There's absolutely no reason why you should be sending your audience off to Amazon and taking a 65% hit.

It's your audience. On your insta, your website, your tik-tok, your newsletter. You've attracted them, you've nurtured them, you've grown their numbers.

You're the one that's crafting the posts and you’re the one that constantly has to come up with something next to write.

When you're finally taking time off, it's you who first has to double down to prepare content scheduled for your absence.

You're combing through the comments. You fend off the occasional troll. You engage in endless discussions.

So, tell me, why do you send those people to Amazon or Apple when time comes to sell your ebooks? When they sell your books, fine let them take the (exorbitant) commissions, but why should you pay that much when you make the sales?

You can make a huge difference to your bottom line if you start selling ebooks directly to the customers that you already have access to. And you can start doing it now.

Let me tell you why you should start selling ebooks now.

Automate!

First of all, let’s focus on selling ebooks for now. While selling physical books yourself is also absolutely doable, ebooks are just perfect to start as they can be almost completely automated.

Once you set up your sales machine, you won’t have to do anything to process or fulfill the orders. Apart from the occasional support email from a customer, you’ll be able to focus entirely on what’s important without giving a second thought to any tedious processing tasks.

Lower commission

While you’ll have to pay for the tools you’ll use to set up your store, you’d have a hard time if you tried to pay for them anything close to what the big retailers charge you. Amazon takes anywhere from 30 to 65% and that doesn’t take into account sales tax (which is entirely passed on to you) and any special offers they can run. You can easily end up getting no more than 10% from some of your sales.

Your direct sales will have a different structure: you’ll probably pay monthly or yearly subscriptions for a few tools or just a small fee for each sale. You’ll also have to take payment processing fees into account but that’s usually just a few percent.

If you sell a lot of books you’ll probably be able to squeeze around 90% of the net retail price, but even selling just a few books a month will cover the cost of the tools and will start making you money.

Better cash flow

Amazon will pay you with a 60-day delay and while that might not be entirely out of bad will, it’s certainly inconvenient. As you can imagine, cash from direct sales will get to you much faster, usually within a couple of days. It’s always better to have money in your bank sooner rather than later, right? You decide the price The big distributors very strongly push you to specific price points: Amazon only grants you the 70% royalty option if you price the book between $2.99 and $9.99 and Apple only offers predefined prices. In many cases those prices make sense either way, but sometimes you’ll be able to sell the book for much more if you stay in charge of that.

If you’re a self-published author running a strong community, you might be very well positioned to sell the book at a very high price.

Offer sweat deals (and still earn money)

When you pay almost no commission, imagine what price drops you can offer without taking a financial hit! If we assume you get 90% of your direct sales and compare this to the commissions the distributors would take out of that it appears that you can offer a 30-60% discount and still make as much money as if you sold the book at regular price via Amazon!

Grow your audience

Imagine offering your audience deals like that! Will they like and subscribe to not miss that in the future? Probably. Will they subscribe to your newsletter? More likely than if you just ask nicely. Will they share/retweet with their friends? Hell yeah! Sounds like a snowballing scenario, right? And who doesn’t like those!

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Hope I at least got you interested! If so, make sure to email me at piotrek@lemonink.co, I can help you get off the ground with direct sales or just chat.

Next, I’ll write about technical and accounting solutions for direct sales. There’s lots of excellent options, but there’s also much to decide. Hopefully I’ll be able to make those decisions a bit easier.

And lastly, a plug: have a look at LemonInk, our ebook watermarking service you could use when you start selling ebooks.