Lauren: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Publish & Prosper. I think this is episode 70, actually. Which I don't think we said in the last episode what number it was, which is unusual for us. 

Matt: I like that you're calling that out because I was the one that did the intro on the last episode. So I t's your way of kind of saying, Hey jerk, you forgot to say what episode number it was. 

Lauren: No I – 

Matt: In the last one. 

Lauren: I – no I didn't, I – cause it didn't occur to me either when you did it. And it wasn't until I was listening back to it that I was like, oh. Or actually maybe it was the one before that. I don't know. Time and space are no longer real. But. 

Matt: But the point is it's episode 70. 

Lauren: It's episode 70, I'm pretty sure. 

Matt: Okay. 

Lauren: Which is a cool little kind of milestone to it. I like any time we hit a new 10. 

Matt: Like a nice round number like 70? or do you like it multiples of 10 is what you're saying. 

Lauren: I mean, 75 would be like. Like 75 is actually a much better number than 70, but I like hitting that milestone of like, we've done another 10 episodes. Like, now we're in the seventies.

Matt: Okay. Yeah. 

Lauren: Look, I got to find the little wins where I can, okay? 

Matt: Yeah. No, I listen. I agree. 

Lauren: So glad 

Matt: That's good. 

Lauren: All right. 

Matt: I'm almost feeling like we need something behind us on the wall. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: But I'm not quite sure yet. 

Lauren: Yeah. I'm not sure what either, but it does look a little boring over here. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: We can't push these chairs any closer together back here. 

Matt: No. 

Lauren: No, but maybe… 

Matt: This might turn into a different podcast if you did that. 

Lauren: Oh no. Oh, no, if anyone has any cool ideas for what we can do on the wall over here. Let us know. 

Matt: Well, I mean, our wall is cool. 

Lauren: Our wall is very cool. I really love this pattern. 

Matt: Prior to that, we had our TV where we could put our logo or other stuff behind us. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: We never actually made good use of that. 

Lauren: I know. 

Matt: We should have played like cool clips or something on it. We never did. 

Lauren: I know, we never… Well, we never really like, know where we're going when the episode starts. So we never have had like, assets prepared for that. 

Matt: That's a fair point.

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Although now you just made it sound very unprofessional. 

Lauren: I completely disagree. Everyone knows we talk about the outlines that we use all the time. 

Matt: Everyone knows we're completely unprofessional. 

Lauren: Yeah. Anyone who's listening to this podcast already knows exactly what's what. 

Matt: That's definitely true. Yeah. 

Lauren: Yep. 

Matt: All right. So episode 70, what are we talking about today? 

Lauren: Today we're talking about something that we've never talked about before on this podcast. 

Matt: Okay. 

Lauren: Yep. We're talking about Selling Direct.

Matt: Cool, something new. I'm tired of talking about the same old things. 

Lauren: A brand new concept that y'all have never heard before from us. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: But we did actually want to talk kind of some new stuff for selling direct because we wanted to get really into like, the mechanics of selling direct and how it actually works…

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: …and how the different parts of it all work together.

Matt: I don't know if it's new. It's us taking a different approach and maybe taking a few steps back for those who are very new to the idea and the concept. And it's because we get a lot of questions that are at the very high level of that journey for people, the where it was like, okay, I get it. We've skipped over a bunch of that stuff, just assuming that people knew that information or would find that information somewhere or that they would realize it as they started going through the process. But to be fair – 

Lauren: To be fair. 

Matt: To be fair. Nothing is quite what you think it seems on the surface. And I didn't think we should keep expecting people just to, to dig in and find out for themselves or just assume that they understood this. So in light of a lot of the questions we've been getting, and even more recently, I just thought, why don't we back up a little bit and let's talk about the mechanics of it. The journey of deciding you want to sell direct, what that means, how does it work per se, know, somewhat agnostic of platform. Of course we want you to choose Lulu, but that's obviously implied. You're listening to a Lulu podcast. So this isn't so much about how to set up a store per se–although we will touch on a few of those things. We have a whole episode dedicated to how to build your ecommerce store. What's the episode number? 30? 

Lauren: We have – 

Matt: 31? 

Lauren: There's actually two –

Matt: Two?

Lauren: – that I'm gonna highly recommend that you listen to.

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: If this topic is relevant to you. 

Matt: So we really haven't talked about this before, have we? 

Lauren: No, never. But we did, episode 31 is your Seven Step Guide to Building an Online Bookstore.

Matt: That's what I said. 

Lauren: Yeah, you were – you were completely correct about that. But then we also have episode 39. Which is Pain Point Solutions for Your Ecommerce Store. And that one gets a little bit… that's less about the like, step-by-step how to build the store. 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And it's more about like, if you're confused about how to collect sales tax and whether or not you need to. If you're not really sure what the whole deal is with shipping and how to set up like shipping mapping and things like that. 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: That's what that episode goes into. 

Matt: Okay. 

Lauren: Yeah. But I think this is a good topic to talk about because we do obviously talk a lot about the value of selling direct. 

Matt: Well I’m glad you agree.

