In my report on ALLi’s SelfPubCon last week, I noticed how much interest people had taken in direct selling. I also noticed that a very large chunk of Jane Friedman’s The Bottom Line was devoted to the direct selling phenomenon. So it felt appropriate to round up some of the stories surrounding and relevant to direct sales. It’s also somewhat timely after the previous post this week about the uncertainties of Amazon’s algorithm.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Going direct to readers doesn’t solve discoverability problems, but it does leave more variables under your control, and that means it’s easier to set up systems and leave them running, saving precious time.
The Income Potential of Substack
I’ll start with some fascinating figures on the income potential from Substack subscriptions. This isn’t necessarily what people think of as direct selling but, like Patreon, having people pay to receive your writing is as direct as selling can get—and as deep a connection as you could hope for between writer and reader. The figures show that more than a third (36.6 percent) of the revenue made through the platform goes to writers with 10,000–50,000 subscribers, who earn an average of $55,000 a year. The next highest proportion of revenue goes to those with 100,000–500,000 subscribers (21.3 percent), who earn an average of $564,000. But there are significant numbers of people making reasonable amounts—those in the 1,000–5,000-subscriber bracket make $3,500 a year—that could form a decent part of a writer’s annual income.
Resources for Direct Selling and Library Distribution
I would also recommend checking out this fascinating piece by the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) that Friedman links to. It contains a good list of the pros and cons of direct selling that can help anyone considering the option figure out where and whether to start.
And to finish, I came across a very useful piece on the Draft2Digital blog related to the decision by Amazon to allow books enrolled in KDP Select to be distributed to libraries. The post walks you through how you can use D2D to feed KDP-enrolled books into the wholesalers that distribute to libraries. It’s worth noting that Baker & Taylor is still a part of this portfolio on D2D but will, as I reported a week or so ago, soon cease to be.
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