Dear O'Abby: Is it a good idea to sell books directly from my website?

 Dear O'Abby,

I'm a self-published author and have always sold my books through external platforms (mainly Amazon through KDP), but I feel like this gives me very little control over my sales and marketing.  

I have been thinking about setting it up so I can sell directly from my website.  My partner works in e-commerce and has the skills and expertise to set this up for me, but I'm wondering if it's worth it?  I sell reasonably well on Amazon and am a little worried that changing things up might result in lower sales.

Do you know anything about this kind of thing?  Any advice would be gratefully accepted.

Yours sincerely,

Self-Pubby

Dear Self-Pubby,

This is something I've been hearing a bit about recently given the changes both Amazon and Facebook have made in regards to setting up ads.  You are in the enviable position of having someone around who can help with the initial set-up which is the part other authors often struggle with.

You will need to remove any titles you wish to sell directly from KDP, and I believe that takes about a month, so you may be without a platform for sales for a period of time.  But if you're set up well in advance, you should be able to limit that.

The advantages of selling directly are that you receive the money more quickly than you do through Amazon or other retailers, so you can more quickly adjust your marketing spend to ensure profitability.  You are also better able to track customer movements from ads to purchase to ensure any advertising dollars are being well spent.

That and the fact you can easily track sales in real time rather than waiting for reports to come, often months after the fact.  Which can be both a blessing and a curse.  Be careful not to get too obsessive about it!

My advice would be to ensure you're very thorough and remove any old ads that point the reader to another retailer (unless, of course, you're planning to leave the book on some external retail sites as well) and focus all future ads toward your own website sales page. 

It might take a little bit of time to start generating the level of sales you want, but by keeping a close eye on things, you should be able to be far more responsive with ad spend and tracking where traffic to your website is coming from, and how people are using your site.

There is a very helpful four-part series about a self-pubbed author who has done this very thing here.

Hopefully that helps!

X O'Abby