Lauren: Yeah. Well, it was, it was Matt’s idea. I'll give credit where credit's due. But I think this is good information for everybody to have. I actually reached out to our ecommerce team. So shout out to Tim for being so helpful immediately in response to this, and asked them first what were the most common questions they get from Lulu Direct customers. 

Matt: I’m sure Daniel and Ryan would have been helpful too, but I think they're out on vacation. 

Lauren: I do actually think both of them got into the doc as well. 

Matt: Okay. 

Lauren: But it was Tim that immediately was like, yep, here you go. I'm going to start putting this together right now and sent it over right away. So shout out to everyone on that team, but especially to Tim, so. 

Matt: Yeah, if you ever have ecommerce issues, Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, whatever, and you're contacting us, you're more than likely dealing with Tim, Daniel, or Ryan.

Lauren: Yes, and they are all super helpful. 

Matt: Yep. 

Lauren: Super great. And we have a bunch of resources that they've helped put together that other people on our team have put together on all different types of channels dealing with all different direct sales solutions in different elements of it. So I'm going to link some things in the show notes. But if you're listening to this as we're talking through it and you're like, okay, cool, but how do I get all this done? Check the show notes. You will find everything that you need in the links that are down there. 

Matt: Yeah. 

[6:29]

Matt: Okay. So let's jump in. 

Lauren: Sounds good.

Matt: Let's start from the beginning. You've decided you want to sell direct.

Lauren: Congratulations. 

Matt: Yes. But what does that mean? There are lots of ways you can quote unquote, technically sell direct to your readers or fans or customers or buyers, whatever you want to refer to them as. Technically even doing a Kickstarter is like selling direct, right? So crowdfunding is a form of selling direct. They are paying money to you in one form or another, whether that's by backing a campaign on Kickstarter or something like that, or even a subscription based service like Patreon. They are paying you money and you are sending them the product directly. So it's not coming from a third party retail source, Target.com or Barnes & Noble, whatever. And he who will not be named the phallic rocket builder. 

Lauren: Yay space.

Matt: Yeah. So selling direct can take on a lot of forms. The most easiest and most common one is crowdfunding Kickstarter, things like that. But it also includes the obvious. You have your own website and you want to sell direct. You do that through using something like a Shopify plugin or a Wix plugin or a Wix site. If you have a site built on WordPress, you can use a WooCommerce plugin. There are several other ways to sell from your website by using a direct API connection and some other ways like that. And then there's other ways to sell direct. So the last few I just mentioned, those are automated ways to do it, right? And we'll get into what that means. 

But then there's also a way to sell direct where you're doing the fulfillment similar to Kickstarter in the sense that you're on the hook to send everybody their books. But in the straight direct sales method where you are the fulfillment center as well, that means what happens is you're ordering copies of your books ahead of time from a printer. The orders come in on your website and you are handling all of the packing and shipping. So again, the difference between that and the previous one I said, where maybe you're using Shopify or something with a plugin, right, to a print-on-demand provider like Lulu, is in that previous scenario with Lulu, when somebody buys the book, the order comes to us and we print it and ship it, and you never have to touch it. You're still collecting the money. You're still keeping all the profit. You're only paying us for the cost of the book, the manufacturing cost. 

In that last scenario where you're fulfilling, again, you have to order copies of your book ahead of time. You house them in your garage or you buy some warehouse space, you rent some warehouse space. And when the orders come in, you pack them and ship them. Or if you're lucky, have a bunch of friends that you can bribe with pizza and every Friday night you guys get in there and you pack books and you ship them and eat pizza. 

Lauren: Kind of sounds like fun. 

Matt: Gross. 

Lauren: Although just don't make sure you don't touch the books that you're sending out to people with your pizza fingers. 

Matt: That would actually be cool. 

Lauren: No! 

Matt: No? To get a book from one of your favorite authors and it's got their thumbprint and pizza sauce on it. No? Yeah, I agree with you. Just kidding.

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: I love pizza, but I don’t want it on my books. 

Lauren: I was going to say, there’s no way. You would throw that directly into the trash. 

Matt: 100 % 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: And then I'd probably email the author like what the hell yeah dude? 

Lauren: Okay. Yep. that's fair 

Matt: Yeah, that's weird. Anyways, there's a lot of ways to sell direct. Choose your poison, pick whichever one you want to try. Most of them are very low cost to get started, some are no cost to get started, depends on the path you choose. But again once you've chosen how you want to try your hand at selling direct, the rest of a lot of what we're gonna talk about right now is pretty applicable and to all forms and somewhat agnostic of whatever platform you chose, right? So the basic mechanics are you have your store or however it is that you're going to… 

Lauren: On your website. 

Matt: Could be a website, could be Kickstarter, could be some other form. You could be selling straight from your, Instagram account, right? 

Lauren: Fair.

Matt: And just manually fulfilling those things out of your garage or something like that. But regardless, you've, you've chosen how you want to sell direct. What happens next is you need to drive traffic to wherever that place might be. Again, a website is obviously the best choice, but you know what? It's 2025. You do you however you want. It's fine. 

Lauren: Some people are finding a lot of success with sales on social media.

Matt: I don't know who those some people are, but I'm to take your word for that. 

Lauren: Okay. I mean, some people are also, then in that case, panicking when their social media sites get threatened, so.

