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Choosing Your Direct Sales Strategy

Choosing Your Direct Sales Strategy

Podcast 41 min read

Publish & Prosper Episode #109
Published March 4, 2026
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Complete List of Channels


In this episode, Matt & Lauren explore three different ways creators can get started selling direct, and the tools you’ll need along the way! Learn about:

💡 Using direct assisted platforms like Books.by to build a website for you
💰 Selling on marketplaces like Etsy for a hybrid sales approach
📚 Connecting Lulu Direct to your site for true direct-to-consumer sales
🧰 Stocking your toolkit with some of our favorite sales and marketing solutions

Episode Chapters

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Complete Episode Transcript

Matt: What’s that noise?

Lauren: Office is haunted.

Matt: I do think this office is haunted, by the way. Like for real for real. But whatever.

Lauren: Don't say that to me when I'm occasionally the only person in here.

Matt: Do you know how often I'm the only person in here

Lauren: I – I probably could guess, honestly.

Matt: Yeah. Welcome back, everyone, to another haunted episode of Publish & Prosper.

Lauren: Hey, as long as the audio isn't haunted, I don't care what the rest of the building is doing.

Matt: Yeah, it's not the audio. It's just the, the office itself.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And that's fine.

Matt: I guess. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. But that's not what we're talking about today.

Lauren: It could be.

Matt: Well yeah, we, we could absolutely probably cover an hour or more of that.

Lauren: Easily.

Matt: Today we're going to talk about how to choose the right direct sales path for you. So we talk a lot about direct sales. We talk a lot about different ways you can do it. But we've never kind of talked about how to choose the best one for you at the moment that you're in right now, with respects to your content.

Lauren: Yeah. And I actually think... cause there's kinda... we're gonna talk about this kind of in like, three different stages in, in getting through –

Matt: We're going to talk about them in three different levels of effort.

Lauren: Yes. Yeah.

Matt: Which could map to stages. But won't always necessarily.

Lauren: That's –

Matt: But yeah.

Lauren: – that's true. That's a fair point. But what I do think actually, is that the, the second of the three that we're going to talk about, I don't think we've ever talked about in an episode before.

Matt: We haven't really, no.

Lauren: So this is something new. How exciting.

Matt: It is. Yeah.

Lauren: It's getting harder and harder to come up with something new in a hundred plus episodes.

Matt: But for anybody who's read my book.

Lauren: Clearly not me.

Matt: They already know about section two – clearly not you. And that's okay.

Lauren: Maybe I'll pack it for some of our upcoming travel and events.

Matt: Not unless you need something to help you sleep at night.

Lauren: I do have a terrible time falling asleep on planes.

Matt: Then you should absolutely –

Lauren: So.

Matt: Yeah. Maybe I should turn it into an audiobook.

Lauren: That would be great.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: I know, I know someone that has recording equipment. If you wanted to do that.

Matt: Yeah, you should give me their number.

Lauren: Okay, great.

Matt: Hopefully they don't have any ghosts in their audio system.

Lauren: Not this time.


[2:43] - Episode Topic Intro


Matt: Good. Yeah. Today we're going to talk about a couple of different ways that you can start your direct sales journey. Based on level of effort or where you happen to be at in your, your journey for content creatorship and, authoring and whatever else it is you're doing. But we're going to basically break them up into a couple of different categories. Those are going to be kind of what we're calling direct assisted platforms. So these are platforms that will actually build a site and storefront for you based on a little bit of information. And so it's probably the easiest of all of them to kind of get started with. We're going to talk about what we call marketplaces. And that's the bucket that Lauren was referring to that we haven't really talked much about before. And these are places like Etsy and some of the others where they're true marketplaces. And then we'll get to the ecommerce platforms, or ecommerce tools. Which we talk fairly regularly about but do require a level of effort that is more than the first two.

Lauren: Yeah. We’ll, we'll definitely talk through those. Hopefully get to a point too where we talked through some, some additional tools and also how to kind of choose which of these is right for you. I do also want to just say right up at the top before we dive into it. If you are already selling direct, I think this is all still relevant and interesting information for you because even if you are already established, like let's say you do already have a Shopify store set up and you are already doing that, you might still want to consider opening up a store on a marketplace and using that as a discoverability tool. Or maybe some of these direct assisted tools might be a good way to help you out. If you wanted to build like a dedicated landing page for one specific book or something like that. So even if you're already selling direct, hang out. Because you might find something interesting in this episode.

Matt: Leave it to Lauren to go ahead and just blow the scope of this thing out of the water. Come on. We'll add another topic in which is hybrid. Why not? Let's, let's add more to the party. Great. Merry Christmas.

[4:47] - Building with Direct Assisted Platforms

Matt: So for those of you that are interested in selling direct, but you don't have the time or the experience, or you just want to give it a quick try and you don't want to invest too much in it. Or you're just like, yeah, I just really don't want to build a website right now, or I don't want to build a store right now, no Matter how fast and easy it is. These direct assisted platforms, I think, are really great for that. They're fairly new. And there's not a lot of them. But there's, there's a couple of good ones for sure. It's great for testing things like digital delivery of your ebooks and audiobooks. These sites incorporate print-on-demand. They partner with print-on-demand facilities. They're just really easy to set up and jump into. They're great for early stage authors.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: I don't know if I would use one of these if you have an extensive catalog. You certainly can, but I think they're really more geared towards, you know, again – early stage, yeah. If you've got a handful of titles, one title, they're great for this. If you've got a lot of titles, an extensive catalog. Again, you can use these sites, but you may be better off jumping ahead to option three, which is a full blown ecommerce solution.

