Website sales for every Author Ecosystem

Webstores and landing pages are an essential component of a direct sales business and critical in building a thriving ecosystem.

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Website sales are as simple as they are complicated. Webstores, for instance, are the thing most associated with direct sales in the author community. Anyone who has read our work or heard us talk knows that’s utter nonsense, but Shopify specifically has done a great job convincing people that if you have a webstore then you are doing direct sales, and otherwise you’re not doing it at all, even if you run Kickstarters, manage a successful Ream/Patreon/Substack, and attend conventions.

Interestingly enough, webstores aren’t even the only type of direct sales you can have on your website. You can host landing pages on your website without ever having a webstore. I’ve seen people run crowdfunding campaigns and subscriptions on their websites. I’ve even seen people host virtual conventions there as well.

For our purposes, though, we’re going to be talking about the two main types of website sales; webstores and landing pages.

Webstores are webpages where you list your work for sale in a catalog, like Amazon, but with direct access to your readers.

While services like Shopify, Payhip, Gumroad, and Woocommerce are most often associated with webstore sales, we also consider sites like Etsy to be webstore sales. Even though an Etsy store doesn’t exactly exist on your website, the functionality of how you set one up and the methodology about how you succeed is similar enough that we’re squeezing them together. Additionally, a site like Teachable that lists multiple courses would also be considered a webstore.

As long as you have direct access to the customer, then we consider it direct sales. If, however, you sell on a site that doesn’t give you direct access to your customers, then we would consider that retailer or catalog sales. Still good, just a different thing.

Landing pages, by contrast, don’t usually list multiple products, but present one compelling offer to customers for a single product. A landing page might look like a Bookfunnel page asking you to opt-in to join your mailing list. You could also set one up on Clickfunnel or OptimizePress to sell a product.

A landing page could be set up to run consistently, or it could be a special offer only available for a limited time. Just like with webstores, you might not set up a landing page on your own website or you might create a subdomain that acts like it was built into your webpage while exists somewhere else entirely.

Personally, I use Payhip for my webstore and OptimizePress to build most of my landing pages for Wannabe Press, augmented by Themify and Elementor, which we use at WriterMBA to create most of our sites. While my personal website is more complicated than just a single page, our company websites are almost all landing pages set up to drive sales to one of our products.

We’ll be talking about both today, as depending on your ecosystem you might have more success with one than the other.

Desert

Advantages: Deserts are optimization machines, so they will get the most from running cold traffic ads to their webstore and/or landing pages. While they can have success with both, Deserts are probably the only ecosystem that has a reasonable chance of making a profit on a webstore through cold traffic advertising.

Why? Because tedious optimization is their jam and that’s the only way to succeed with cold traffic advertising directed at a webstore.

For every other ecosystem, they should focus on running traffic to a landing page (if they run traffic at all), but because Deserts tend to have big backlists and their customers are so used to the retailer experience, they can have success with cold traffic advertising.

Additionally, while we usually recommend authors not try to mimic Amazon and focus their store on selling bundles unavailable on every other site, Deserts should do the opposite and try to mimic the Amazon experience as much as possible, and focus on cross-selling and upselling people into more expensive offers. This is because Deserts are aiming at the middle of the road, quick sale, impulse buy customer, and those readers highly value ease of use.

Because of the complicated nature of what Deserts are setting up, they are also the only ecosystem where using Shopify makes complete sense. Features like browser intent, where you can retarget visitors without anyone signing up, the ability to use ShopPay to streamline the checkout process, and other advanced features make it a no-brainer to spend $100+/mo for all the bells and whistles.

If you are thinking about Shopify, it really only makes sense if you’re going to be running advertising traffic to your webstore.

Additionally, we’ve seen Deserts have great success with optimizing landing pages, specifically for series, especially if they don’t have a huge catalog. Deserts are going to be able to pour over the data and make very specific and meticulous changes to their site, like changing the color of a button to increase conversions, most of the other ecosystems aren’t going to have the stomach or fortitude to do.

Challenges: Deserts are the most likely to jump on tactics that produce short-term gain. Because they love taking advantage of arbitrage while it exists, they will fall down all sorts of rabbit holes if they are not careful, which could lead their ads to be marked as spam and their tactics frowned upon by advertisers. Even though we don’t often see this with Deserts and retailer sales, we have seen it multiple times when Deserts transition their attention to direct sales.