Matt: That's right. Yeah. 

Lauren: So. 

Matt: Yeah. Well anyways, 

Lauren: I'm just saying I'm advocating for selling from your own website. 

Matt: The way that this works is, and this is why it's beneficial to use something like Shopify or Wix or a plugin, the transaction takes place on your property. So your website, wherever that might be, you're responsible for that. If you're using Shopify, they have a built-in payment processor. It's not like you have to go out and find your own. You can, but it's not advisable. It's a pain in the butt. There's a lot of things that go into that. Just use the one that's native to Shopify. Or if you're using Wix, Wix has one too. I believe they're plugged into Stripe maybe or something like that, it doesn't really matter, but. The payment's gonna happen on your side. The transaction's gonna happen on your side. So if you set your retail price at $24.99, that's what they're gonna pay. And whatever shipping amount you've added to that for whatever shipping choice they wanted, that's all on you. The transaction happens on your site. The money is available to you almost immediately, unlike when you're selling through third party retail and you have to wait 30, 60, 90 days for your royalties to come. When you're handling the transactions, when it's a direct sales scenario, you're getting that money almost immediately. 

So benefit number one or benefit number two, I've lost track at this point, but the transaction happens on your side. That's the first thing to understand and the first thing to know. Because that will then help you understand why at some point soon after starting your store, you need to learn about sales tax collection and Nexus and some of those things. There are plugins and tools to help you with that. It's nothing to freak out about, but you should understand what it is and you should know how to address that. So. Transaction happens on your side. 

Lauren: But when you say the transaction happens on on my side, if I'm the store owner, then what does that mean in terms of like, who's who's paying me? How am I getting the revenue from that sale? 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Who is it?

Matt: Your processor, your merchant processor. So the customers checking out on your site your merchant processor, which is wrapped up in your Shopify or whatever store you're using. They process the transaction, they’re PII compliant. So all the necessary, you know, security protocols in place. And then you have – this is a good question by the way, thank you – you have set up your own bank account with, you know, Shopify. They know where to deposit that money. You've told them where you want that money deposited, right? Could be your PayPal account, could be your bank account, doesn't matter. That's up to you. But Shopify, Wix, the WooCommerce plugin, all of these tools have processors built in. The transaction happens. The money gets deposited into whatever account you told them that you wanted it deposited into. Typically almost immediately, but you know, it can take up to 24 hours depending on banking holidays or weekends, things like that. But the latest I've ever seen money arrive in my account for a Shopify transaction was about 48 hours later, so. 

Lauren: Way faster. 

Matt: Yeah, for sure. 

Lauren: But that's still, you're saying that's coming from Shopify, Wix, whoever. 

Matt: Whoever processed the payment. 

Lauren: That’s – Yeah. So not Lulu? 

Matt: Whatever you're using. That's correct. No, no money is coming from, from Lulu. So if you're using the direct sales scenario where you have a Shopify store, and you're using Lulu's plugin to facilitate the printing and shipping of your books, we're going to get to where the money exchanges hands with Lulu in just a second. But somebody has to pay for the book first, your customer, that transaction has to happen and it's on your side, on your site. And then the money gets deposited into your account. The $24.99 plus the shipping gets deposited into your account. 

Now, the next step is if you're using an automated plugin like Lulu's, the order gets transmitted immediately on the backend to us. We will charge whatever payment you have on file with us for the cost to manufacture the book and the shipping cost. So you've already collected shipping from your customer. That's what we call pass-through cost, right? If you've mapped your shipping methods appropriately between your printer, Lulu, and your site, it's a straight pass-through cost. You don't lose any money and you shouldn't be making any money. You don't really want to make money off people when it comes to shipping. It's bad enough that Amazon ruined shipping for everyone, but you don't want to try to make money off of it. You want to try to break as even as possible. Some people will actually eat the shipping as a loss leader, especially if it's not very expensive, if you're running media mail or something like that, but.  

Lauren: And we also see some people that will build the shipping cost into the list price of the book. 

Matt: Sure, yeah. 

Lauren: That, because I tell you what, as an online consumer myself, nothing makes people happier than free shipping or the…

Matt: The thought of it. 

Lauren: The, yeah. 

Matt: Yeah. The perception, 

Lauren: The perception of free shipping. 

Matt: Of course. Again, Amazon ruined us. Yeah. 

Lauren: Okay. Yeah. For sure. 

Matt: Yeah. So in the scenario with an automated plug-in like Lulu, the order would then come to Lulu. You would have a form of payment on file with Lulu. Now if you're really savvy you're using the same PayPal account where you had your money deposited from the purchase on your side. You're using that same PayPal account to pay Lulu for the production and shipping of the book.

Lauren: That's a good idea. 

Matt: Absolutely. That's what I do. 

Lauren: Okay. Okay.

Matt: So that's a separate account doesn't affect my normal everyday checking account or business account. And I can see the transactions happening in real time. And I know at all times what my profit is and what my cost of goods is.

Lauren: So it doesn’t – 

Matt: So I can understand my profit and loss statements. 

Lauren: It doesn't necessarily have to be like a credit card that you have on file at Lulu in your Lulu direct account? For these charges? Just some kind of payment method. 

Matt: Yep. 