Lauren: I think that these are a really good stopgap for people that know that they're getting to that place eventually. So if you are an author who already knows, like I've heard, I've heard the spiel, I'm sold on selling direct. I want to do that, I'm into it, but it's going to take me some time to get an actual website built out because if I want to put all this effort in, I want to do it right.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Which is totally fair. But this is a great for solution for like in the meantime. You know? Let's say you're going to an event in a couple of weeks and you're like, shoot, I really wanted to have my direct store set up already before then, and that's just not possible. So let me spin this up really quickly. Use this as like, a temporary solution while I'm having – either like, you're designing it yourself or you're having somebody else build out that actual end game website for you.

Matt: Yep.

Lauren: So I think this is a perfect solution for that.

Matt: They're really great because they automate most of what you would normally be doing yourself in terms of managing the website. They handle all the infrastructure. They handle most of the, the technical backend stuff, if not all of it. And most of them handle all of the payments processing. And a couple of them will share all of that customer data with you. Some of them may share some of the data, but not all of it, depending on how they process those payments. But for the most part, you'll get a lot of great benefits out of it, and you'll barely have to lift a finger. The main platforms to consider would be Books dot by or Books By. They're awesome, we really like them. They're based in Australia, but they have a global reach, so I wouldn't let that concern you. Their templates and their tools are really awesome. The other one is called Stack or STCK dot me. They cater to a more largely creator audience but certainly take care of authors as well. Books dot by or Books By clearly focuses mainly on authors.

Lauren: Yeah. I'll put both those links in the show notes. So don't worry if you're like, I'm sorry what? We got them, they’re in the show notes. And if they do sound familiar to you, we did also talk about them in the episode that we did on building a landing page for your books.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So.

Matt: Yeah, that's true. We’ve kind of already covered most of the pros and cons. But again, the best one is such a low barrier to entry. It's just so easy to do it. You don't have to really worry about building anything, for the most part. For those of you who like to be hands on, there's going to be less of that. So you may want to consider that. But it's truly just a plug and play. Or plug and pay and play.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: I should say.

Lauren: Yeah, there is – I mean, there is always that element –

Matt: Or pay, plug, and play.

Lauren: Pay – pay to plug and play?

Matt: Something like that.

Lauren: I don't know. Now it’s getting weird.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: But no, I do think that that's, you know... The pros and cons in this are, are almost like hand-in-hand with each other. Like on the one hand it is a templated, super, super easy to build. On the other hand, that means that you don't have a lot of customization and control.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So, you know, you're kind of giving up some details for other details. And it's really just a matter of what's important to you. And we'll talk more about that.

Matt: It's also a really easy experience to jump in and try, like we said. Especially if you've never tried direct sales before, you're really worried about, you know, investing some time into building a Shopify store or something like that. And you just want to try this out because it's very easy to just quit it.

Lauren: Yeah, it's very, it's very low risk.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So this is a great way to like, test the waters, test it out, see if this is something that you want to actually invest like, real time and money into.

Matt: But I've seen the storefronts and landing pages that both of these platforms produce and they look great.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: So, you know,

Lauren: Yeah. For sure.

[10:01] - Selling on Marketplaces

Matt: The next one we'll jump into is marketplaces.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: This is the one we've never talked about before on the show, really.

Lauren: Which is kind of surprising to me. I can't believe we've, we’ve never –

Matt: Eh, not so much.

Lauren: I guess, yeah, I guess we've never really had a reason to before. But it is kind of an untapped area for us to talk about.

Matt: It's an untapped area for us to talk about, yeah. I think part of that is, I think initially when you talk about selling direct or just as an author, your first thought isn't to go sell your book on Etsy.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: So –

Lauren: There might be people listening to it right now that are going –

Matt: Certainly some have –

Lauren: Well that’s, that's not –

Matt: – sure, but – yeah.

Lauren: Yes, of course. But there, there are definitely people. I mean, even me at first. When we were first talking through the content of this episode and, and you said marketplaces like Etsy. I had to, like, sit with that for a second and go, that's not... oh, well, I guess it is. Because to be clear, these are not – like, this is different than using something like a retail distributor like Bookshop.org or Amazon.

Matt: Yes.

Lauren: Because you are still the store owner.

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: On a marketplace.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So it's not something where like Amazon is the seller, Amazon is the, and I know Amazon Marketplace is a thing, but it's not the same.

Matt: It's not.

Lauren: It's not.

Matt: You're right.

Lauren: It's not the same.

Matt: It’s 100% not the same at all.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: And maybe marketplace is a term that does it injustice. But that's, that's what they're called.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: So that's what I’ll stick with. But you're right. These are nothing like, you know – or the experience is nothing like being on Amazon or even Bookshop, or some of the others that we'll talk about. And the experience is different. So you're 100% right. But what makes a marketplace different than, let's say, the group we just talked about where they're direct assisted, or the group we're going to talk about next, which is ecommerce solutions like Shopify. Marketplaces are different because their biggest feature, their biggest advantage, is that they spend money and time driving traffic to their marketplace.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: So it's great for discoverability. Which is what Amazon used to be. Great for discoverability.

Lauren: Right. Right.

Matt: So if you're... if you're okay doing some work to build your own little storefront area and you want to skip over that direct assisted experience because you want to benefit from some built -n traffic and market share, then you might want to try this step before going full blown, you know, Shopify or full customized store.

