Podcast Interview: Imelda Dharmawi 12/07/2022 - How to market and sell books directly to your readers using Payhip

Carla King interviews Imelda Dharmawi on how to market and sell books directly to your readers using Payhip.

Nonfiction Authors Association Podcast | December 7, 2022

“There are just so many marketing ideas that are free. And that’s what I always tell people who are direct selling. I’ve seen some other authors actually create social media posts on this, where they say, ‘Yeah, if you’re direct selling, you’re going to do a lot of marketing on your own.’ And some people find that really overwhelming. But it’s really not the case.” -Imelda Dharmawi

Imelda Dharmawi is the Head of Growth at Payhip. With years of experience in the ecommerce industry, Imelda’s journey has been fueled with unrelenting passion for empowering people to start their businesses online. Today, she works with creators and authors on Payhip to build and grow their brands and generate sustainable income through ecommerce.

I will also add that the NFAA invited Payhip to join the Nonfiction Authors Association as a partner member and I’m thrilled that they did. We wanted to offer our members access to a direct-selling, ecommerce partner and they have that and, as you’ll see, much more, including websites you can set up in no-time.

Nonfiction Authors Podcast: Imelda Dharmawi

Find the video podcast, show notes, links, quotes, and podcast transcript below.

Live on December 7, 2022 at 10:00am PT

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Show Notes

Links

In this episode…

Direct selling and what it means for authors.
Why authors should consider direct selling platforms like Payhip, and what makes it different from bigger platforms.
How Payhip can help you connect to your customers/readers on a deeper level.
Three steps to set up direct selling.
The benefits of direct selling through Payhip.
How to create a website using Payhip.
How to use Payhip for digital downloads.
How Payhip can act as a lead magnet for your business.
Recommendations for when and how to discount your books on e-commerce platforms like Payhip.
How to bundle and cross sell through Payhip.
How Payhip deals with worldwide tax laws.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the interview series for the Nonfiction Authors Association. Today’s session is with Imelda Dharmawi and we will be talking about how to market and sell books directly to your readers using Payhip. I’m Carla King, your host, and I’m happy to have you with us today. This interview will last only 30 minutes and you can find the replay on our Nonfiction Authors Association website and social media platforms including YouTube, and wherever you listen to podcasts.

And now I’d like to introduce our guest.

Imelda Dharmawi is the Head of Growth at Payhip. With years of experience in the ecommerce industry, Imelda’s journey has been fueled with unrelenting passion for empowering people to start their businesses online. Today, she works with creators and authors on Payhip to build and grow their brands and generate sustainable income through ecommerce.

Imelda Dharmawi 2:20

Yeah, so we’re at 10 plus years now. And yeah, we’ve been around for a while. So we’ve had a lot of improvements since then, so we’re now a really robust ecommerce for a lot of sellers selling a lot of different things. We started off with just digital downloads, for people to be able to sell their ebooks really quickly and other digital downloads. But now we’ve expanded to a lot of other things like online courses, subscriptions and things.

Carla King 2:44

Yeah, you’ve added a lot since then. And I track ecommerce and author stuff. So I look at you every once in a while I go, ‘Wow, they’ve added a lot of stuff!’ I love that about tech. So yes, the heart of your company is direct selling products and books, digital and physical. Can you just define direct selling and what that specifically means for authors?

Imelda Dharmawi 3:09

So for authors, direct selling literally just means authors selling their books directly to their readers. And this is as opposed to selling via third party companies, or platforms like Amazon, or publishers. But in today’s world, direct selling typically involves the author selling directly to their readers via their website online. And this is what we help authors do.

Carla King 3:29

Well, let’s start with the why. Why should authors do that, in addition to uploading to IngramSpark, and Draft2Digital, and Amazon, and all those places?

Imelda Dharmawi 3:45

So with direct selling, first, you want to check that you don’t have any exclusivity agreements with any other parties, for sure. But if you are free to direct sell, then there’s tons of benefits that you can enjoy. One of the more obvious ones will be that authors tend to pocket a lot more of the profits from their own book sales, because there’s just simply no middleman involved. And I can give you some numerical visualizations over here. So if you were to sell using platforms like Payhip, or some other ecommerce platforms–but I’ll just use Payhip because it’s easier for me to be able to show you numerically–then we charge 5% transaction fee per sale. So if you don’t make any sales whatsoever on your website, you pay nothing. And you still get to keep your beautiful website showing people what you’re about as an author. But if you go through third party platforms, they usually charge, on average, about 30-35% commission fee–or royalty fee. Which, that’s a pretty significant chunk of your profit, in comparison to 5%. So if you’re already an established author, especially, and you’re selling a lot of books, that 35% is really a lot of money out of your pocket.

