Business Post: Selling Direct - Some Data

So this is our... third (?) year selling wide. Well, third year with our current e-commerce platform, though we used Payhip and Woocommerce before, so I guess we're roughly 4 years in. I figured it might be worthwhile to discuss what we have found worked well to drive sales, what hasn't, and what we do.

Firstly, though, I guess it might help to see how we did:

Yeah, overall cruising roughly the same. Fewer total orders, and lower gross sales by a hair. Some refunds (mostly, when someone doubles up an order and we refund it to them because there's no reason to make a reader pay twice!) and a bunch of shipping revenue, though it was lower. In this case, last year, we didn't have that massive shipping mistake by Ingram with the bad copies of Climbing the Ranks 1 that we resold as 'bad' books, so we did a lot fewer shipments that year.

Still, a pretty respectable amount, even if it's not going to pay a full salary. So, what did we do to drive sales that worked?

Exclusives and Bundles

I'm putting these all in the same grouping, because I think of them as 'exclusive to the shop' variations. In our case, we have a bunch of shorts that are purely exclusive to the store, for both A Thousand Li and the System Apocalypse. These sell semi-regularly especially when we remind our readers that there's more of the world to find, if they come to the store.

We combine that with exclusive short bundles and certain exclusive bundles that are not available anywhere else (for example, the Adventures on Brad audiobook series for books 1-9 are grouped on the site). That allows us to sell them at a discount that keeps it worthwhile to readers and brings them back.

Pre-release of new releases

One of the biggest drivers of income (see those sudden surges?) are from pre-release on the sites, especially on the audiobook end. We generally have the audiobooks up on the site a month before they are on places like Audible, which allows us to garner direct sales from readers at a high % take (97% compared to like... 25%). So we make anywhere from 3x to 4x, even if the payment is about the same on the reader side.

We see a chunk of pre-orders (around a couple of hundred) for these early release pre-orders each time, and most importantly, it teaches our readers to keep coming back and buying from us. If we can draw more of them over to our site, it's amazing.

The negative, of course, is that you do see a minor blip in Amazon ranking. So individual ranks are lower, even if your net income might not be affected (or, more likely - be higher!).

Free eBooks

Another major driver of traffic (and in the same line of 'training' readers) is the use of free ebooks. Mostly, these are permafree ebooks that we have, which previously was the Adventures on Brad first book, now we've switched it up to the Hidden Wishes series. They're basically there to drive readers to pick up the series and train them to pick up books on your side.

Things That Are So-So in Driving Readers & Revenue

The Climbing the Ranks serial

For those that don't know, the Climbing the Ranks (a Malaysian Cultivation LitRPG Tower Climber) is release on a bi-weekly basis for free on the shopify store. It's meant to draw readers over to keep poking at the site, or to accept e-mails (because we email them when a new chapter comes out if they subscribe).

So, we have subscribers (whose income aren't shown in the general income graph) who sign up to the site. While we know we get a lot of readers arriving on the site for Climbing the Ranks, the number who convert over to subscribers is a smaller number. Of course, some of those are just readers who buy the ebook later, but how well it does at teaching people to come over to the site; it's hard to say.

Something we could, I guess, run a survey on; but eh... I like writing the series; so we're keeping it for now. Still, it's probably a major opportunity cost lost in terms of income lost from not being in KU; so I'd call it a so-so trade-off.

Social Media

Social media (Twitter previously, Instagram and TikTok and Youtube, etc.) are really not very good at driving people to the store for us, outside of Facebook. See below...

Now, we're off Twitter entirely, and the new systems (bluesky, Threads) are terrible, Threads in particular as it depresses outside links significantly. We find Bluesky a little better, though we're not seeing it as much in terms of driving readers to the site (yet); but overall, social media has become significantly less of a push and more of an add-on for us.

Outright Failures - Facebook Ads

Not a lot to say here. We tried Facebook ads direct to the store to drive sales, both to paid product pages and to free ebooks. Both saw terrible conversion rates, few new readers and was overall, not worth the spend at all. The problem is that we're just not getting enough  cheap people arriving to make it worthwhile to keep them on the site buying, especially when what we're mostly selling are ebooks at $3.99/4.99 a pop.

And this is very much a 'I'm Canadian so physical book shipping is incredibly expensive' thing.

Things to Come

Possibly the biggest test of the direct website for sales will be new special editions. We're going to basically make them exclusive to our site (after the Kickstarters) once they arrive. We should start shipping the A Thousand Li: the First Step deluxe edition sometime in March, after which we'll start having them available for normal purchase soon after. 

Final Thoughts

And that's it really. Hopefully, others have other ideas of things we can do to drive more readers, overall. At some point, we'll need to spend some time cleaning up the site to increase overall conversion rates, though the number of sessions that aren't CLimbing the Ranks readers related are still small. All of which means that spending hours getting a marginal increase in conversion rates is often not worth it.

Which is, of course the hardest thing about running your own site. Working on perfecting conversion rates don't matter till you get enough visitors, but to get enough visitors, you need to drive them to a not perfect site. A bit of a chicken and egg situation.