Lauren: This is a pretty solid hybrid step in, in the middle here. Where it's like you're still getting kind of some control and some, some remarketing opportunities, some opportunities to, you know, make the storefront your own, but also accessing an existing audience and existing traffic. You're not exclusively responsible for being the one to send traffic – and I absolutely, like me personally, Etsy is one of the places that I'll go to.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And like, just kind of browse and see and –

Matt: But that's one of the other benefits too, you just touched on.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: So, you know, the first bucket, you’re basically selling your book. With Etsy or some of these other marketplaces, you can sell multiple products, so you can sell your book, but you can also start dabbling with merch. If you write, you know, sci-fi and fantasy and, and you've got some, you know, character merch or things like that that you've been wanting to try. Or something to do with, you know, a world or a realm or whatever that might be, like. These are also great options to be able to sell multiple types of products in one storefront.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: One of the other differentiators here is that you have a couple of different options when you build an Etsy storefront. You can manually fulfill. And this is important to understand.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: If you're selling print and you choose to manually fulfill, it means it's your responsibility. So you'll need to order copies of your book ahead of time, and you'll need to have them on hand so that when you get an order, you can pack it and ship it. There are a lot of print-on-demand providers and other fulfillment companies that have built plugins and things for Etsy. And Lulu you can use on Etsy if you, if you create a zap on Zapier. So there are ways that you can also achieve automated fulfillment still using something like a marketplace like Etsy.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: And I just wanted to be clear on that because, you know, again, that first bucket is truly hands off. Books By, Stack, they have automated fulfillment tools that, that can, can help do that for you. And then digital delivery is obviously, you know, super simple. The important thing here is that as you get into this hybrid marketplaces, fulfillment is also a bit hybrid. You can choose to do manual, or you can choose from an assortment of, of providers that will plug in and do it for you.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Like Printful and Printify some of those others, they have plugins for Etsy where again, if you're going to sell merch or things like that, you can automate some of that stuff and make your life a little bit easier. I've not actually used one of those plugins on Etsy. I don't have an Etsy store. It's one of the ones I didn't necessarily try out. But I've, I've heard and seen from others that it is pretty easy. It's great, again, for people who they need some more discoverability, because maybe your email list is not very big and you've not been doing much advertising, and your social media game is a little weak. Any marketplace you can get yourself into that has built-in traffic and discoverability is going to be a huge help. So. Yeah. What were some of the other ones that you wanted to mention? The platforms?

Lauren: I think Fourthwall and Gumroad are both platforms –

Matt: Yup.

Lauren: – that could be, or marketplaces rather, that could be worth exploring. And I'm also going to throw TikTok Shop into the ring.

Matt: Yup. You have to, right?

Lauren: TikTok Shop is a huge –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – huge marketplace. But I also would – I would keep it almost separate from... Like, to me, TikTok Shop and Instagram are two different –

Matt: Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Lauren: – things. You know?

Matt: Yep.

Lauren: And I think that that is, it's kind of worth approaching as it's own thing.

Matt: That’s true.

Lauren: Even though it is hosted on a social media platform.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: I would almost approach it with a different mindset.

Matt: I agree. Because it also has a lot of different rules and stuff too.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: And it's really very much confined to its own ecosystem. Whereas some of these others you can, you know, kind of drive traffic and play with it and like, TikTok Shop is its own thing.

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: Like, there's no going outside of the ecosystem. And even within that ecosystem, they have a lot of somewhat confusing rules around fulfillment and some other things. So be careful with that one. But absolutely.

Lauren: Yeah, you do have to – We see people selling books on TikTok all the time.

Matt: Of course.

Lauren: And you absolutely can.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: But you probably do have to, have to do your own manual fulfillment on that in order to –

Matt: Yes and no

Lauren: – stay within the confines of their fulfillment rules.

Matt: That's where a lot of the arguments are, like they –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: They do have some rules. Just be aware of that. Do your research, do your homework. But yeah, I won't go any further on that one.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: That could be a whole episode in and of itself.

Lauren: It probably will be at some point.

Matt: Don’t get any ideas. No. No, it should be. We'll see.

Lauren: We'll talk about it at some point.

Matt: We’ll flip for that one.

Lauren: Okay.

Matt: Or we'll play like, some Uno or something. I'm really good at Uno.

Lauren: Yeah. I had a feeling you were good – the fact that you pulled that out, I was like, wait, I'm – you’re setting me up to lose here.

Matt: So again, pros and cons to marketplaces. You have a built in audience. You know, there's already traffic coming to it. There's people like Lauren surfing around looking for weird gothic stuff and might stumble across your book. Somewhat easy set up and management. Again, you know, they've been doing this a long time, so to set up an Etsy store is not rocket science. It's not complicated. Like the others you’re gonna pay for some platform use or, or things like that. So not a big deal. You're going to be limited in customization and personalization and, you know, things like that. Like Etsy is not going to let you go crazy with the color palette or, you know, uploading a ton of photos of yourself or, you know, there's not a huge About You section, but that's okay. Again, limited control over customer data and relationship data. You might get some. You won't get all of it. But any little bit is helpful.

Lauren: Yeah. Which is why, again, we said this is kind of like a hybrid or a bridge solution here.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Where like, this is not completely selling direct in the sense that you have unlimited access to, to collect –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – any and all customer data. But there is still that like, you have the opportunity to build some kind of direct relationship with your customers.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: That are shopping on Etsy or any of the other marketplaces.

Matt: Yeah. And again, it's, it's one step closer to, to more of an, an owned channel, right? Like, you know, again, we're never going to convince people not to use Amazon.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: But our goal is to, convince people not to send hard-earned traffic and customers to Amazon. Let Amazon send customers to you. That's the, the, the real play. So you know, in this scenario, again, you don't get to keep all customer data and things like that. But you're going to get some of it. And if you're going to drive customers somewhere, drive them here instead of Amazon.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: You know what I mean? Here you have a better chance of being able to remarket to them, to get them over to more of an owned instance when you're ready for that, whether that's a Shopify store or something else. Or at least get them onto your mailing list so that you can begin remarketing other titles and stuff like that. So I do think it's a great bridge, you know, to go from somewhat owned to fully owned. Which is the next bucket we'll talk about.