Lauren: Cool. 

Matt: So payment will come out again. We'll charge you for the manufacturing cost of the book in the shipping. You've already collected shipping from your customer. That's a pass-through. If you charge 24.99 for the book and we charge you 4.99 to print it, you just made 20 bucks straight profit. You're not sharing that with a third party distributor or anybody else. That's all yours. It's already in your bank account. Nobody can take it. And you're not waiting on somebody to give it to you. It was there immediately. That's the beauty of it. 

So at that point, the book is being manufactured or printed and it's going to be shipped, right? If you're using Lulu, it's going to be shipped what we call white labeled. So won't come from Lulu. It'll actually come from you or whatever your brand is that you've set up ahead of time. 

Lauren: Yeah, we do everything… like the packaging is completely white label. There's, there's nothing like, even the packing slips in there. You can actually go so far as to customize your packing slip if you want to so that it looks like it's coming from you as far as your customers are concerned. I believe, and I can cut this out if it's wrong, I believe that we do send shipping notifications for Direct, but it is also a white label email notification, like it doesn't say that it's coming from Lulu. It's just a…

Matt: So we'll be doing that now. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: Prior, what would happen is there are web hooks that would go back to your Shopify store and it would give the signals of this was shipped or whatever. And then your Shopify store would send the shipping notification to the customer. 

Lauren: Got it. 

Matt: Because remember, part of this is you want to keep everything branded from you 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: and everything's coming from your store, your brand, your channels, which you can still do that. Yeah. But yes, one way or another shipping signals are going to your buyer, but they won't come from Lulu. No. 

Lauren: Right. Every, everything, whether it's the branding in the packaging, on the packaging, anything like that, it's coming from you as far as your customer is concerned. Which also a side note, includes any kind of marketing or promotional messaging. Like Lulu is never going to reach out to – 

Matt: Yeah you shouldn’t –

Lauren: – your customers. 

Matt: Your customer wouldn't see any of that. Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah, like you're as far as we're concerned those are not our customers. They're your customers. 

Matt: We don't even have that information.

Lauren: Okay. Right, exactly. There's never going to be a time where we're cutting you out of the conversation and it's us reaching out to your customers. You are our customer. 

Matt: Right. 

Lauren: Okay. And then these are your customers. 

Matt: Correct. 

Lauren: Okay. Yeah. 

Matt: Yeah. The only information we get is that in that order packet is the book to be printed and the name and address that it's going to. And that's it. 

Lauren: Yep. 

Matt: Yeah. And then for the most part, it gets purged from our system, data retention kicks in and purges it. 

[18:08]

Matt: So yeah, at this point now we've reached a transaction from beginning to end, right? You've made the decision to sell direct, you've set up however you are going to sell direct, hopefully a storefront, a website. You're driving traffic back to your storefront or website, not over to a third party retailer. They are purchasing from you at the prices that you've set. You're collecting that money almost instantly. The orders are getting transmitted through a third party plugin like Lulu's on the back end directly for us to print and ship. We've charged you a fraction of the money that you collected from your customer, and we've now printed and shipped the book, right? 

Lauren: Yep. 

Matt: So what happens if they don't get the book or it arrives damaged? 

Lauren: They reach out to you. 

Matt: Me? 

Lauren: Well, are you the store owner? 

Matt: I'm the store owner. 

Lauren: Okay. If they reach out to you, the store owner. 

Matt: That’s right. 

Lauren: Not to Lulu. 

Matt: That’s correct. 

Lauren: Now you as the store owner can reach out to us – 

Matt: Correct, yes. 

Lauren: And say, hey, I had an issue, something went wrong here. Can you guys take care of this?

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And we’ll figure out how to help you. But that is a part of the experience as anyone selling direct, anyone as a business owner in any way, you are responsible for all of your own customer service. We do have a really great blog post that I have linked in the show notes that… What's Kristen's title these days? 

Matt: Kristen? 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: She heads up our customers… Sorry. We just renamed the whole team.

Lauren: I think she's worn more hats than anybody else here, and she's so good at all of them. Like no matter what she's doing, she's just –

Matt: Right 

Lauren: – nailing it. 

Matt: She's a customer success manager. 

Lauren: Perfect. Well, then I guess she knows a lot about – 
Matt: Yes. 

Lauren: How to provide good customer support. She wrote a great blog post about how to set up your ecommerce business with customer service that everything's running smoothly there. So go check that out. We've talked about it in those other two episodes that we referenced earlier in the episode as well. But that is just something to keep in mind that you as the business owner are responsible for handling any kind of customer issues. 

Matt: Yes. 

Lauren: And of course we're here to help you, but we're here to help you, not your customers. You don't want them reaching out to us. 

Matt: Well, I think some people would want them reaching out to us because they've never been in a situation or scenario where they have to do customer service. 

Lauren: Sure. 

