I have had many different jobs and not left all of them voluntarily.  Because of that I firmly believe that I have to keep control over everything that I can.  I know that I cannot control the environment, the economy, or the actions of any company I am associated with.

I self publish because I control my marketing, my publication, my book covers, my illustrations and my pricing.  I like this site because it allows me the freedom to set my own pricing, do any marketing I like (including this blog post), build a real business online by helping develop the visitors to this site and so increase the sales of my books and gain commission on the sales of others books, not something to discount folks.

Let me just expand that bit for a moment.  If you have your own website to sell your books you may sell 1% of the visitors if you are really good.  That means that 99% of your visitors leave without buying your book or anything else.  If you have 100 visitors a day you’ll sell a book a day.  If you have 80% unique visitors, that’s those who have never been there before, the one sale you get is most likely to come from one of the repeat visitors not the new ones.

This means that of the 100 visitors per day, 20 are repeat and you are able to sell to one of those.  Can you see that you need to bring more of those 80 new ones back?  It isn’t about bringing a lot more visitors, although that will help, it is about getting more value from those who do come.  If you can get your repeat visitors up to say 40% rather than 20% then you’ll likely sell 2 books per day, that’s a 100% increase in sales.  Then ramp up the overall traffic to 200 visitors a day and your book sales should double again.

Now that’s great but why is that different here at Bearly Books?  Lets say you are able to bring 100 new visitors to your book page here.  Assuming the same sales rates you sell 1 book per day.  However, while they are here the 80% who would normally have left your own site have a bit more to look at so some of them browse around and find another book that they do want to buy.

You get a commission on that sale as well as the profit from the book you sold.  You get more value from your efforts than you would on your own.  Someone else is doing the same and one of their visitors buys your book so you end up with 2 book sales and one commission.  Now that’s what I call a good plan.

Does it work?  Currently Bearly Books has 56.7% unique visitors, Mr Bearly told me that.  It also has only a 48.2% bounce rate, those visitors who arrive and leave almost immediately.  I can’t get those stats on any of my other sites so I know that I’ll get much better value for each visitor I bring here than anywhere else I can send them.

If you look at the concept of self-publishing the only real difference here is that I am not producing a hard copy of my book, yet, I am not competing on the book shelves for space and I am not only getting 6% of the retail price as my royalty.

On this site I am getting 50% of the sale price, which I set, 25% of any other sale price and I don’t have to worry about setting up secure pages to deliver the book.  I don’t have to worry about dealing with the ecommerce component, I don’t have to worry about hosting fees or domain names or even how to write html, javascript or any of the other web site stuff.

Yeah, I know that you can use tools like NVU to create nice web pages in a wysiwyg environment but why do that when you can just type it in here?

I still have to design and create a nice book cover but that’s pretty easy using free tools like The Gimp or I can outsource that to a graphic artist.  Looking at all the benefits I think they outweigh the disadvantages.

What are they?  The fact that you have little control over the overall layout and presentation of your work.  The fact that you may set the price on your work but you will only get 50% of the sale price (beats 6% hands down) or 70% if you become a paid member ($20 per month seems pretty reasonable to me once I’m selling more than 2 books per month) but that is outweighed by getting 25% of any other purchase my visitor makes.

That’s it I think, if you can think of any more negatives why not add them here.