Lauren: Sure is.

[19:47] - Using Ecommerce Plugins

Matt: So we've talked about direct assisted platforms. We've talked about marketplace platforms. Next bucket is...what?

Lauren: Ecommerce.

Matt: That's our favorite.

Lauren: That's – obviously you've heard us talk about this one once or twice.

Matt: You're probably tired of hearing us talk about this.

Lauren: I'm tired of talking about it.

Matt: Are you really?

Lauren: Absolutely not.

Matt: I hope not, cause you’re talking about it in London in a couple of weeks.

Lauren: Wow. It is in a couple of weeks.

Matt: Yep. I don't think I've even shared the online with you yet, have I?

Lauren: You sent me the, the description doc and that was it.

Matt: Oh yeah.

Lauren: I have the like, the one paragraph summary.

Matt:We'll just get up there winging it. It’s what we always do.

Lauren: Sounds good. It’s fine. It’s fine.

Matt: Ecommerce solutions.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: These are our favorites. These are Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce. There’re others. We focus on those three because they tend to be the easiest, most robust platforms. But there's others that are coming up. There are others that are already out there, they're just a little more abstract. I think a lot of people use… What’s it called, ThriveCart?

Lauren: ThriveCart. Yes. Which actually does have, I learned this very recently. ThriveCart, on their website, actually does have instructions for how to integrate Lulu's API to ThriveCart.

Matt: Whoa.

Lauren: And our API team is aware of that.

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: And they said it is actually like pretty, like their, their instructions are actually like pretty good.

Matt: There you go.

Lauren: – if you're somebody who wants to use our API solutions and ThriveCart is kind of your bridge for that, that is an option. We already said Zapier for – or Zapier, or whatever for –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – like, if, if that's, if you want to connect to Lulu Direct, but it's not one, like your website is built on a platform that isn't one of the three –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – that we have plugins for, they – there are ways to work around this.

Matt: If you have an existing website. That's right.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: We've talked about this before, like Justin Moore, he uses Framer. That's the, the website platform that he uses. But he used the API.

Lauren: I know a lot of people –

Matt: Because we didn’t have a plugin for Framer.

Lauren: Right. And Square is the other one that a lot of people that I've spoken to, that's been kind of a roadblock for them. That their website is already built on Square, but you can work around that.

Matt: Yup.

Lauren: It’s gonna take a little bit of effort on your part. You might need to outsource it to somebody with a little more like, tech savvy than you, but it is still doable.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Absolutely. We actually talked about – we did an episode a while back, episode 31, that was Your 7 Step Guide to Building an Online Bookstore. And we broke down a lot of the... I mean, seven steps, obviously. But we broke down really like a lot of what you need, specifically, to actually build an ecommerce store. Whether you're building your website from scratch or plugging any of these solutions into your existing site.

Matt: It's probably all still valid, I would imagine.

Lauren: I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure it is. We'll link it in the show notes. And if we figure out that it is, that there's any outdated information in there, maybe we rerecord it. Updated.

Matt: Maybe.

Lauren: Maybe.

Matt: You're, you're just reaching for job security now.

Lauren: We – you know what we actually should have done? With episode 101, we should have just started back from zero.

Matt: Started rerecording them all?

Lauren: And just – Yup. Just completely redid like, beat for beat every episode.

Matt: That's a strategy. Probably not one we want to employ, but.

Lauren: No, probably not.

Matt: Ecommerce solutions. So this is the... This is the only way to get a true direct sales experience from end to end.

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: But it obviously brings with it, you know, a lot of work.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: It's fairly easy to get one of these up and running. But continuing to build and expand upon that. Adding more titles, adding more shipping regions, it's, it's work. It's not terribly hard, but it is work, and... It's beneficial. I mean, there's no better way to control the customer experience from beginning to end and grow your business and capture all that data. Realize 100%, you know, profit margin. Or profits, I should say. If you got 100% profit margin, that's great too. But, it's really the only way to do it. Obviously, like we just talked about, you can also just have a site and use our APIs. But the point is having more of an owned space where... You know, again, on a marketplace, they have final say.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: You know, you could wake up the next morning, tomorrow morning and realize that somehow or another one of your books violated the terms and services of, of Etsy, and they, they were upset about your gay hockey romance fling novel and they decided to shut you down. They have that power. I don't know that they would, but they do. When you have your own space, nobody can really tell you what to do with that. And it's pretty much yours.

Lauren: Yeah. This is the only way to have complete ownership and complete control over your ecommerce. Your store, your customer experience, whatever it is that you want to do, this is the only solution. And yes, it is definitely the one – of the, the three different things that we've talked about here, it's definitely the one that requires the most work. But just like we talked about in the episode that we did recently on moving from manual to automated fulfillment, this is a thing that requires work upfront so that you can build out workflows that are going to run themselves. So it's work at the beginning –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – that is going to ultimately make your day to day easier in the long run.

Matt: Yeah. And again, so if you started with one of the other two solutions, whether it was like a Books By site or an Etsy store, and you realized like, this is, this is definitely for me. This is what I want to do. This is your next step.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: To build something more permanent and automated. You know, you can set it and forget it and make money while you sleep type of deal. And then just maintain and make updates to your store as you get new titles, or you want to release in new geographic areas, things like that. I look at it as like a, almost a LEGOs approach. Like, you know, Shopify or Wix or Woo is the, the foundation. It's the, the flat plate. And then each of the things that you need, you just plug – They have plugins for everything, you know? So Lulu, for all your print-on-demand and fulfillment stuff. They have plugins for doing your taxes, plugins for email marketing, plugins for social media marketing. You can build basically an entirely automated little ecommerce empire. And again, yeah, it takes some time, but you just do a little bit at a time and before you know it... again, you've got a full blown business that, for the most part, is primarily automated. And I think that's really cool. Like that's my favorite part about that. So that's why I get so excited about Shopify stuff.