Matt: But yes, in general, they're not our customers, they're yours. And that for some people it's a double edged sword. The beauty of it is it's your customers. So you're reaping all the benefits of a direct sales business. One of which is: they're your customers. Nobody else gets that data. Nobody else gets that money. Nobody else gets to remarket to them except for you. The other side of that sword, the double edge there is that when they have an issue, yeah, they're going to come to you. The reality of this though, I will tell you, is that it's very infrequent. And oftentimes the issue that probably comes up the most or is tied for the most prevalent issue–and again, it's such a small percentage in the grand scheme of things though–is FedEx or UPS or the mail lost the book or didn't deliver it. And so that's simply a conversation for the carrier. Like what's the tracking ID? Go find out what happened. In most cases, if you're using Lulu, we're able to send out another book pretty quickly and easily. But again, you know, if you talk to some people who run direct stores and they've got everything set up well, the amount of times that a customer is going to have an issue where you have to get into the weeds with it is slim to none. And if you do a really good job of setting up your FAQ page, which was going to be the next thing we talk about with customer service. If you've done a good job in setting up your FAQ page, you will get very little customer service inquiries. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: Lots of people these days have somewhat mimicked the FAQs that Joanna Penn had put on her store; she was one of the early adopters of selling direct as well. And then when you're selling direct and utilizing print-on-demand, especially years ago when this was still kind of even newer and more fresh, people didn't really understand print-on-demand takes a couple days to print the book because you want a good quality book. You can get it in 24 hours, but it's going to fall apart. And so between that and carrier issues, there's a lot of questions people have, they don't understand things. But Joanna Penn did a really good job, I remember looking at hers years ago, of designing her FAQs to really help people understand, her customers understand all the possible scenarios that could happen, what the answers were to the questions they might have. And then if their question wasn't answered in any of those, they could reach out. 

Lauren: I'm going to link to it in the show notes because it does look pretty useful just from what I'm skimming right now and also not totally over the top. So I think it is a good example –

Matt: Right.

Lauren: – of like, here's how to answer these questions, kind of cover all your bases, but not, you know, it's not a 15 page – 

Matt: Right. 

Lauren: – endless scroll site –  

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: On her store. So definitely – 

Matt: So you're yourself up for success. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: You're setting yourself up to have very minimal customer service interactions. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: And that's what you want. Again, your goal is to automate as much of this process as, as you can. The allure, I think, of using a third party retail platform, or one of the bigger sort of draws, I think, is that you do get to be hands off. You pay a hefty price for that, but you do get to be hands off. You don't have to worry about transactions. You don't have to worry about customer service or the printing and the shipping stuff. It's all handled by the third party retailer. The trade off there is you're going to get pennies on the dollar. 

Lauren: Well, it's not that different from the difference between self-publishing and traditional publishing. Traditional publishing, you have a whole – 

Matt: From a sales and, and, and yes. 

Lauren: Well, yes. 

Matt: Right. 

Lauren: Also, I mean, just the idea of it in general. Like, you have a whole publishing house of pros behind you to help you do all this stuff, to do all the stuff for you in order to edit your book and market your book and format your book and handle all the sales stuff and everything. And the trade off for that is that you lose a lot of control over whatever happens to your book after you've turned in your finished manuscript.

Matt: Are you just trying to bait me into a traditional publishing conversation? 

Lauren: No. 

Matt: Oh. 

Lauren: No, because I'm making the argument that self-publishing, while you have to do a lot of that stuff yourself, you have more control over all of it. And if you are doing it correctly, you reap more benefits from it. That was actually a pro-self-publishing. Look at me. Look at how far I've come in the last six years. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Who would have guessed? 

Matt: I like it. It took a while, but we got you there. 

Lauren: Hey, come on.

Matt: I'm just kidding. So anyways. 

Lauren: I literally left the traditional publishing company and came here. I feel like my loyalties are clear.

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: Yeah. Anyways. So we're on the tail end of this transaction, right? 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: We've set up our store. We've collected the money. The order’s been transmitted to our production facility. In this case, it's Lulu. In every case, it should be Lulu for the most part. Right?

Lauren: Yeah. Why not?

Matt: Order’s being shipped out and now we've gotten to the point where there may or may not be questions from your customers. That is on you. But there's a lot of resources out there to help you get through those. And, and again, if you set yourself up for success on the front side with a good FAQ page and being very clear with your, your readers and buyers, you'll have very minimal need to interact with them in a customer service oriented way. So that's really not actually a huge concern once you get rolling. 

Matt: So yeah. We good? We cover the transaction side there? 

Lauren: Yeah, sorry. I got distracted by the fact that my one o'clock meeting was just canceled so we can keep yapping forever. 

Matt: Okay. 

Lauren: Great. I think we've covered the whole process or at least I'm hesitant to say a high level look at the whole process because I think some people listening would not – a medium level look at the whole process. 

Matt: The one last thing I did want to touch on, which is a question I get fairly frequently is what if I want to sell other things in my store? 

Lauren: Oh, great question. 

Matt: And how does that work with, let's say, a Lulu plugin, right? So if you're an author creator who happens to have some books for sale, but you also maybe sell a few other things like a coffee mug, a t-shirt. Maybe you have a role playing game that you also sell or, or, you know, a deck of cards or any, I mean, we've seen everything, you name it. This is not a problem. This is what's known as a split cart in ecommerce. So most ecommerce stores, Shopify stores, you're using multiple print-on-demand and production providers. One of the more popular ones is called Printful. So Printful does everything except books. So you could have Printful plugged in and Lulu plugged in to your Shopify store. Somebody could put a book in their cart as well as two t-shirts in that cart. The t-shirts are obviously gonna be printed by Printful. The book's obviously gonna be printed by Lulu. Same cart, same checkout. You're still collecting the total amount of the transaction. But what'll happen is the t-shirt order will go to Printful. The book order will go to Lulu.