Carla King 4:50

Amazon is direct selling to Amazon customers platform. Amazon is selling, so they take that cut. IngramSpark sells to Amazon, and so does Draft2Digital, and they take an additional 10%. So, you know, that’s even more. But that’s quantity, right? You get exposed to more buyers. But if you have a platform, or you want to grow your platform–which we always say is very, very important for authors, you can sell a lot of physical books and digital books via your own website.

Imelda Dharmawi 5:27

Absolutely. And there’s tons more benefits. So if you think about it–the best way is really to just spread your wings as wide as possible. So you don’t want to be exclusive to certain things. A few more benefits to direct selling are, of course, you get paid faster, typically–depending on the platforms that you choose. But with PayHip, you definitely get paid instantaneously. Because we integrate with Stripe and PayPal, the world’s most reliable payment gateways, and they pay out to our sellers directly.

Carla King 5:55

So if I have a Stripe account, or a PayPal account–I actually have both–I could choose either of those?

Imelda Dharmawi 6:02

Yes, you can choose to connect both. Because each of those platforms actually give different payment options to people. So PayPal obviously has PayPal, and Stripe has all the different kinds of major credit cards and things like that. Even if you don’t have an account with Stripe or PayPal, you can still sign up for one in less than 10 minutes. So you get paid faster–and this is in comparison to some of the platforms that I know will sort of hold a certain threshold before you can even get to your income. So essentially more money in your hands more immediately to invest more in other things, such as marketing. But one of the, I guess less obvious benefits, is the amount of control you have over everything. And I’ll talk about the kinds of different control that you have.

One big one is the fact that if you own your own website, and you’re direct selling, you get to build your own email list. And this is big in the author community that we know at PayHip because basically, you own that list of customers. And no one can pull the rug under you, no one can suddenly say, ‘Goodbye, you don’t have access to your customers.’ So no one can do that to you. You can get in touch with your readers in a more personal way. You get to announce your new books, create blog posts and announce it to them. We also have what I call this small business personalization aspect. So I saw this joke on Facebook where people say, ‘Yeah, if you order from Amazon, you’ll get a box, your item, and probably an invoice. But if you order from small businesses, the box explodes with these love letters from all these small businesses, little trinkets of appreciation, and things like that.’ And that’s the kind of experience you get to give to your readers, right? So you’re not just selling a book–you can actually send them a lot of different things, and because you own those customers. They’re speaking to you directly, and you get to really curate what their experience with you would look like.

Carla King 7:45

Oh, I just love that. I mean, pens or journals–I got one box from a vendor that had confetti in it. It was so fun.

Imelda Dharmawi 7:59

Exactly. And I think that also really makes you feel really good as an author. And as a seller in general, you give something away to people. People really love it–you feel really good in return. So you have that amount of control. And there’s a lot more control, obviously, to your creative aspects of your marketing as well–if you’re into those things. And obviously, some people might not want to invest time into thinking about those. But you get to really have full control over everything. So maybe I’ll add one more thing. So this is particularly in comparison to selling on Amazon, for example. And this is also true when you’re selling on other marketplaces, like Etsy. What we hear sometimes is–authors or sellers just being really frustrated with the one star review they get, especially if they felt like the one star review was unfair. But you really have no control, because it’s somebody else’s platform. But if you’re selling off of your own website, we do have a customer review feature on Payhip as well. But it’s approval only. So yes, you do want your customer reviews to be honest. But you also don’t want to fall victim to those unfair one star reviews. So those things will never happen on your own website, for sure. You still get to showcase the social proof that you want, with regards to your books and your other items. And it’s just a lot less stress, I would say, when it comes to seeing those reviews trickle in.

Carla King 9:18

Yeah, that is stressful when you get a one star review–and especially when it’s unfair, you know? So how easy or hard is it to set up the direct sale of your item?

Imelda Dharmawi 9:32

At the very basic level of things, you only need to do three things. And I promise you this, you can finish this within an hour or even less. One, you want to sign up to an ecommerce platform of your choice. So you want to create an online store or website, essentially. And of course I would recommend Payhip in this case, but I’ll go into details later on.

Carla King 9:53

You can also have your own website, right?