Lauren: This is why we'll never get tired of talking about ecommerce solutions and –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – direct sales and selling direct and all of that. I also totally

Matt: I'll tell you one thing though.

Lauren: Yeah?

Matt: It's not to say that Shopify doesn't their issues. I mean –

Lauren: Sure.

Matt: – Shopify’s not perfect, but no platform is.

Lauren: No.

Matt: I'm not paid by Shopify, unless they want to come stroked me a check, I won't turn it away. But I have found after playing with a lot of them, and obviously we, you know, have built integrations for several of them, that Shopify tends to be the easiest, most widely sort of used. And they're just continually updating and building new things. That being said, Shopify is also notorious at times for, you know, changing their, their policies or pricing sometimes. Nothing that I've seen so far has led me to be like, screw you guys, I'm out of here. But, you know, if you do some research, you're going to see some of those things. Just know that that's normal. They all do it. I think Shopify is probably the best of them, in my opinion, but I know other people have had really good experiences with Wix, WooCommerce, and even some of the others like Thrivecart and a few of the others we've talked about.

Lauren: Yeah, I think that's a really, that's a really fair point, when you're looking at these different options, whether it's any of these like, higher level solutions or the individual options within them. Make sure that you're kind of comparing some of the options on the different platforms if you're turned off by something. So if –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – you’re looking at it and you're saying like, oh, well this one costs money to use... they all cost money to use. What they cost – maybe there is one that's, that's more affordable than the other ones, but all of these there is going to be some kind of access fee, subscription fee.

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: Like, platform hosting fee, whatever it is. So, you know, if you're immediately like turned away by like, oh, well, this one, this one I have to pay for, what can I go find that's a free solution? You might not find a free solution.

Matt: And by the way, for everybody that’s listening and goes, well, it's free to sell on Amazon. No it's not.

Lauren: No it’s not.

Matt: That's why you walk away with a dollar or two for every copy you sell. Because they're taking everything else.

Lauren: Yeah, it's just built in.

Matt: That's right. So, we get that all the time, where it's like, why would I sell direct when I can sell for free on Amazon? You're not selling for free on Amazon. At all. They're taking your customer and they're taking eighty to eighty-five percent of your royalties, like. So. Just choose your poison. You know?

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: And quite frankly, $39 a month for Shopify, in my opinion, as long as you're selling, you know, multiple copies of your book every month or more, it's nothing. That is nothing to have such a robust, like, home base, to own your business and be able to move, you know, quite frankly, globally from there.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: In a very easy sort of way. So. What are the pros and cons of ecommerce solutions?

Lauren: I mean, we've covered a lot of them already.

Matt: That’s true.

Lauren: There's, there's definitely the, you know, having that access to your customer data. Which, you have unlimited access – I mean, you have unlimited access to what you're asking for, or what you, what you can potentially get from them. You know, you're not, you're not gonna just get a dossier with everyone's first name, last name, address, phone number, credit card, social security number, and everything else in between. But you have the opportunity to collect emails, collect addresses, whatever it is, that you might not have on some of those other options. You also, when you're selling on your own store versus selling on a marketplace, are not competing with other stores. You know? There is that element, in the same way – And I know it's, we've, we've talked about, we literally just said when you're selling on Amazon, you're competing with other products and other stores. Yes, that is true on marketplaces as well. You are competing with the other store owners on there. But you have to weigh like, does the discoverability element outweigh the competition? And there are absolutely ways to make yourself stand out from the competition –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: But in an ecommerce solution, there is no competition. It's just you. Once you've gotten them to your website, there's no one else there that can get their attention.

Matt: Yeah, and that's the goal.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: For sure. Ecommerce solutions, like we said, they do require some, some more extensive setup. You are going to be responsible for building out your shipping regions and stuff like that. But there's a lot of great help articles on, on Shopify and Wix and Woo that'll help you with that. Lulu has a lot of resources around that. We have an onboarding team here that they're pretty much experts in that stuff too. So there are resources. There's solutions there to help you. Like, I wouldn't let that deter you. I do know that a lot of people, they hit that point where they have to start building their shipping regions or messing with taxes, and they get freaked out and they just don't. They don't move forward, they stop. But it really isn't that bad. If you just push through and you get your hands on the resources, it's not that bad at all.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: And once you get it done, you can have a really great store. And again, yeah, there's, there's fees and things. So, you know, generally the lowest plan on Shopify is $39 a month. And I think Wix and WooCommerce are very similar in price. And that basically includes everything you need to have a fully functioning, you know, website in store. They'll process transactions for you. And then the money just goes right into your account.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: That's the other beauty of it as well. You know, when you're selling on retailers like Amazon or even through Ingram, and some of the other channels, you have to wait sixty days minimum for your money.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: Sometimes more. When you are doing ecommerce and some of the marketplaces and some of the direct assisted. So all three of the buckets we've talked about. You're going to get that money within a matter of forty-eight to seventy-two hours, sometimes faster. In my Shopify store, the money's there almost immediately. I think technically they have to tell you between twenty-four and seventy-two hours, but I've never had a book sale on my Shopify store where the money wasn't in there immediately. You know, like, it's, it's that simple. And then that's what I connect my production to. So when somebody buys a book on my Shopify store, the order gets transmitted to Lulu. I have my Shopify card on file with Lulu. So the same account that the book money went into, the full retail price, the shipping and everything, that's where Lulu's pulling the production cost out of. All the profit is still left in my account, so I'm just paying the manufacturing out of that. So I'm literally no money up front, no money out of pocket. My entire operation is completely automated. I can sell books and make money while I'm sleeping.

