It has been an educational experience, so I thought I’d share the good, the bad, and the ugly with you.
The benefits: Data, mailing list integration, discounts
Amazon provides its suppliers, whether self-publishers or traditional publishers, with no more than basic sales data. This makes it very difficult to explicitly tie marketing activities to sales, which in turn makes it hard to know whether a specific campaign has been successful.
My ebook shop is hosted on DPD, which allows me to hook it into third party analytics services such as Statcounter or Google Analytics. This means I can find out where my buyers come from, which helps with marketing. For example, I know that 46 percent of my fiction buyers come from the USA and only 32 percent from the UK, whereas 67 percent of my science anthology buyers come from the UK, and only 21 percent from the US.
That’s useful data because it means that I need to craft different marketing strategies for the different types of book. I should, for example, consider how to better reach American readers, perhaps by scheduling some tweets later in the British day and overnight to reach more of my American followers.
DPD also allows me to connect my shop to my mailing lists, which I run through Mailchimp. I have monthly newsletter for my fiction readers, and everyone who purchases something from my ebook shop is given the opportunity to sign up to it. When I released a short story through my store in April, sign-ups to my fiction newsletter jumped. When I released my latest novella, Queen of the May, I saw another surge in sign-ups, far more than when I was relying on just the sign-up form on my site and a link in my ebooks.
The same has been true for A Passion for Science, which was released to coincide with Ada Lovelace Day on 15 October, the annual celebration of women in science, technology, engineering and maths that I run. I always get a lot of sign-ups to the ALD newsletter in October, but this year’s surge was much bigger and, hopefully, will continue for longer than normal.
Finally, most online shops also allow you to create discount codes. Every person who signs up to my fiction newsletter, for example, gets a code that allows them to download a previous novella and short story for free, and another code that gives them Queen of the May for 99p, a £1.50 discount. I can’t incentivise sign-ups to my newsletter like this via Amazon.
Possibly more importantly, I can also use discount codes to run marketing experiments. For example, I can create a unique discount code to seed on each social media, and the number of times each code is used gives me insight into which platform is most effective at reaching my book buyers.
The killer disadvantage: Scale
The single biggest problem with only selling direct is that when you stop marketing, your sales just stop. In early August, I got too busy with Ada Lovelace Day to do as much marketing for Queen of the May as I had planned. Sales shut down and I don't expect them to restart until I begin marketing again.
This means that sales never become self-sustaining; my websites simply do not have and will likely never have the reach that Amazon and other etailers can provide. There is no way for me to scale my sales by selling direct in the way that I could if I used Amazon to amplify my signal.
The problem: A/B testing
If you really want to maximise sales, you need to get analytical, and one technique that is very useful is A/B testing. For those of you to whom that phrase is new, it’s really simple: Serve up two versions of the same thing to random members of your audience and see which one performs better. You may want to test your blurb, cover, title or bio, but there’s absolutely no way to do that on Amazon. And, so far, online shops like DPD don’t provide that option either.
I have spent some time testing various A/B testing plug-ins on WordPress and using Google Analytics content experiments, but those all comprehensively failed as well. If anyone knows of a WordPress plug-in that actually works, please let me know in the comments!
Works for me, YMMV
Overall, selling ebooks direct has given me an interesting insight into my audience and buyers, but it does take an awful lot of work to keep the momentum going. On Amazon, there is the chance that your work might — might! — start to take off under its own steam, but with a direct sales approach that won’t happen unless you already have a massive fanbase, which most of us don’t.
At this point in time I’m actually happy to trade new newsletter sign-ups, data and the ability to control discounts for those lost sales. I have to work harder for every sale, but every each one pays more both monetarily and in terms of building my communities.
This, of course, isn’t a trade-off that other authors are willing to make, and that’s fair enough. You can play both sides, to some extent, by both distributing to the major retailers and selling directly through your own site. However, that will dilute your data and Amazon’s ‘most favoured nation’ clause means that you won’t be able to price more favourably on your own site without risking them dropping their prices too.
None of this means that I've completely turned my back on Amazon. If it feels like I’ve got all the data and info that I can out of direct sales, then it will make sense to move back to platforms where I can reach more people. But I don’t think I’ve got there just yet.