Lauren: Yep. 

Matt: And we'll print and ship the book, Printful will print and ship the t-shirts. It's called a split cart. It happens all the time. 

Lauren: This is – 

Matt: The other question we get that's somewhat related is – 

Lauren: Wait, are you changing the subject? 

Matt: Nope. 

Lauren: Okay, go ahead. 

Matt: What if I'm selling ebooks? 

Lauren: All right. That's exactly what I was going to say. 

Matt: What if I want to bundle my ebook with a print book? And yes. So you can sell your ebooks as well. And then what happens there is they just get an email with the download link in it for the ebook. There's nothing obviously to print and ship.

Lauren: Because our Lulu Direct plugins are for print books. 

Matt: Correct. 

Lauren: We haven't made that clear in this episode, I don't think. Yet. 

Matt: Correct. 

Lauren: So just to, just to be clear, if you're using a Lulu Direct plugin on your website to sell your books, you're using it to sell print books. Lulu Direct plugins do not support the sale of ebooks. It's just for print books. 

Matt: Well, we did that on purpose. There's no need to build it out because on Shopify and the other platforms, digital delivery, download deliveries are, are something that they offer. It's just a thing. It's not a big deal. 

Lauren: Right. So if you're selling your ebooks, and you can –

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: – still sell your ebooks, it's just going to be something that runs in tandem –

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: – to your Lulu Direct. It's totally still doable. It's just related to the question about, I sell other products as well in my store? You can also sell ebooks alongside your print books.

Matt: Right. 

Lauren: It's just going to be a different plugin for that. 

Matt: Well, it's just part of Shopify's thing. If you're using Shopify, I believe that's the same for Wix. And then you can also bundle and it'll just do a split cart. So print book will get sent to us for print and delivery. Ebook will get sent as a digital download in an email. So yeah, it's all pretty easy. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Where were you going before I went into that? 

Lauren: I was going to bring up the ebook thing. 

Matt: Oh, I got you. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Yeah

Lauren: So, same page. 

Matt: Okay, well, that makes sense. 

Lauren: Digital page, same digital ebook page. 

Matt: Yeah. 

[29:06]

Matt: So you wanted to go into post sale, post delivery, what we always talk about, especially as we talk about the mechanics of selling direct, it ties into some of the benefits of selling direct. And what we see happening a lot is people are not taking full advantage of all of the benefits that come with selling direct. A lot of people are doing it because they think they have to because everybody else is, and they don't fully realize a lot of the benefits that come with it. You get so wrapped up in launching your story, you know, and just kind of getting these mechanics sorted out and the logistics of how everything's going to get delivered. And then you kind of forget some of the main reasons you were doing it is for things like capturing customer data and maximizing the amount of profit that you're bringing in and things like that. So post-sale, post-delivery, there's a lot of things you could be doing, right? 

Lauren: Yeah. Yeah. There are a lot of things you could be doing and all of them more or less lead back to trying to build relationships with your customers. 

Matt: That's right. 

Lauren: Building long-term relationships. You've heard us talking in recent episodes about the idea of algorithmic marketing versus relationship marketing and this is how you work on that relationship marketing, is by connecting directly with your customers. Which you can do if you are selling directly. You cannot do that if you are selling exclusively through third party retailers. 

Matt: Right. 

Lauren: You can't email somebody that bought your book on Amazon and said, hey, thanks so much for your purchase. I really hope you enjoy the book. If you like it, I've got a new one coming out next month. You should be sure to check it out.

Matt: Why can't you do that? 

Lauren: Because you don't have any of their customer information. 

Matt: That’s right. You have no idea who bought your book. 

Lauren: You have no idea that – those are Amazon's customers not yours.

Matt: Your mom could sit across from you at the, at the dinner table and tell you that she bought your book and you'd have no way to knowing that she actually bought your book or not. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Well, unless you actually went in her room and looked, but. 

Lauren: Well, yeah. 

Matt: You can't do it because you don't have that information. 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: You just don't know. To me, there's only two reasons to sell direct. It's one, to maximize your profits. You're literally cutting out all the middlemen. And then number two is to grow a sustainable business. You can't do either of those when you're going through third party retailers as your only source of sales.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: If your only path to market is through a third party retail platform, you can't do either of those things. You're not gonna maximize your profits no matter what you do, and you're not going to be able to build up your own database of customers to grow and sustain your business. 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: So. That second part is extremely important. Yes, everybody wants to make more money, of course. And everybody wants to get paid faster, of course. But the other piece is extremely important because it keeps that cycle going, right? So as you're making those sales, as you're driving people to your website to buy your books and whatever else it is you're selling, the important thing there is that customer data and then what you do with it afterwards. 

Lauren: Well, there's also too, like how you can use that customer data to inform what other choices you make as you're trying to grow your business. So that can be anything from like, what kind of products you're going to sell next. 