Imelda Dharmawi 9:51

Yes, if you do already have one, you can start selling from it. Essentially, if your current website doesn’t have the transactional element to it, you can add Payhip for free into any ecommerce websites, and then your website will become sort of fully transactional at that point. So first, you just create a website. Or if you don’t have one, just just basically embed Payhip into your existing website or create a new one entirely for free using Payhip. And then second one is, of course, you want to upload your product listing here, in this case will be your books, or anything else that you might want to sell. So I guess this is one of the other benefits–you get to sell anything else you want on your website. If you want to sell merch, or you want to sell ebooks, online courses, coaching services, that’s up to you–you can do that. And that’s pretty much it. You already have a store, you already have a product. And now you’re ready to direct sell.

The last step is basically just to drive traffic to your own website or online store, right? So you want people to visit your store for them to be able to make a purchase. So with this, the sky’s the limit on what you can do. This includes things like you want to maybe start getting reviews for your books, and you want to start creating reader magnets. And that’s super easy to do using Payhip. You can actually publish your book as a product listing. And then you can set a pay-what-you-want kind of price. So basically what that is, is they get to–if you’re selling an ebook, then you get to download it for free. But if you’re selling a normal book, you can also ship it for free if you want to. But there’s an option where you can sort of ‘Buy me a coffee’–so it’s a way for people to still support you, if they want to. And that’s really nice for authors. And typically, we see a lot of people actually really do want to support their authors. And they really want to support their favorite authors for them to be able to even make even more amazing books for them to read.

Some of the other stuff that you can do include things like–you can do discounts or other promotions, free gift with purchase with your books, you can do a free mini online course, if you’re teaching something within your book. You can also go a little bit more complex and even create a full on affiliate program with Payhip, for free as well. And this is where you’re going to give commission to influencers ,or whoever else wants to promote your books. And once they start bringing in sales, then you pay them commission as a percentage, which is a really powerful tool. And if used correctly, essentially, you’re almost hiring a whole brigade of sales people. And there’s just so many marketing ideas that are free. And that’s what I always tell people who are direct selling.

I’ve seen some other authors actually create social media posts on this, where they say, ‘Yeah, if you’re direct selling, you’re going to do a lot of marketing on your own.’ And some people find that really overwhelming. But it’s really not the case. Because, (A) Budget wise, it’s not really overwhelming, because there’s so many marketing initiatives you can do for free–social media being one of the major ones, actually. So many authors are on social media now. But so many other non-budgetary marketing initiatives that you can do to drive traffic to your website. And I heard this from one of the startup founders the other day–if you don’t have the budget to do things, you can substitute that with time and effort. So I think that’s really powerful–time being a really important key when you’re driving traffic to your website. It will slowly grow. Especially if you start doing blogs and things like that. You start ranking on Google, you start getting organic traffic. And that all just takes time.

Carla King 13:29

A lot of authors have a website. A lot of authors have really old websites, and they’ve been procrastinating redesigning. Some authors might want to have a separate website for maybe a little bit of a different topic, or just a sales page, you know. So let’s talk about the website, which is kind of a newer Payhip feature, right? I was really amazed at how easy that looked. So can you talk about that?

Imelda Dharmawi 14:01

Yes. So the Store Builder actually is something that we launched last year. So it’s relatively new in comparison to the age of our company, I would say. But what’s even newer is this week, we’ve launched website themes, which is awesome. So you literally create websites within minutes, which is awesome. And it’s for free, which is even more awesome. Essentially, all of those situations that you’ve just mentioned– everything is possible. If you just want to create a sales page, you can. If you already have an ancient looking website, and you just want to add an extension to it, you can also.

What people usually do is they create a one menu navigation bar. Typically what happens is–you have your blog, you have everything on your current website already, and you’d want to move all of those away. This creates one more link that’s a shop, and that entire link leads to your paid store. That’s also possible. Or you can embed a paid product listing into your existing website, if you’re using WordPress or any other e-commerce platform. Basically, if you already have those product listings, you can embed a buy button from Payhip as well. So there are just so many ways that you can use Payhip. And the best part about it all is–honestly, because our platform is free, we don’t charge anything unless you make a sale. And once your store grows to a certain revenue–typically once you grow to about $1500 to $2000 per month, you can then switch to our monthly plans. And we don’t charge any transaction fees at that point. So it’s just a monthly fee, and no feature differences between any of the plans.

Carla King 15:27

Alright, so say I have a physical book, and I have an ebook. I’m launching my book, so I need to package up and deliver my signed books, and whatever confetti I want to put in the box. What about digital downloads?