The key to direct sales is consistency over time, and Deserts like to hop from one thing to the next. With direct sales, your goal is to set up something that works for a while, so make sure to chill out a bit. Don’t chase every gold rush that comes along even if you can, and try to set up your business for the long term.

Grassland

Advantages: The secret advantage of Grasslands revolves around creating a lot of little hooks back to their work all around the internet, so a smart Grassland will focus on setting up series landing pages and bundles of their work that they can constantly point back to while they're creating content. At the very least, every time you speak or write a post you should have a link to a relevant opt-in that allows you to gather email addresses.

This can be in the form of a cheat sheet, an email course, an ebook, or just about anything designed to get people to your website to sign up. Then, after they sign up, you should have an autoresponder set up to indoctrinate people into your ecosystem and offer them something to buy that is relevant to their interests.

Perhaps somebody signed up to read the first book in your series for free, and now you are giving them a special offer to purchase the rest of the series at a discount, or perhaps you have a cheat sheet on setting up a 401k and you have a landing page offer to do somebody’s taxes for 50% off their first year.

Grasslands are experts at providing value and building goodwill, but they need to be better at not only telling people what they do, but offering them something to buy. As for webstores, you’ll probably be fine with a Gumroad or Payhip store that doesn’t charge a monthly fee since you won’t likely be running advertising to it.

It’s very important for a Grassland to have all their work available on their website so people can buy when they are ready. I also recommend putting together special bundles with additional content people can’t get anywhere else so that it encourages people to buy.

Challenges: Grasslands don’t love standing up and saying “Did you know you could buy this?” So, they are very likely to set up the free part of this system and then completely neglect the indoctrination and sales funnel part that tries to extract value from all their hard work. I know Monica and I have been guilty of this, especially while overstressed.

It’s great that you keep building those hooks, but we have to turn those hooks into money, which means setting up your landing pages and a webstore so that people know what they can buy. It’s very different knowing all about psychological triggers and using them effectively in your business.

Tundra

Advantages: Tundras traffic in excitement and there’s not a ton exciting about a webstore. So, I think most Tundras, myself included, find them boring. One way I’ve added some excitement to my webstore is to fill it with exclusives and bundles readers can’t get anywhere else.

For instance, I’ve got about a dozen books available on my webstore that you can only find on my website. So, when readers come to my webstore and see all sorts of new things they can read, they get all sorts of excited.

Additionally, I offer bundles for all my series that include audio commentary and/or AI-read audiobooks that they can’t get anywhere else. I’m really trying to delight people with my webstore and give them something unique to convince them to buy from my site instead of a retailer.

I have also set up series landing pages for both my major series that includes a one-time offer people can get when they first join my mailing list. While my Godsverse Chronicles is usually $50, I offer it for $20 to new subscribers for the first few days after they join to help encourage people to start reading early.

I also get a lot of value from “special offer” landing pages. Earlier this year I offered a hardcover copy of Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter volume 1 to people for free if they paid shipping and handling. Then, I offered several upsells which ended up making me good money even giving the first book for free.

These are three ways I’ve been able to use my website between Kickstarter campaigns to keep the excitement level high and delight readers.

Challenges: All of that is great, but you also need the slow boring work of having things on your webstore and allowing people to buy them. Yes, you need special offers and bundles, but you should also make it easy to buy less expensive things in your store, too, if you want to maximize your money. Even somebody picking up a free book is being taught to buy from your website instead of Amazon.

Tundras want everything to be exciting, which is great, but they shoot themselves in the foot by forcing everything to be these grand spectacles where a lot of selling books is the slow, boring work of adding a few dollars here and there every day of the month and every month of the year.

Forest

Advantages: Forests love doting on their biggest fans, so the best thing that a Forest can do with their webstore is the exact opposite of what a Desert does with theirs. Deserts are looking to match Amazon as possible, while Forests would benefit from filling their webstore with as much exclusive merch as they can find. Whether it’s merch, special editions, merch, or exclusive offers, a Forest webstore should be a way for fans to fall deeper in love with the characters they love.

While I don’t think it’s a bad idea to have your regular books available on your webstore, they could drown out your exclusive offers, which is where your webstore will shine. If you’re using a site like Shopify, then make sure every offer is cross-selling or upselling another piece that will up the cart value on every order and get people to fall deeper in love with you.