Lauren: Wow, you're really good at this.

Matt: Took a long time to figure out.

Lauren: That you're good at this?

Matt: No, that – to figure out how to do it.

Lauren: Nah, you've been doing this for longer than that. Because we did a whole episode on how direct sales actually work. So going through that.

Matt: That's right, yeah.

Lauren: And not just on like building out your store, but that actually like, how do the sales and transactions work from end to end and stuff like that? I'll link that one in the show notes too, if you want to dive deeper into the, the process that Matt just talked about.

Matt: Yeah.

[33:43] - Choosing the Right Solution for You

Lauren: So we've covered the three different kind of options here, for how you're going to go about managing your direct sales, choosing which solution is right for you. Let's actually talk about how to actually go ahead and choose which of those paths.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Which is hopefully what it says on the title of this episode. So we should probably cover that a little bit.

Matt: So I think there's two approaches here. You can take the Lauren approach, and create a spreadsheet and a matrix with columns for how much control do you want, how much time do you want to spend building it, how much money do you invest, you know? And go on down the list of all the things that are important to you. And then down this side, you can put all the different, platforms or, you know, marketplaces, platforms, all of those things. And you can go through and do a full blown matrix, if you will. Or you can do the Matt solution, which is just whichever one your gut tells you you'll actually follow through with.

Lauren: Both of those are great, great options. You know, those logic puzzles that are the like –

Matt: Yes.

Lauren: – would, I'm sure it wouldn't surprise you to know that as a kid, I loved those.

Matt: It would not surprise me to know that you loved those.

Lauren: It would not surprise you at all.

Matt: Nope.

Lauren: But yes, there are definitely – and, and I think that in all three of these there is kind of... it's like a spectrum of, you know, what matters to you, which things matter more than others. You know, in some cases, if you're like, I don't really care about controlling the aesthetic or branding. Like, I'm fine using whatever template is provided for me, or I am fine with my storefront looking the same as everyone else's, then that's lower on your list of priorities. For some people that branding, having that like, complete creative control where it is, it is like part of your ecosystem in every way possible and looks indistinguishable from everything else about your brand, then that's much higher up on your priority list, and you want to make sure that you choose an option that allows you complete custom and creative control. So I think the the three main questions that you want to ask yourself are: How much control do you want? How much time and or money do you want to invest? And how important is owning customer data and the customer experience to you?

Matt: For me it was easy.

Lauren: Yeah?

Matt: I wanted full control.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: And I wanted all my customer data. And I wasn't overly concerned about my investment of time and or money. So like I said, I went with my gut and I just knew that those things were – That's what was important to me, and those were some of the other things that weren't so important to me. So I that's why I went the Shopify route. But I do agree, I think when, when you're sitting down to plan out which path you want to try for direct sales, those are probably the most important things you could ask. Cause I think for most people, when they don't think about it that way and they don't understand these different types of paths that you have, they just jump right in to what is probably most commonly talked about. You know, Shopify or some of the others. And they're not prepared, I think, for sometimes the level of time it might take or financial investment for certain things. For me it was, again, a no brainer. I think those are, those are the important questions to ask, you’re right.

Lauren: Yeah. I think it's also not necessarily a question, but something that's important to keep in mind while you're going through this is that immediate solutions are only good for the short term. You want to think about something that is going to grow with your business. You want to think about scalability. You want to think about, you know, something that hopefully, if your goal is to build a long term business strategy here, you want something that's going to last. You want something that five years from now, your business has grown exponentially, and your tech stack or your ecommerce solutions or whatever have grown with you. Like, keep that goal in mind – and if, and – it's okay if the answer is genuinely like, no, I want to sell this one book that I have, and I just want a quick and easy ecommerce solution to sell this one book. It's a part of a bigger ecosystem, but it's just the one book and I don't really care about like, building an empire out of this. I just want a good solution, a simple solution that'll let me sell this one book. That's great. You can do that. But if your goal is is long term growth and scalability, that should be a factor that you consider while you're deciding on your solutions here.

Matt: Yeah. And again, you know, it could be a graduated approach. You can start with a Books By site or a Stack site. You could then go on and start incorporating, you know, some marketplace presence like, you know, Etsy or one of these others. And the whole time behind the scenes, you could be building out a Shopify store and getting ready to launch like your full scale, fully direct, fully branded, you know, experience. And some people do that.

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: And, you know, once you launch that, you can slowly taper out the other two if you want. Or leave them in play for a while, it just depends. But. Yeah. So I think you said that upfront. You know, it doesn't have to be an either or necessarily, it can be a this and then a this and then a that for a total thing. Right? That's how I do math.

Lauren: That's perfect.

Matt: Maths.

Lauren: But yes, I agree, I actually think that framing this as choosing which path is right for you might actually kind of be a trick. A trick statement –

Matt: No, I – I think for –

Lauren: – because I think that all roads lead to the same place in the end.

Matt: Maybe, yeah. But I do think some people need a very distinct path to start with.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: I just wanted to make the point that, you know, similar to what you said, ultimately your goal should be to get to a fully owned state. Unless you're one of those one out of ten who, again, like you said, is just looking to sell this book. No bells and whistles, not even like your big thing. Like you just – and that's okay. So.

Lauren: Yeah.

[40:12] - Stocking Your Toolkit

Matt: Yeah. Now, we did touch on a few other things. Especially when you, when you think about – I like when you say tech stack, I think more appropriately your ecom stack is what we're talking about.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: When you decide to head that path, or if you decide that is the path for you, or it's just the end goal is to get to a place where you're building a Shopify store, a Wix store, or something like that, a true ecommerce storefront. There's a lot of tools and plugins that you can build into that to build your ecommerce stack. Your most important should be your email list.

