Direct sales are gaining traction among self-published authors, offering not only higher profits but also faster access to your well-earned revenue. Yet questions still remain with regards to balancing the advantages of direct sales with the invaluable perks of driving traffic to Amazon—like boosted rankings, increased reviews, and organic visibility. Especially if this means having to split your ad budget to cover both cases. Is it worth it?

That’s why today, Ginger is examining ways in which we can balance these two competing strategies. What if you could run ads that effectively drive traffic to both your direct sales site and your storefront listing without sabotaging one for the other? It’s a tactic with the potential to deliver the best of both worlds—and one that he’s personally tested. So whether you’re already selling direct or just considering it, these strategies will help you maximize every marketing dollar you spend.

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Recently, I’ve been writing a lot of posts about Direct Sales – the concept of selling your books directly to readers, instead of first sending them to third-party book-selling platforms like Amazon.

There are significant advantages to doing so, especially in terms of cash flow and how much control you have over your “sales funnel.” However, it’s not a perfect solution for everybody – and even if you can make a profit selling your books directly, it comes at the sacrifice of scoring reviews, rank, and other benefits from marketing your books on Amazon.

So what is the most effective use of your ad budget if you run direct sales? And should you be spending your money marketing exclusively on one platform? Or can you split the difference and still drive readers to Amazon?

All excellent questions – and a topic I’ll jump into with this week’s blog post.

I have a question!

After my recent article on how a higher FB ad budget can lead to better metrics, reader Lauren emailed us with an excellent question that inspired this week’s article:

Should I be doing secondary ads that direct to my books on Shopify in addition to Amazon? Or just ads that focus on one store and not both?

Great question, Lauren!

If you’re an author who’s decided to experiment with direct sales, you’ve already had some pretty difficult decisions to make. For me, the toughest one was to take all my books out of Kindle Unlimited since I couldn’t sell them directly while enrolled in the Amazon-exclusive program.

But while my books might not be enrolled in KU any longer, they’re still available for sale on Amazon – along with any other book retailers I chose to sell them on, since I’m no longer required to be exclusive to Amazon.

And the remarkable thing is that I still get sales of them! In fact, since stopping my Facebook ads that directed to my books on Amazon, I’ve still continued to sell copies of them there. In fact, my biggest months for direct sales have coincidentally been some of my biggest months for book sales on Amazon as well.

I think this is largely due to the “brand awareness” my direct sales ads have created among the audiences I advertise to. While my ads directed anybody who clicked on them through to my own website, the creative and copy promoted my books more generally – providing a familiarity with my pen name and my book series that helps steer many potential readers to my books whenever they visited Amazon, even if they’d never actually clicked on any of my ads when they’d seen them in my feed.

This leads to the question of whether or not I should leverage this brand familiarity any further. Could I run ads for my books on Amazon as well as my direct sales ads? Would that amplify the impact of my marketing? Or cannibalize potential direct sales?

Here are my thoughts:

Money Flows Where Attention Goes

Direct Sales seems like it’s the big, new trend in self-publishing, and if Amazon is upset about that, they have nobody to blame but themselves. 

What pushed me to abandon Amazon exclusivity and create my own direct “sales funnel” was the fact that direct sales allowed me to leverage my ad budget much more effectively – giving me access to the money I generated through book sales within hours or days, instead of having to wait 60-days-after-months-end on Amazon. If Amazon ever wanted to stop losing authors to direct sales, they really need to address that challenging payout schedule.

But of course, the sales I make from my own website are completely outside of the Amazon infrastructure and that’s not necessarily an ideal scenario. It doesn’t matter how many books I sell directly – none of these sales impact the sales rank of my book on Amazon, help me score new reviews there, or plant my book series and pen name deeper into Amazon’s algorithm – all well-established ways to help promote your book on that platform. It’s like you have to sacrifice one to benefit from the other, and it would be awesome if there was a way to do both.

…and perhaps there is! 

After all, if “brand awareness” is helping promote my books on Amazon even if I’m not directly advertising them there, wouldn’t it be even better if I was? But what could that look like? And can an author advertise their books on both platforms without cannibalizing their sales on either of them?

Here’s what that might look like:

Direct Sales on Facebook, Amazon Sales on Advertising on Amazon

One possible scenario to advertise your books in two places at once is to leverage two entirely different advertising platforms at the same time.

When it comes to advertising your books, Facebook is the biggest game in town. It’s far and away the best advertising platform for self-published authors and that’s even if you’re still promoting your books on Amazon. I’ve always been able to run profitable ads on Facebook, even if direct sales ended up being more profitable.

But coming in a not-so-close second after Facebook ads is Advertising on Amazon, which has the unique advantage of being built right into the Amazon sales platform. 

Advertising on Amazon allows your books to show up in the searches and on the product pages of competing authors, placing your book series right in front of people who are already searching for books.

So, if you really wanted to chase “the best of both worlds” a really logical place to start would be Advertising on Amazon. You can exclusively drive traffic to your Direct Sales Funnel on Facebook, but simultaneously use Advertising on Amazon to promote your books on Amazon (and only Amazon.) In theory, you won’t be cannibalizing your sales on either platform because they have mutually exclusive audiences.

In fact, this is what I’m doing right now – albeit in a modest capacity. Even though I’m directing the bulk of my ad budget into Facebook ads, I continue to run what I call “defensive advertising” on the product pages of my books on Amazon.