While a Desert will want to upsell other books, you will likely get more value on upselling merch or something exclusive that will get your fans to squeal with excitement.

Then, you can augment your webstore with special offer landing pages built around different times of the year or special times inside your universe. If your characters have special holidays or events special to them, use that to make something special for your fans. You could produce a different special offer to your audience as often as every month. I would recommend looking outside books to create packages with other craftspeople that could deepen the experience readers have with your brand.

Challenges: The obvious challenge here is that offering so much exclusive stuff on your webstore could feel isolating to casual fans, but I think that’s okay in this case, especially if you provide on-ramps to your work through your special offers and series landing pages. That said, it’s definitely something to consider. Could you offer a “featured deal” that is just your full series, or something to hook casual readers?

Or could you just offer a compelling book for free in order to hook those same readers, and then create an automated sequence to bring them through your series and create superfans?

Another thing you could try is a popup that says “New here? Try our newbie sampler for X% off” which will help you parse out new people.

While this will be acutely true with new fans, you also run the risk of overwhelming all your diehard fans if you put too many amazing offers on your webstore, which is why you should augment it with your special offers to draw attention to certain things you offer throughout the year.

Aquatic

Advantages: Since Aquatics love delighting their fans, it’s a no-brainer to have tons of merch and extras on your webstore to draw people into your universe. Like a Forest, an Aquatic is trying to get people to fall in love with their universe, but since they’re building a trend from the ground up, they also need to be acutely aware that people will often come into your universe without knowing anything about it.

While a Forest should almost exclusively use “deep cuts” from their books on their merch, an Aquatic would likely get a ton of value from making a broader appeal to people who like their genre and using that to start people on a journey to love their brand.

For instance, an Aquatic who writes sci-fi might have a shirt that says “Space Opera lover” that features art from their own universe. People don’t need to know their universe to think the shirt is cool, but by exposing them to an Aquatic’s world, they help them subconsciously fall in love with their universe.

That’s not to say they shouldn’t create all sorts of cool pieces from their universe, but an Aquatic would get unique value out of something like creating an RPG of their world built on an existing Dungeons and Dragons system and incorporating other bits of well-known formats that can expose larger audiences to their world and pull them off to fall in love with your universe.

The same is true with landing pages. The more an Aquatic can create broadly appealing offers that feature their universe, exposing people to it through “the side door” as it were, the quicker people will start adopting and noticing your cool universe.

Challenges: The challenge of an Aquatic is that they are creating a trend from scratch, and they want to talk only about their thing, ignoring the fact that most people don’t know their universe. They want to talk in code, but nobody knows the code. They need to stay broadly appealing to draw in people from all sorts of modalities while being unique enough to get people excited to stay around. Aquatics have to balance both of these things at the same time, and it’s a fine line to walk.

Final Thoughts:

Website sales can be overwhelming, which is why it makes so much sense to break down the components and try to tackle them one step at a time.

• Webstore exclusives - Products a buyer can only get, or only get for that price, on your website.

• Opt-in offers - Freebie landing pages that bring in new traffic to your email list.

• Series landing pages - A landing page offer for each series, or book, you produce. The more books you have in a series, the more compelling the offer.

• Special offer landing pages - Special deals and bundles you’ll offer once, or once a year, to keep delighting your readers.

• Mimicking retailers - Adding your other books that are available from retailers.

I recommend tackling one of these a month, or even one a quarter, before moving on to the next one. Website sales also pair well with crowdfunding. It’s quite easy to take your Kickstarter and mold it into a series landing page, then use roughly the same copy to create a webstore exclusive. I’ve done that several times for my best-selling series.

Additionally, though tedious, it’s relatively easy to mimic retailers as you already have all the copy already created from uploading them to those other platforms. All you need to do is copy and paste, for the most part, and then massage it.

For the most part, you can do most of this with a Payhip store and free Elementor plugin for your WordPress site. There are more complex solutions available, but most people can get by, at least at the beginning, with those two largely free elements.

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If you haven’t had a chance to take our quiz yet, I highly recommend taking it before you read this article. Additionally, if you haven’t taken a look at our membership options, I think they are pretty neat.

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