:: Related post: That one time I sort of met Jeff Bezos. ::
As a freelancer, I've tended towards client work and digital downloads even though my preference is to create and make physical products.
Why?
It's to avoid the problem of Amazon and a customer base trained to get things cheaply with no shipping costs, a mindset that has unfairly weighted the balance against brick-and-mortar stores as well as individuals trying to sell products.
Yes, you are paying for shipping.
One of the more challenging things I've faced as a writer and artist trying to sell products online is that Amazon has trained people to not pay shipping.
Oh, they are paying for the shipping.
Whether it's on Etsy or some other platform trying to compete with Amazon and force sellers to offer free shipping, you're paying for the shipping.
Someone has to. It just isn't in the way they realize. Shipping must be extracted by someone from someone because shipping and handling, those boxes and packing materials and the time it takes to get orders ready and get them to the shipper and then travel across the country and get delivered? That's not free.
That costs quite a bit.
It's either added to the price or the cost gets passed down the line to the schmuck at the end with the least power to push back. For writers, particularly those who are self-published (whether POD or through a vanity press), the cost of shipping is something they get to eat.
And that's just the start.
The wholesale discount.
First, understand that booksellers demand a wholesale discount. This is standard in the bookselling world.
That discount has recently gone up (like the price of everything these days) to 55% if you want to reach the most potential selling outlets, but no lower than 40% if you don't mind that some outlets won't carry your book.
That means that whatever your book costs to print, you have to add the wholesale discount to it, and that's your break-even. Booksellers want to remove that percentage from the total so they can mark it up in the store and keep 40 to 55% of the profit themselves. If you, the author, want to make a profit, you have to add what you'd like on top of the cost + wholesale discount total.
For the self-published author, though, you're going to see your profits eaten up quickly in that wholesale discount and simply adding even just a $1 profit to the top of it prices your book in a range (in many cases) readers won't be willing to pay. Most of my books are full-color with lots of illustrations, and that increases the price by leaps and bounds.
Add to this that Amazon wants the lowest price out there, must have a wholesale discount (though they seem to take 40% from my own experience, and not require the 55%), and because of their "free" shipping, people won't buy from anyone else, and things get sticky.
To your customers, perhaps, the price on Amazon is the same (or less!), the convenience is increased, and they get to beat the system by not paying for shipping.
This is not reality.
Example: selling a new children's book.
I recently released a new children's book. I added no color to the interior and tried to make it as inexpensive as possible to keep the cost down because I know money is tight and my goal is to give kids something fun to read, not rob their parents.
For the genre that it is, it's a decent little book and people have told me their kids liked it.
How awkward, then, that I need to earn profit from my work.
I'm happy to do free work for my family, always. I do some free work for friends if I know money is tight for them. But this little book was a lot of work. I spent a year creating it and the peripheral content. What is a fair price for a year of work? What is your price for your year's worth of work?
It's not out of line to try and earn some level of profit.
Oddly, though, I find in recent years the need to justify trying to profit off of my work and the use of my time when I ask for monetary compensation for some blog articles or downloads. A decade of "everything is free on the internet" has done the same thing as Amazon in regards to shipping.
So for clarity's sake for anyone writing or creating out there: it is acceptable and expected that we make a profit from our work so that we can live.
Just tuck that away and believe it. Undersell your products and services too long, and you end up underselling who you are as a person. Wanting to earn a profit doesn't mean you are a Grinch.
In order to keep the children's book in the price range I believe is fair and feasible for parents, I tried to keep my profit minimal and that means that I make not even $1 when you buy it from Amazon or some other bookseller.
Less. Than. A. Dollar.
I can't even buy a can of soda for what I get off an Amazon sale.
It's like going to a craft fair and seeing cute items that turn up on Target's shelves the next year and weeping for the original artisans whose popular ideas were outsourced and their income leveled.
I have made the new book available for sale directly from me on my website, promising to autograph it and provide a free bookmark, to ship it quickly so they don't have to wait for the POD delay that comes when the book is ordered from Amazon et. al, all to take away the sting of the $4 shipping (which, to be honest, doesn't actually cover the full cost depending on where the recipient lives, because I tried to price that low, too).
I've encouraged people to purchase it directly from me because I at least make a couple of dollars a book instead of watching Amazon and other sellers eat up all my hard work, and yet, here's the odd thing:
Free shipping (and the convenience of Amazon) wins every time.
Multiple people, friends in particular, have said, essentially, that I should let them know when it's available on Amazon so they can purchase it there.
"You can buy it from me on my website," I say. Professional convenient online shopping cart. Painless. Click. Done. Fast shipping. Autographed. Free bookmark. Helping a friend make a living.
Nope. They want to buy on Amazon. They go through all kinds of contortions to avoid paying the $4 shipping and handling.
The allure, the habit, the ingrained thought pattern, compliments of Amazon, can't be overcome.
Just as Voldemort was the one who was not to be named, shipping is the thing not to be paid for.
If you won't pay shipping fees, don't complain that everything is a cheap import and Amazon is destroying the world.
Free shipping is not free.
It is incredibly destructive, particularly for creators who don't have large publishing houses or mass production behind them to take away the brunt of the blow.
Any time an individual sells something, they have to cover all of their expenses, add some kind of wholesale discount to it in case someone wants to carry it in their store, add a wee profit on top of that, and then add the shipping. There is no getting around this. Amazon (and others like them) has not changed the laws of selling and profit physics; they've simply maximized their cut at the expense of the individual making the thing you say you want.
I want to encourage you that if you know someone who has published a book or created some kind of product, go to their website and order from them when possible. If you find a book on Amazon, do a search on the author and see if you can't find their site and if they are selling it there, or link to their printer/publisher for a direct sale (they'll make more profit that way, too). You are not paying all that much more, and you are making it possible for them to keep creating and writing.
What do you do about the Amazon monster?
Some obvious answers as possible solutions would be:
Educate your customers.
Offer more perks and hide shipping in your sales.
Get signed by a big publisher and let them haggle the deals.
Find other platforms that are at least a little less toxic than Amazon.
Get creative about how you market your book or product.
Number 3 would be awesome, but it's the rest I can tell you I've done, and only with middling success. You can't educate customers who count beans. You can't squeeze money out of customers who are tightening their belts in tough times.
Getting creative (#2 and #5) is what I'm aiming at now. What value can I add that doesn't cost me too much that would outweigh the cheap factor on Amazon? It is my intention, for the following books in this children's series, to not list them in the system (Ingram) that would put them on Amazon or elsewhere. They will have ISBNs, yes, but only available from me or the printer directly.
Could work, could be shooting myself in the foot.
Knowing from past experience that this fear of paying shipping might happen, I have tried to create fun, outside or additional income flows (products, downloads, audio, clubs) associated with the book series that I hope would drive people to my website. The first book was a kind of sacrifice in the hopes that if enough young readers enjoyed it, I could forgo online sellers like Amazon entirely. It may be a pipe dream, but I have to try.
I have to keep hitting the bricks, contacting media, going to stores, and doing what I can to sell the book, but there's this behemoth in the room we have to talk about, and that's what this post is.
This post was originally posted on LinkedIn.