Matt: Right. 

Lauren: What kind of book you're going to write next, how you focus your marketing efforts moving forward, what social media channels you decide you want to spend more time on, what events you want to attend or what cities you want to look for events in based on where your buyers are. There's all kinds of information that you can get that you can use to kind of help inform some business choices.

Matt: So you're telling me that I will now have the stuff at my fingertips that other businesses do where I can do some data analysis and figure out what I can do to grow my business? 

Lauren: You can and you should.

Matt: Shut the front door. 

Lauren: I was really wondering whether or not you were gonna catch yourself on that one. 

Matt: All right, so yes, all this data is extremely important. 

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: The first thing you're gonna do with this data is you're gonna remarket with it. 

Lauren: Yep. 

Matt: Right? If you are a serial writer or are doing other things, you want to be reaching back out to these customers. This is your most important segment of readers because you know for a fact they've bought something from you. Therefore, the next time you need to sell something, you've got a built in database of buyers. But until that time, you want to nurture that relationship with them. The last thing you want to do is only speak to them when you have stuff to sell. That's the fastest way for them to unsubscribe. 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: Right? The best thing to do is now that you've gotten a sale from them, continue that relationship. So, you know, little emails or newsletters, things, talking about what's going on in your world or what you're writing now or where you're going to be, what event you're going to be at next or things like that. And then when it is time for that next book to drop or the next product to drop, you've got a built-in audience. They're your audience. You know, they bought from you before. It's a lot easier than just going back to your social media channels and throwing some posts out there where you're just kind of screaming into the void for the most part and hoping that somebody sees or hears what you've put out there and comes back to buy. 

Lauren: Yeah, it's a really valuable marketing tool to have at your disposal. And it's also something that you don't have to go super overboard with. I don't want to discourage people from consistent email marketing and stuff like that, because there's definitely value in that. But I was actually thinking about that this week. I'm a big fan of the author, Emily Henry. She had a new book come out this week. Yesterday, actually. And yes I did stand in Barnes & Noble and go through the entire stack of books on the table to decide which one was the least damaged, because actually a lot of them were damaged in ways. And they all have stickers on the front cover that I'm going to be really annoyed about when I'm trying to take them off. 

Matt: Why do they do that? 

Lauren: They have two stickers on the cover and one of the two stickers they put directly over her name.

Matt: She should take issue with that. 

Lauren: I, honestly – 

Matt: Or her publisher. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: It's just, that’s ridiculous. 

Lauren: You know, whatever. 

Matt: That's what I say. Whatever.

Lauren: The point is that I'm on her mailing list for her newsletter. It's called Emily's Grocery List and she writes it very, very sporadically. Like, there is no rhyme or reason to when, it's basically just whenever she has news or an update or something interesting to share. And there's, there's no consistency to when it is. And that's kind of fun because every now and then just out of the blue, I'll get an email notification and it'll say subject line Emily's Grocery List and I will be like, oh, a fun new email from Emily Henry. It's a nice thing to get maybe six total throughout the year. Like it's not a huge lift. It's not something that she's sending me an email twice a week reminding me that she still exists and I should buy her books. It is something that keeps her in my rotation as an author that I pay attention to, as an author that I'm interested in, and kind of…even the sporadic nature of the emails makes me appreciate them that much more when they do come. So. It's a valuable marketing tool. And yes, for the record, I did go yesterday, the day her book came out, to buy the book. So it worked. So I think really the point of all of that is to say that you have some really valuable marketing opportunities available to you if you have your customer data and you don't have those available to you if you don't. And the only way to get that customer data is by selling direct, which does not necessarily mean that you have to rule out any and all other retail channels. We've talked about this plenty before. It's not an either or situation. You can sell direct and also sell your books on other retail channels. We've done an episode recently about the idea of going wide with your book sales. 

Matt: Right. 

Lauren: So you can check that one out for sure. I also, before we get too far away from it, we did do an episode a while back about how to use your customer data. So we did more of a deep dive into this specifically, what you can do with all that customer data, once you have it, to help you grow your business. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: That's episode number 22 and I have it linked in the show notes. So if you want to dive more into that, I would recommend that one. 

Matt: The other piece of this is like you, you started to talk about a minute ago or at this point several minutes ago, is using that data to inform business decisions – 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: – around things that you do. And so if you're using direct sales and you're a brand or a business and you're selling multiple books and products, you're amassing that data. It's not just customer data. It's buying patterns. It's product patterns. It's seasonality that you're recording. It gives you the ability to make projections for the coming year. You know? So if you're purchasing things in large quantities ahead of time, it's very helpful to understand what your buying patterns are for your customer base is, or the seasonality that may or may not exist within your business. As you start to acquire those, those transactions, that's the data that you're getting and you're able to make better informed decisions around the things that you do. The products that you buy or stock and vice versa. I think when we talk about the mechanics of, of selling direct, when we talk about the life cycle of, of a purchase, of a transaction and how that goes from initiation on your site. I bought the book. What happens now? Data is transmitted to the production facility, you're getting the money directly into your account. Production facility is producing the product and shipping it and charging you just for the production. Now you have full profit, you have this customer data, cycle starts over, right? Now you have this customer data, you can remarket to them for other things, to nurture the relationship, to keep it going. And you're also acquiring data around, again, trends, buying habits, products, things where you can take a look at that data and add more products to your lineup based on what people are buying. Those signals tell you certain things that you can do to optimize your store and your business for more success. So this idea that selling direct is just a way for authors to escape Amazon or for other types of creators and business owners to escape, you know, using Amazon or some other third party. That's probably the least of it. You know, it's really turning yourself into an Amazon or a Walmart.com. It's you taking charge of your business, of your data, and an effort to sustain some sort of a long-term future for what you're doing. Whether or not you plan on exiting is…it just doesn't matter. The idea that you could build a business with your own data, your own customer base, I think that's what's most appealing. I think that's the important thing, right? 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Maybe not.

