tweak your sales funnel and hopefully turn a loss into a sustainable profit. Selling books from Amazon doesn’t give you this level of information, even if you use attribution tags, so you’ll be able to reach profitability much faster selling directly.

More Results and Final Thoughts

Right now, I’m still excited about the potential of direct sales to readers. I’ve seen some initial success, and I intend to keep building on it. I think this is the right path back to consistently making $10,000+ a month in book sales, and I’m working hard to get there.

It wouldn’t have been possible if I’d stuck things out with Amazon. The lack of information I got from my advertising makes it a real struggle to know if I was making a profit or not, and having to wait 60 days for my royalties made the level of advertising I wanted to do financially unsustainable. 

But I felt horrible about that. One of my concerns about moving to direct sales was what effect it would have on my books on Amazon. After all, I’d removed them from Kindle Unlimited, and stopped all advertising that sent readers directly to my product pages. I thought my sales on Amazon would tank as a result, and initially that’s what seemed to happen.

The month prior to starting my ads, which I spent building my direct sales funnel, ended up being my worst month of the year in terms of book sales. This made sense, since all my books were out of KU by then, and I wasn’t doing any advertising at all.

However, something really surprising happened the month after: My sales on Amazon actually picked up!

Weirdly enough, after I started advertising my direct sales funnel, I started to sell more books on Amazon!

In fact, the month I spent doing direct sales has ended up being my best month in book sales on Amazon this year, even without my books being in Kindle Unlimited! More so than that – the trend seems to be continuing. Now I’m advertising at $100 a day, I’m seeing a massive increase in sales on Amazon as well.

That doesn’t make much sense to me, but I’m not complaining about it. In fact, it reassures me that advertising in general does work, even if you can’t track a direct link between where your ads show up, and who eventually buys your books. People are seeing my novels on Facebook, and then finding them on Amazon without me even having to provide them with a link.

That’s been my biggest surprise from experimenting with direct book sales – but I’m sure there will be many more along the way. I promise to check back in and let you know what they are as I continue this new chapter in my self-publishing story.

Have you experimented with direct sales to readers? What have your experiences been like? I’d love to hear your perspective. Don’t be shy about letting me know in the comment section below.

Share this blog