In mid-2021, I made the call to leave Kindle Unlimited and go wide.
Let me tell you—it hasn’t been easy.
I started like many others do: by reading Wide for the Win by Mark Leslie Lefebvre and taking a handful of courses. Some were great. Most repeated the same things: Do A, B, and C, and you'll get to D. But no one ever tells you how to get to $. Maybe I’m thick-headed, or maybe the secret just doesn’t exist. Some authors figure it out and coast to success. For the rest of us? It’s a grind.
Here’s what that grind looked like for me.
I built a Shopify store. Got a landing page set up for Facebook ads. Gave away a free book to hook readers and (hopefully) turn them into buyers.
It worked—in one sense. People downloaded the freebie. My email list grew. But the sales? Not so much.
The truth is, a bloated list doesn’t mean an engaged list. Freebie seekers aren’t always buyers. According to TBR stats, the average reader has 20–50 books waiting to be read. Freebie hoarders? They’ve got 200 or more. My open rates were decent. My sell-through? Meh.
Still chasing results, I leaned into promos: BookBub deals, discount newsletters, the usual suspects. Gave away more books. Dropped others to $0.99. And just like that, I was back in the free book game I was trying to escape.
I should’ve stuck with landing pages and pushed traffic to my site. Instead, I stalled out.
So, I reset.
I revamped the Shopify store and went all-in on direct-to-consumer. Built a six-book bundle. Ran ads. Structured a landing page that offered the bundle, then upsold additional books at a discount. It worked—kind of. I moved books, but I didn’t know if readers were continuing the series.
The real issue? I didn’t fully understand the metrics. Heatmaps, conversions, optimization—they were just words on a dashboard. And I wasn’t segmenting my email list to track buyers or retarget them with follow-ups. That’s on me. I’m learning now, but I should’ve learned earlier.
And Facebook? That’s its own beast. Ads are expensive. Creatives are fickle. What works one day flops the next.
Here’s the bottom line: There’s no one thing.
There’s a dozen things. And they all matter. Selling direct means you are the publisher, the marketer, the analyst, the technician, and the strategist. It’s a nonstop process of figuring out what the customer wants—and how to deliver it in a way that doesn’t bankrupt your ad budget or your sanity.
Selling direct isn’t for the weak. But neither is trying to make a living as a full-time author.
Writing the book? That’s the easy part. That’s the tip of the iceberg.
What’s underneath: editing, formatting, uploading, emailing, advertising, launching, review-chasing, advertising, tweaking websites, remaking creatives, learning metrics, advertising, segmenting email flows, rewriting blurbs, advertising, rebuilding landing pages, testing headlines, advertising, fixing broken links, rewriting ads, building bundles, emailing again, advertising, writing again—and yes, advertising again.
Rinse. Repeat. Wake up. Do it all over again.
It’s a grind. But then again—what job isn’t?
You hustle. You take your wins. You learn from the losses. And you keep moving forward.
I decided to lay it all out. You can enjoy the journey, or you can call me an idiot. Your call.
All I know is:
The writing is still the easy part.