Lauren: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean it's a, it's an essential part of this. If for no other reason than the fact that the whole point of selling direct is to have that customer data, and be able to remarket to them, and to be able to speak to them directly. And you can't do that if you don't have an email system.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So you absolutely need to have an email service provider. A lot of these solutions will also let you, connect to your ESP directly to them for the things like the transactional emails –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – that you'll be sending.

Matt: Yup.

Lauren: So that you have things like your cart abandonment or your post-purchase follow ups, things like that. So if you already have something and if you're using something like MailChimp or Klaviyo or Kit or whatever, you can plug those right into your...

Matt: There's so many of them.

Lauren: Yeah, there's, there's – truly, there's so many.

Matt: And they all basically pretty much will work.

Lauren: Yes. And they all have, you know, they all have different, different levels in terms of what they offer you. They all – some of them are much more entry-level than others. Some of them are very scalable. Some of them very expensive, some of them very cheap. So definitely do your research on those.

Matt: Email is your most important one.

Lauren: But yes, if you're – yes.

Matt: Social media, there's no guarantee that people are going to see your posts. You could do website ads, you can do all kinds of other things. The only way to guarantee that somebody will have access to your message is if it lands in their inbox.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: Or their mailbox, their physical mailbox. Now, as to whether or not they're going to open that email, that's up to you and how clever you are. But email marketing is still the number one way to communicate with your buyer, reader, customer, whatever you want to refer to them as. That's why it is the most important channel to start building as soon as you can. Even before you have a website if possible. Like start, start building an email list as soon as you can.

Lauren: I had this conversation recently at Momentum and I was asking Paul Gowder and Jeff Sieh and Lou and everybody there like – What, you know, how soon in, in like launching a content channel, if I know that, like, I'm not right away gonna be sending emails to people, but I know eventually I probably will. At what point do I want to start collecting emails? And they were like –

Matt: Yesterday.

Lauren: – literally day one. Like, you don't you don't launch a content channel without having a way to collect emails at the same time. Even if it takes you a year to send your first email to anybody. Day one.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And they know what they're talking about. So I take their word for it.

Matt: Yeah, I would agree with that.

Lauren: Yes. There are also a lot of solutions that you can use to help you with customer relationships and customer relationship development. And I'm kind of using that as a, as a catch-all for a number of different things. A lot of people that are selling direct are bundling that into some kind of subscription. So if you're using a paid subscription platforms like Shopify subscriptions, ThriveCart also has a subscriptions thing, Gumroad also has one. Which is not to be confused with something like memberships.

Matt: Right.

Lauren: Which would be more like those community-based platforms like Mighty Networks or Patreon, Memberful, Kit, Circle. All of those like, have all these things built in there.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And then I do also like, we don't talk a whole lot about customer support solutions. We've done an episode on this, one or two, where we've talked about, you know, providing manual customer support. But there are also tools that you can integrate to help you out with that as well. Some of them are directly within the different – like Shopify or, Gorgias? Gorgias. I'm not sure how to pronounce it.

Matt: I think you said it right.

Lauren: But has – is a Shopify integration that you can help manage your customer support on there. There's also, Re:amaze has a Shopify integration and also a social integration. So you can connect your like DMs.

Matt: The social one would be extremely helpful.

Lauren: Yes, absolutely. So you know, depending on on what type of customer relationship you're trying to build, whether it's subscription, membership, support, whatever, there are absolutely tools and plugins that can help you out with that.

Matt: Yeah. Another one is, is automations, workflows. So for those of you that are a little more advanced in building out your tech stack, your ecommerce stack, and you're already experimenting with creating automations for yourself and workflows. There are lots of tools, platforms that you can use for that. Zapier. Zapier is one it's probably been around for I’d say the longest so far. I mean, that I can think of anyways.

Lauren: Yeah, we should probably figure out how to pronounce...

Matt: But there's a lot of other newer ones that are also incorporating a lot of AI. So Make and Bolt and a few others will help you automate different activities and workflows that again, you can truly be hands off once you get all these things set up, and... Automation and workflows really refers to things, you know, an order workflow, for example, or a customer service workflow. If you get an email that comes in to, let's say, info@Laurensdisneyexperience.com, you could have an automation or a workflow set up where that that email triggers a certain thing to happen. And then what happens is an AI agent will kick in and respond to that email and create a ticket or whatever, you know. So depending on your level of support or the other things that you're doing, some of these automations and workflows could be really helpful. The obvious ones, again, are your fulfillment automations and workflows using like Lulu Direct and stuff like that. So.

Lauren: Yeah. Disney, that's not a real email. Please don't sue me for copyright infringement.

Matt: That would be funny if you got a cease and desist.

Lauren: Hey, it meant they were paying attention to us.

Matt: Oh that's fair. Who knows? Analytics.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: You know, you don't necessarily need a special tool for analytics per se. At least not in the beginning, until you get to a point where you might want to build out some more complex dashboards and things to, to grow and scale your business. I think for most people, what's internal to the platforms you're using is usually good enough. Shopify has some pretty good metrics and analytics built in. I've not found myself yet going, I wish they would show me this, or how can I get more of this? But if you're one who's actually putting some effort into driving traffic to your, your website and some other locations, you may want to, you know, use Google Analytics and plug in with that, although GA4 is not so great. But whatever, you do you. I think for the most part, all of the platforms have their proprietary built in metrics, and for the most part, they're okay. Again, if you wanted to get really technical about it and build yourself a way to integrate all those platform metrics into one dashboard, you – there are lots of tools out there, AI generated stuff that you could get your hands on that would give you a nice, neat and tidy dashboard from all your – So if you're using Shopify and Lulu Direct and, you know, Kit for email and all these other things, you could probably build yourself, you know, an all encompassing dashboard that just piped all your metrics into one place.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: But for the most part, I think what the tools provide is good.

