For many authors, the idea of having to sell ebooks on your website seems like a bizarre thing to do.

Well, why should you sell ebooks on your website when it’s a lot easier to sell your ebooks to retailers.

Thanks to Amazon, Draft2Digital, PublishDrive, and Ingram Spark, you can even sell your print books to your readers, not just your ebooks.

Seeing how easy it is for you to distribute your books to retailers all over the world in multiple formats, the idea of having to sell ebooks on your website seems absurd.

On top of that, there are so many things you have to do yourself if you want to sell ebooks on your website.

Having to drive the traffic to your website, accepting payment, order fulfillment, and customer service.

That sounds like a lot of work.

There’s no way for you to squeeze another sales channel when you have so many things on your plate right now.

It’s no wonder why so many authors treat direct sales as the last thing they will do.

But here’s the thing. If you want more control over your sales and you want them to be sustainable for the long term, then it’s worth considering selling your ebooks on your website.

The wonders of having to sell ebooks on your website that not many would want to talk about

Yes, I get that the idea of having to sell your books directly to the readers can feel intimidating when you’re so used to having the retailers do all the work for you.

But with so many changes that are beyond our control, depending on these retailers for our income can be a risky ordeal.

If you’ve been doing this long enough, I’m sure you already know how the changes in the Amazon algorithm and how people discover your books have a significant impact on how many book sales you can make.

Gone are those days when you can depend on organic traffic to drive sales to your books.

The only way to drive sales to your books nowadays is to use paid ads, which isn’t cost-effective over the long term.

And who knows what sort of curveballs will get thrown at us down the road.

It’s because of this reason that we need to be in control of how we generate sales for our books and anything that we create.

Of course, being in control isn’t the only reason why it’s worth considering selling your books directly to the readers.

There are also other reasons that make selling directly to your readers worthwhile. Here are some of them.

You make more money

Yes, a 70/30 royalty split when you sell your book on Amazon is still a lot when you compare it to the amount of royalty that you get if you’re a traditionally published author.

But if you’re using something like Payhip to sell your ebooks on your website?

You only need to pay a transaction fee to Payhip which is 5%. You get to keep the rest of 95% of the sales to yourself.

Of course, that doesn’t include the transaction fee from PayPal and Stripe.

But you still get paid a lot more than the amount of royalty that you receive from Amazon and other retailers that you distribute even with the transaction fees combined.

What’s not to love when you have more money that goes into your pocket?

You have direct access to your customer data

Unless you’re doing a meticulous job in tracking the book sales from all retailers, there’s no way to know where those book sales are coming from.

Sure, it’s easy to know where the sales are coming from if you’re using a paid ad.

But if you’re like me who uses content marketing to market your books, you have no way of knowing where the traffic to these retailers is coming from.

And the worst part of all? You have no access to your readers’ information such as their names and email addresses since retailers aren’t going to share this information with you.

But if you sell your books directly to your readers, not only do you know who your readers are and how they come across your books. But you will also have their email addresses too.

Why does getting a hold of readers’ email addresses such a big deal?

Well, that’s how you can contact your readers, notifying them about your new book or simply connect with your readers.

Email is still the best way to keep in touch with your readers.

Of course, you can always get your readers to join your mailing list. That’s also another way for you to get your readers’ email addresses.

But I prefer to build a list this way since those who already bought from me are more likely to engage with my emails.

And they’re more likely to buy more of my books too since they already bought my books before.

You can reach a much broader audience

Not going to lie that platforms like Draft2Digital, PublishDrive, and Streetlib make it easier for you to reach a wider audience.

And that holds true for PublishDrive since they’re distributing books to retailers in Europe and China, and Streetlib for retailers in the African region.

Even with that, I still think that it’s a lot easier to reach a wider audience when you sell your books on your website.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that these retailers don’t have a large enough foothold in the region. It’s just that people are more likely to discover your books through your website than through any of those retailers.

Does it mean that you shouldn’t be spending your time distributing your books to these retailers?

Of course, the answer is no.

I still recommend you distribute your books to as many retailers as possible provided that your books aren’t in KDP Select.

But you also need to have the books available for purchase on your website.

While it’s more convenient to buy your books from the retailers, there are still some people who can’t buy the books from any of these retailers.

Maybe it’s due to the region restriction. It’s common for retailers like Amazon to place a restriction on ebooks for copyright reasons.

Or perhaps they prefer to pay using PayPal or other payment methods since these retailers can only accept credit card payments.

Whatever the reason may be, it’s not that hard to do when services like Payhip allow you to accept PayPal, credit card, and Apple Pay thanks to Stripe integration.

You can avoid forfeiting your income to the IRS

I bet that many of you would rejoice when I say that you don’t have to pay any taxes to the IRS.

But nope, this part is only applicable to those who live in a country that doesn’t have a treaty with the US.

For those who don’t know, you have to forfeit 30% of the royalty to the IRS if you live in a country that doesn’t have a treaty with the US.

That means I only get 40% of my royalty payment from Amazon since the other 30% goes to the IRS.

While I can’t do anything about this situation other than move to a country that has a treaty with the US, selling direct is the only way for me to bypass the tax payment to the IRS.

If you’re a US citizen or currently reside in the US, selling directly to your readers isn’t going to prevent you from having to pay your due to the IRS.

You still need to pay the tax. There’s no exception here.

Getting started with selling ebooks on your website

The idea of selling your books directly to the readers may sound intriguing. But that’s impossible to do if you don’t have a website, right?

Even if you have one, you can’t integrate with any of these services since you have an author website on a free platform like WordPress.com.

Well, here’s the good news for you.

You don’t need to have an author website since a platform like Gumroad and Payhip doesn’t require you to have a website.

All you need to do is to register, upload your books and share the links to the page wherever you want.

No website is required.

You can take a look at this page right here to learn more about the website that you can use to sell your books directly to your readers.

And in case you’re wondering, I use Payhip to sell books directly to my readers.

You can take a look at my Payhip store right here if you’re curious about what it looks like.

And while we’re at it, don’t forget to use the coupon code THEEFFICIENTYOUBLOG to save 25% off on any books that you buy from the store.

Just to let you know that I have a Payhip store for The Efficient You as well. You can take a look at the store right here.

This is where I’m going to be focusing on

Just to let you know that the idea of selling directly to the readers isn’t something that I decided to do at a spur moment.

It’s something that I have already done since the beginning of my author career.

Like many authors, the bulk of the sales tends to come from the retailers. So, there’s no reason for me to put my attention on direct sales when most of the sales are coming from somewhere else.

But after all these years, I realize that generating sales from the retailers requires just as much work as generating direct sales.

So, I may as well spend most of my time and resources generating direct sales, right?

Just to let you know that I won’t be discarding my book distribution to retailers just yet. But generating direct sales will be what I intend to focus on from now onwards.

P.S Another way to get your readers to buy your books directly from you? Talk about it on social media, of course.

But here’s the thing about social media. You can’t be pestering people all the time, telling people that they should buy your books.

That will only turn people off if the only thing that you talk about on social media is buying your books, nothing else.

And that holds true for Twitter where people can see your tweets on your Twitter profile.

If you’re using Twitter, you can learn how to strike a balance between talking about your books and connecting with your followers effectively in my Twitter Marketing for Business guide.

You can take a look at the guide right here on my Payhip store:

Twitter Marketing for Business guide

Don’t forget to use the coupon code THEEFFICIENTYOUBLOG to save 20% off on your order.