Plenty of authors these days talk about new opportunities beyond the major retailers. As indie publishing expands into new territories and readers are searching out new ways of interacting with the stories they love, authors are moving to take advantage of how we can sell our books wider than wide, looking for places where we can find new readers to delight and entertain.
As authors look to expand their reach beyond more obvious book retailers, crowdfunding campaigns—usually Kickstarter—direct sales from an author’s website, and reader subscriptions on sites such as Substack and Patreon have emerged as some of the most popular options. A full rundown of those sales channels is too big for any single article, but here are a few tips to help maximize your use of each of these possibilities.
Crowdfunding
- Be prepared to start small.
One good way to think about crowdfunding sites is like they’re a new retailer. They can be a good place to earn new fans and build readership. But like any new venue, it can take a while to build up an audience. It’s not unusual to start small and gradually grow with each new project. Starting with a relatively small—but not so small as to be unprofitable—goal can be a powerful way to build your Kickstarter empire. Often something as simple as a $500 target can work well, assuming your budget works out.
- Use e-books as extras.
Only part of the revenue from a crowdfunding campaign comes from the actual project. One can also derive a lot of income from add-ons, and e-books are an easy and popular option—that doesn’t cost you as the author anything additional to produce or distribute. If you have another series of books that have a similar target reader to the project you’re trying to fund, use them as add-ons; many readers will pick up some or all of them.
- Physical rewards are the main drivers.
The best-funding crowdfunding campaigns usually have a physical product as the main reward, according to Anthea Sharp, author of Kickstarter for Authors, and Monica Leonelle, co-author of Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter, so this is generally a good direction to travel, especially for your first attempts at crowdfunding. Running a crowdfunding event for something digital, like an audiobook, tends to be much more challenging as the platform market is smaller, so you may need to focus more on bringing an audience for these projects. Because of this, it’s often best to begin with something easier, like a special edition hardcover of the book your fans already love most, or a print and e-book launch of a new book or trilogy.
Subscription Platforms
- Consistency matters.
For writing in general, consistency can help a lot with maintaining creative momentum. But it’s especially crucial when we ask readers to pay us monthly for content. Make sure the content you promise readers—and the deadlines you’ve set for writing it—is achievable regularly. If for some reason you can’t deliver what you’ve promised, the best practice is to be transparent with supporters and communicate clearly what’s going on.
Pro Tip: Authors often talk about batch-creating social media posts or newsletter content to save time, and you can do the same with subscription platforms. If you can set targets that are consistently reachable, so that you can over time build up some backlog of things to post, then you’re in great shape to deliver what your readers expect even if you aren’t able to hit your target every once in a while.
- Offer e-books as sign-up bonuses.
There are a few ways to maximize the use of already published e-books with subscriptions, but one method is to offer them as bonuses to entice new subscribers, similar to how many use reader magnets to pull readers into their newsletter. Methods vary for how to do this, but the two most popular seem to be offering an EPUB as a bonus for download when someone subscribes or having a “subscriber library” of already completed books available for subscribers, usually right on the subscription site. E-books published in Kindle Unlimited (KU) won’t be eligible, but for those published wide, these bonuses make readers feel like they’re snagging a deal.
- Follow the Trajectory: ‘Subscription’ to ‘Free’ to ‘Published.’
The workflow many subscription-using authors prefer is sharing new writing first with subscribers, then with online readers, and finally as a completed published work. They publish chapters to their paid subscribers as they write them. Later, they release those chapters for free on Wattpad, Royal Road, or similar sites, dripping them out at the same pace they’re writing new ones. The subscription always stays ahead, sometimes forty chapters or more, of the free releases, with top tiers usually getting content three to five months ahead of the free release. This encourages fans to sign up to find out what happens next sooner. Later still, those chapters are compiled into books, edited, and published on retailers. For wide authors, the special advantage here is that non-KU books don’t have to be taken down from the free sites or subscription site, allowing the subscription-generating engine to continue purring along.
Direct Sales
- It’s OK to start selling e-books on your website.
“Direct sales” may sound like it requires a leap into ordering, shipping, and managing the distribution of physical copies, but starting out with e-books is often easier. Since there’s no need to get set up with a printer, it takes a major step out of the loop. This is one area where wide authors can especially shine, since they can immediately set up all their e-books for direct sales and go from making 70 percent of list price to about 90 percent to 95 percent per copy. Adding print is great too, of course, but it’s OK to start with one product and then expand.
- Direct sales of print books are powerful.
For authors who have ventured into selling physical copies through their website, BookVault and Lulu are the two most common companies for managing the task. Both are print-on-demand printers/distributors and do a solid job in terms of quality and reliability. On average, BookVault charges around half what Lulu does for printing, but Lulu works with Wix sites, which BookVault does not, and has the advantage of being a long-recognized player in the book-printing space.
Both options will also connect with either Shopify or WooCommerce, allowing orders placed on your site to be sent to the printer automatically, who will print and ship the book to your customer without you having to lift a finger.
- Pick a strong sales platform.
Because most authors will want to use BookVault or Lulu for the automated ordering and delivery, that narrows the field. BookVault integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, and Payhip, while Lulu integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, and Wix. That makes those four platforms optimal for most authors, but any of them can work.
That said, some authors don’t need or want the automated delivery. Someone selling signed copies from their Fourthwall site can choose whichever printer they want, for example, since they have to order the books to them first, then ship them to readers. This is more work, but some authors prefer the closer connection to fans this can build.
- Learn what’s needed for taxes.
Crowdfunding, subscriptions, and website book sales all count as forms of direct selling, and as such, you as the author-publisher will generally be required to charge sales tax/VAT. There are different requirements for different nations, but in many cases, there’s a threshold below which it’s not an issue. As soon as you pass that threshold, you’ll need to collect and remit sales tax/VAT. For a state-by-state list of thresholds for sales tax nexus, see this site: https://www.salestaxinstitute.com/resources/economic-nexus-state-guide. This can be complicated, but don’t let it scare you off!
Pro Tip: Don’t try to do everything at once! Take your time, and ease into each step as you’re comfortable. Although there’s a ton of FOMO (fear of missing out) around this sort of thing, these tools will still be around once you get to them, and mastering one, then moving on to others, is probably a wiser play for most of us than trying to juggle too many new sales methods at the same time.
Don’t stress this stuff. Remember that these are new sales channels we can explore and new ways to connect with readers, but at the end of the day, it’s the stories and those connections that matter most. Take these things at your own pace, and enjoy the process of building new relationships with your readers.
Kevin McLaughlin