Lauren: Yeah. So this was actually in the reverse of the way the rest of this episode was set up. This whole bit was set up in order from highest priority to lowest priority. So if you are putting together your tech stack or ecommerce stack or whatever you want to call it, your solutions, your tool kit, whatever. Number one priority, after you secure your actual sales options, whatever, is email. And then I – and I would say as you’re, if you're running through that list and saying, okay what do I need for this, what do I need for this, what do I need for this? Analytics, you probably don't need anything. Realistically.

Matt: Beyond what you have.

Lauren: Beyond what you – Right.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah.

Lauren: Like, you already have access to everything you need. If you want to get really granular or really, really robust, then maybe look into some additional tools for that. But I would start with what you already have.

Matt: Yeah

Lauren: For sure.

Matt: Yeah, I agree with that. Again, I've not had any point where I was like, man, I wish I had more of this. So.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah.

[49:36] - Episode Wrap Up

Matt: Gosh, I had something I was going to say and now I can't remember what it was. What are you reading right now?

Lauren: I'm actually. I have two different holds that I am next on the list from Libby right now, but.

Matt: Oh my god. Just go buy the book.

Lauren: Well. I really was looking specifically for an audiobook. Because I have a lot of like – we're about to be traveling a lot.

Matt: That's true.

Lauren: Starting with this upcoming weekend. So I have a lot of like, packing and prep and stuff that I have to do. So audiobooks are great for that. And the audiobook that I'm waiting for right now is in Enshittification by Cory Doctorow.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So I'm hoping to get that. Like, if I could get that today or tomorrow, that would be great.

Matt: Just go buy it.

Lauren: The audiobook?

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Eh. We'll see.

Matt: I can't – nevermind.

Lauren: I try not to buy audiobooks unless I know it's one I'm gonna re-listen to.

Matt: So Christoph had mentioned that to me. That one. And then Caleb Dempsey had also posted about it on LinkedIn. And that's one that I've got on my list, I haven’t got to it yet, but.

Lauren: Yeah, I'll let you know if it's good.

Matt: Yeah. I've heard several people say it was pretty good.

Lauren: Yeah. I was actually, I was in Quail Ridge over the weekend and they had it on their Staff Picks shelf too. So somebody, one of the staff members there had also –

Matt: Maybe I'll just go pick it up there. Actually, I'll be over by Quail Ridge tonight. Yeah. Maybe I'll stop by there and grab it.

Lauren: Do it. Worth it. What are you reading?

Matt: I just finished a book by John Dickson Carr. He's a murder mystery writer. I'm still on that kick. This one was set in London, old London, which is really cool.

Lauren: Fun.

Matt: It was called The Lost Gallows. But now I'm back to, I got my other – So I had run out of books by Seishi Yokomizo.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: But Pushkin has translated and published a few more, so I had to order those off Bookshop and they finally came. So I'm going to jump back into one of those.

Lauren: Great.

Matt: Yeah. There's three more and they've got another one they're translating that's going to get released in June, I think. So as long as they –

Lauren: Well you better slow down.

Matt: Well. He wrote like seventy-seven of these.

Lauren: I know, you said.

Matt: So I'm hoping that Pushkin got the rights to all of them, to translate all of them. But we'll see.

Lauren: I don't think I have any friends at Pushkin, but.

Matt: Maybe I'll make some in London Book Fair.

Lauren: Yeah that’s – I feel like that's, that's your in.

Matt: Oh, man. That's that's. Listen kids, that's the importance to rights. Like foreign rights.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: I don't care what language you write your books in, you never know when they're going to get discovered at one point in time and who's going to want to translate them and get hooked on reading them. So, I mean, I never thought I would have fallen into Japanese murder mystery as much as I have, but.

Lauren: And you never could have if it wasn't for –

Matt: Exactly.

Lauren: – translated editions being available to you.

Matt: Yeah. So shout out to Pushkin, again.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Or Pushkin Vertigo, whatever.

Lauren: If you, if that's, if that sparked your interest in any way shape or form, we did do an episode on international book rights about a year ago.

Matt: Foreign rights.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah.

Lauren: So.

Matt: Less than a year ago.

Lauren: Yeah. Because it was right after London Book Fair last year. So.

Matt: Shortly after, yeah.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: And we have a partnership with DropCap actually. So if you're an indie published author, DropCap is the only place that has a marketplace for you as an indie published author where you can go and sign up and have your book put in their marketplace for foreign publishers to find it. Justin Moore did that and almost immediately after signing up with DropCap... I think had a Taiwan publisher purchase the rights.

Lauren: Wow.

Matt: And I think he has another one interested. But yeah, anyways. So did Louis and a few others, actually.

Lauren: Cool.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah.

Lauren: Cool. Alright, yeah. Well, check that out. I'll link that in the show notes.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And some other resources too. So help yourself. Everything's going to be there. Of course, you can always just tune in next week to another new episode where we'll talk about something else. Until then, please like and subscribe if you haven't already. You can check us out on any of Lulu’s social channels, on YouTube. You can leave comments on Spotify, reviews on Apple Podcasts. And you can email us at podcast@lulu.com.

Matt: That's correct.

Lauren: Yeah. So thanks for listening everyone.

Matt: Later.

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Lauren

Lauren is the Content & Community Manager and co-host of Publish & Prosper, Lulu’s publishing, ecommerce, and marketing podcast.

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