Play To Win

When we started selling Lori's books directly on her store, we were only selling her paperbacks. Not the eBooks.

Why?

Partly, it was because we were afraid of losing her Amazon income.

But looking back, we weren't playing to win. We were playing not to lose.

Sounds similar, right? But there's a difference.

When you play not to lose, you have one foot in and one foot out.

When you play to win, you're all in.

This is why, in October 2023, we decided to go all in and take Lori's books out of Kindle Unlimited (KU).

We even stopped running Facebook Ads for Lori's books on Amazon, and put every penny into Facebook Ads for her direct sales.

We knew things were going to be rough for a few months without the KU income, combined with the drop in Amazon Bestseller Ranks, and the reduction in organic sales.

But now we were playing to win with direct sales.

eBooks were and still are Lori's top-selling format. So, if we were going to play to win at direct sales, we needed both feet in the game.

We couldn't do that with print books alone. We needed the eBooks to make direct sales work for us.

Have we had some challenges along the way? Absolutely.

Have we doubted our decision to bring Lori's books out of KU? You bet.

But if we hadn't made this decision, Lori's store wouldn't be working as well as it is.

If we were just dipping our feet into direct sales, we wouldn't be taking the actions we need to take to make this work.

I'm not saying you need to go all in on direct sales from the start if you don't want to.

But if you really want to see what direct sales can do for your author business, then at some point, you're going to have to go all in.

There’s always going to be uncertainty, nothing is guaranteed, but you only get out what you put in.

You'll know when it's time to stop playing not to lose, and instead, play to win.

To Your Success
– Matt