Lauren: No, I have nothing to add to that. I just agree entirely. 

Matt: Yeah. 

[39:37]

Matt: So, there's obviously lots of things that go into what we just talked about in terms of, again, building your store and putting the products in there and downloading the plugins and things like that. There's a lot of little steps along the way. And those are in other episodes. Those are in blog articles that we'll link to. This was really meant to be more of a high level overview of like, again, what are the mechanics of selling direct? Just how does it work? What's the life cycle of a transaction? What does that look like? How does it happen? You know, then what happens afterwards? And then what am I doing with that data, right? To then start that cycle all over again with more acquisition and more growth. 

Lauren: Yeah. I want to touch on just a couple of technical questions, just in case people have them and we don't really have to dive into them, but maybe just kind of like, skim through a little bit. If you have questions about how does this work from the book end of things, you know, like how do I set up my book files? How does all that work? If you're using Lulu Direct, so this is gonna be platform specific. If you are using Lulu Direct as your fulfillment plugin –

Matt: Right. 

Lauren: – for your ecommerce store, you're gonna do all of your book files set up and everything through your Lulu Direct account. You're going to create an account on Lulu, log into your direct dashboard, upload your print ready PDF files there. You're coming to us with your book finished and formatted and ready to publish. 

Matt: Yep. 

Lauren: And you're going to handle all of those details within your Lulu account. You've got everything that you need in there, including everything from publishing your book, ordering copies for yourself, seeing your sales and transactions from other customers. Everything is going on in your Lulu Direct account. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: So that's where you're going to see all of that. And there's, we have tons of resources on how to do all that, how to get all that set up. 

Matt: Again, that's not platform agnostic, though. I mean. 

Lauren: Sure, yeah.

Matt: For the few other platforms that do what we do or really there's probably only one for the most part. It's the same, so. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: And you would do that, by the way, even if you're not selling direct at Lulu Lake, it's two files, interior file cover file, go in your account, upload them. The system will check to make sure everything is correct and you're done. 

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: But yeah, that's how you get that set up and you handle all of that stuff over there one of the other things that I wanted to just highlight and make sure that we're super clear on this is revenue. Because we talked about that within the context of how these transactions work. But I just want to be like super super clear when it comes to your revenue for your books how that works. The – whatever you make on your book sales is the difference between the print and fulfillment price that we charge –

Matt: That's right. 

Lauren: – for the book and what you charge your customers for the book. So the list price. 

Matt: That's right. 

Lauren: So like Matt said, you know, you're charging $24.99 and your customer is paying $24.99 and we're charging $4.99. You make $20. 

Matt: That's right. 

Lauren: That's how that works. There are plenty of details, I guess. There's plenty of minutia that goes into how you decide what you want that list price to be. We are not going to get into all that. We've done an entire episode on it and we've got resources on Lulu's website as well to help you with that. One that I want to shout out that I will have linked in the show notes is the pricing calculator that we have on our website 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: That you can use to figure out not just how much it's going to cost you to print and ship your book, depending on the different variables that you include in it. But you can also use that to help you figure out what your revenue will look like based on what you set your list price as in different markets. 

Matt: That's a good point. And it will also show you shipping costs. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: So, you know, again, part of this, like we said, is when you're setting up your store, again, not to go too deep, but you'll have to set up shipping and then you'll map it over to Lulu or whatever you're using. And it's all explained in the help files. But the calculator will also give you an idea of what shipping costs are too. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. I just wanted to make sure because I know that's that's kind of tangential to the actual mechanics of selling direct but because we mentioned it in the context of…

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: How do transactions actually work I wanted to make sure that we, you know.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Underline that a little bit. 

Matt: For sure I mean we do get questions about that all the time. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Camera’s about dying so it's probably good time to wrap it up. 

Lauren: Yeah but we should – we have to let it die and then turn it back on and then end it. 

Matt: Or we can just end it now.

Lauren: Right now?

Matt: Yep. 

Lauren: Just like this? 

Matt: Thanks for listening everybody. 

Lauren: Thanks for listening everyone. Send us an email if you have any questions and check out the resources in the show notes. We'll be back next week. 

Lauren: The camera hasn’t died yet.

Matt: Send us a camera. Somebody sponsor us from a camera company. 

Lauren: If you have a recommendation for a camera that isn't gonna overheat there it goes. 

Matt: Yeah, it’s dead. 

Lauren: Okay, bye everyone. Thanks for listening. 

Matt: Later