There’s a lot that goes into selling direct to consumer—more than most authors realize.
Everyone loves the idea of cutting out the middleman, owning your customer data, building your brand. But before you make a sale, you need one thing above all else: a functioning website.
Whether you use Shopify, WordPress with WooCommerce, Gumroad, or another platform, this is your storefront. It’s what showcases your work, tells the world who you are, what you’re selling, and why anyone should care.
You can build it yourself or hire someone. Either way, you still need to understand how it works. No one’s coming to save you when Google fails to index your product pages, or your site looks like a 2004 blog because the graphics weren’t tagged properly for SEO.
Let’s back up. The website is the backbone. Publishing it is the easy part—getting it to work properly is where the pain begins.
I’ve run both WordPress and Shopify. Right now, everything flows through Shopify. And just moving my domain—evangraver.com—from WordPress to Shopify? That alone took weeks. I had to request transfers from both platforms, wait for approvals, then watch as my old site went offline and my email chain broke like a rusted link.
When Shopify finally recognized the domain, I still had to verify sender credentials, rebuild email delivery with Klaviyo, and dive into DNS hell: CNAMEs, MX records, TXT entries... stuff I had zero interest in learning, but had no choice.
I’d rather be writing my next thriller.
But making sure my store worked—and that my branding carried over—wasn’t optional. And that was just the beginning.
I had to connect Google Analytics, verify ownership, reindex the entire site, discard the old search data, and wait while Google kindly informed me of everything that was broken.
This morning? I had to update SKU numbers on multiple paperback listings. I thought SKUs were just internal labels. Nope. Turns out Google uses them too. So now I’m manually renaming SKUs and praying I don’t break the connection to Lulu, my print-on-demand provider.
It’s death by a thousand papercuts. Or whatever the digital equivalent is now.
Let’s call it what it is:
The slow bleed of backend bullshit.
And honestly? I would’ve never survived this process without ChatGPT.
Say what you want about AI, but this thing walked me through website setup, fixed broken code, created metafield logic to add retailer buttons, debugged DNS errors, and solved Shopify issues faster than any forum or help doc ever could.
The only thing I don’t use it for is the storytelling itself. That’s still 100% me, fingers on keys, characters whispering in my head and dragging me into gunfights or black ops raids. But when it comes to blurbs, back cover copy, image generation, and untangling the web tech? AI has been a lifesaver.
So yeah—selling direct is powerful. But it’s not plug and play. It’s plug, cuss, unplug, research, plug again, and maybe cry a little.
But when it works? You own the whole damn ecosystem. And that’s worth bleeding for.