Direct Sales

Payhip is the fastest path from zero to a functioning direct sales store. No monthly fee until you're ready to upgrade, EU VAT handled automatically, ebook delivery built in, and a setup time measured in hours rather than days. This article covers everything you need to know to launch on Payhip, grow on Payhip, and know when you've outgrown it.

Pricing in a direct store is different from pricing on retail platforms. You're not constrained by royalty tier thresholds, you're not competing in the same browse context as Amazon, and you have products — signed copies, bundles, special editions — with no retail equivalent and no comparison price. This article covers how to price each product type in your direct store, when to discount and when not to, and how to track which prices actually drive your best revenue.

Your direct store earns revenue proportional to the quality and volume of traffic it receives. Not all traffic is equal — email list traffic converts at 5-15%, social media traffic at 1-3%, cold paid advertising often below 1%. This article maps every traffic channel available to indie authors, ranks them by conversion rate, and tells you where to invest your time and money for direct store traffic at each stage of your author business.

Most author stores are run on intuition — which products feel like they're selling, which promotions seem to be working, which channels appear to be generating traffic. Intuition is a starting point, not a strategy. This article covers the specific metrics that tell you whether your direct store is healthy and growing, how ScribeCount's Sales Dashboard surfaces those metrics across your full author business, and how to turn data into decisions without spending hours in multiple dashboards.

Email is your direct store's primary revenue driver — not an add-on to it. The readers on your list are your highest-converting direct store audience. The buyers from your store become your most valuable email subscribers. This article covers the specific email-to-store connections: post-purchase sequences, buyer segmentation, launch emails that drive store traffic, abandoned cart recovery, and how ScribeCount Email connects these systems without requiring separate tools for each.

An affiliate program turns your most enthusiastic readers and genre colleagues into a promotional network — they recommend your books, earn a commission on sales they refer, and you pay only for results. This article covers how to set one up on Payhip and Shopify, what commission structure works for book products, how to recruit and activate affiliates, and the legal disclosure requirements that apply to both you and your affiliates.

Patreon and Ream are direct sales channels in the most literal sense — readers pay you directly for your content, with no retail platform intermediary. But they operate on different economics and serve different purposes than a Shopify or Payhip store. This article covers when to use Patreon and Ream, when to use your own store instead, how they complement each other, and how to connect them so supporters on one platform can become buyers on the other.