I’ve got a whole post about “defensive advertising” but the theory behind it is quite simple. There are dozens of spots on each of the product pages for your books that Amazon sells for advertising – most commonly a ribbon of book suggestions called “Products related to this item” that are actually just paid advertising spots. You can tell because they have “Sponsored” written in tiny letters beneath the headline.

I find it deeply frustrating that Amazon collects money from other authors to advertise on MY product page, and it was even more frustrating when I was paying Facebook to drive traffic there in the first place! It was like I was paying Facebook to send traffic to Amazon, only to have Amazon collect money from other authors to drive that traffic elsewhere as soon as they arrived!.

So, that’s why I set up what I call “defensive advertising.” I run a series of Advertising on Amazon campaigns that advertise my books only on the product pages of my other books. Therefore if you go to one of my books on Amazon, all the potential advertising spots will be promoting my books instead of those from other authors. 

Yes, it’s frustrating to have to advertise my books on my own product pages, but I like to think it plugs all the holes that could have otherwise sent the traffic I paid for off onto the product pages of another author. It also looks really cool to land on one of my product pages and see almost nothing except all my own books advertised there.

And the best part is that it’s profitable! Defensive advertising is one of the easiest ways to run profitable ads through Advertising on Amazon because you’re advertising your books to an audience that’s already checking out your books – and because “relevancy” always trumps the highest bids for those advertising spots, I tend to pay a lot less for impressions than I would if I was running a traditional Advertising on Amazon campaign and promoting my books on the product pages of other authors.

In fact, relevancy is perhaps the biggest reason why these ads are profitable. Because I took all my books out of Kindle Unlimited, I can’t use the royalties from KENP page reads to bolster my profit margin, and it’s a lot more difficult to sell books than it is to have people read them through KU. However, even after I started direct sales, I’ve still been able to maintain profitable “defensive advertising” because the ads are so well-targeted.

It’s not ideal. I’m never going to start my books ranking with defensive advertising, because the only people who’ll see those ads are people who are already checking out my books. However, it’s definitely helped me make more sales and I still think it’s valuable because my Facebook ads indirectly send a lot of traffic to Amazon thanks to that “brand awareness” I mentioned earlier.

If I’m selling books and not losing money, why wouldn’t I continue doing it?

Subsidizing Your Advertising on Amazon with Direct Sales Revenue

I’m starting to sound like a stuck record, but I’ll repeat this part once again: The major reason I switched to direct sales is because I was tired of how long it took Amazon to pay me. 

To make real money advertising your books, you need to have a real budget – and even assuming you’re doubling your money with advertising (which is a lot tougher than it sounds) you’d still have to spend $100 to make $100 in profit. Therefore if you wanted to consistently advertise your books at $100 a day for three months, you’d have to shell out $9,000 in advertising before you got your first royalty check from Amazon (and you can only hope that you made a profit during that time.)

This is beyond the means of most self-published authors, myself included. Any time I start getting those kinds of savings in my bank account, the exhaust falls out of my truck or my kids need new braces and that money disappears faster than I can spend it.

But if you’re running successful (and profitable) direct sales ads, you might have a solution to that problem. Because you can get access to your profits within hours or days when you sell direct to readers, you can use that income to pay for any additional advertising you want to do on Amazon – and still feel good about it because the pressure of where to find that money is taken off your shoulders!

In fact, in an ideal scenario, it could be “the best of both worlds” that I spoke about. You make a profit with direct sales, and then you direct that profit into Advertising on Amazon and make even MORE profit – double-dipping, if you will, with the added benefit of driving your sales rank and scoring new reviews and reaping all the benefits of advertising on Amazon that you miss out on with direct sales.

That being said, if you’re making a big enough profit from direct sales, wouldn’t you just pour that money back into direct sales? Scaling up your advertising is the way to find success as a self-published author, and it seems like a safer bet to maximize your profits would be to pump that money back into a platform that’s already proven to be profitable rather than try to make additional profit somewhere else. Advertising on Amazon is not the easiest platform to master, and it’s made that much more difficult if your books aren’t in Kindle Unlimited to begin with – but it’s definitely a possibility!

And with this approach you do at least address the biggest downside of direct sales – the fact that they’re completely divorced from the Amazon ecosystem. If you can balance both at the same time, dual advertising like this could be the best way to drive sales while also maximizing the impact and visibility of your books on Amazon.

Advanced Level Advertising

Whichever approach you decide to take, it’s not for the newbie. It’s very far from easy for self-published authors to make a profit advertising their books no matter which platform you leverage, and you’re making things even more challenging for yourself by advertising on two competing platforms at the same time.

That being said, there is potential there – and as I reach the upper limits of profitability with my own direct sales experiment, part of me remains curious about taking the plunge and seeing if I can amplify awareness of my books on multiple platforms, instead of just relying on one or the other.

Conclusion

What do you think of the idea? I’d love to know your thoughts – or hear your success stories (or failures) if you’ve tried splitting your ad budget across multiple platforms. Don’t be shy about leaving a comment down below, or sending us an email. It was a message from a reader named Lauren that inspired this blog post, and your comments might inspire the next one!  

And if you’re looking for more specific help getting any of this running, feel free to book a 1-on-1 consult call with me. I can help walk you through how it all works, setup, tuning, or anything else. Or if you’re someone who enjoys learning with a group of peers in a more on-going and relaxed format, check out our Self-Pub Growth Hub. We have a group that specifically centers around advertising and marketing, and would love to have you join us!

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