Imelda Dharmawi 15:44

Same exact processes. So first, you want to sign up on an e-commerce platform. I should mention not all E-commerce platforms would have these kind of features if you’re selling ebooks. Payhip definitely comes with that, because our e-commerce platform already is specialized toward digital products. Then what you want to do is start uploading your product. In this case, if it’s an ebook–it can be a PDF, I’ve seen people sell ebook PDFs. But of course, any other formats. As long as it is a file that you can save on your computer, you can basically sell it. So once your customer purchases it, the Payhip platform will automatically deliver it to your customer. But we also integrate with Book Funnel–if that’s your platform of choice to deliver your books to your readers, we also integrate with them. So the same type of process, where people would purchase from your Payhip store, and then automatically Book Funnel will then deliver it to your customer as well.

Carla King 16:39

A lot of people have Book Funnel. I do, and it’s just so easy, because they give the reader instructions on how to download it. But then I have to hook up my computer to my Kindle and load it on or email it to myself, which is fine. That’s why I love using Book Funnel, so I’m really glad that you’ve integrated with that. Also, I want to say–PDFs. So with Payhip, you can also use Book Funnel to deliver PDFs. I use them for lead magnets. But you can also just use Payhip straight up to have a free lead magnet. And do those people get added to your email list?

Imelda Dharmawi 17:21

Yes. Basically, if you are selling digital products, then absolutely. Your customers will have to input their email addresses. And you have an option on your product listing that says–when your customer is purchasing, do you want to collect them and put that into your mailing list automatically? Then you can start building and of course, that’s a really good idea to do–you should do that. So that when people purchase your items, you start building your email list. And you can just get in touch with them in the future if you have any email marketing you want to send them.

Carla King 17:53

So if I have a website, do I just get the button like I would from PayPal, and just put it in the HTML on my website?

Imelda Dharmawi 18:01

Yeah, so it is kind of like that. However, not to, I guess, throw shade in the situation–the PayPal button was a little bit of an older technology. With the Payhip ‘Buy’ button, you can actually add to cart. So for example, if you have multiple books within your website, then once your customer clicks on ‘Buy Now,’ it will be added to a cart. Everything is happening within your website. But you’ll now see a cart button on the top right hand corner of your website. And they can put more and more books there, they can check out using a bunch of different payment options, like the credit cards and things like that. So essentially, you’ll get the best of both worlds–you won’t have to change your website, and you still get to enjoy Payhip. But of course, if you want to just migrate your entire store to Payhip, you can, too. I should mention that if you don’t have a website yet, we actually give a free domain to you. So it will be payhip.com/whatever you want to customize at the back. So it’s like payhip.com/imeldaauthor, or something like that. But you can also connect a custom domain. So it’d be ww.w.imelda.com. You can connect it for free. But of course, you just need to purchase the domain elsewhere, like from websites like GoDaddy.

Carla King 19:14

And for many authors, you’ll just be replaying that to your tech person so they can do that for you.

Imelda Dharmawi 19:21

Yeah, and once you get into the platform, it’s just easy. We try to make this as easy as possible. There are tutorials all over the place. Support team is always constantly praised for being super helpful towards our sellers. So we’re always here if anybody needs us, for sure.

Carla King 19:42

I wanted to talk about the discounting. It is really nice to have a book launch with discounted ebooks, and print books, and free shipping, and all that. What do you recommend doing? And does that happen automatically? And then I want to talk about taxes a little bit.

Imelda Dharmawi 20:03

In terms of discounting–it’s super easy. Again, I mentioned we have a bunch of marketing tools that you can utilize for free. So setting up coupon codes is one of them. So basically, you can just set up, let’s say, Carla50 to get 50% off. You can also announce it to your website and things like that. You can make individual coupon codes as well, if you want to give certain people a free book. There’s also other types of discounts that you can do. So we do have what’s called an upgrade discount. An upgrade discount happens when, let’s say your customer has already purchased one ebook–let’s say ‘How to Cook Vegan Food: Level One.’ And then once they purchase that, Payhip automatically then sends them an email saying, ‘Hey, because you purchased this book, you get a discount on these other books.’ So that’s what we call an upgrade discount. There’s so many other little types of marketing campaigns that you can do within Payhip.

Carla King 20:55

I’ve seen that so often. I’ve purchased a book and then it says, ‘Oh, wait, would you like to purchase the course that goes along with this book?’ Can you sell courses on Payhip as well?

Imelda Dharmawi 21:09

Yes. You can actually sell bundles. That’s the beauty of being an ecommerce platform that has a variety of product types–you can actually bundle your online course with your ebook together. And that’s really powerful, because you have different types of learners when it comes to learning and how to guides, right? So the online courses–you get to upload videos. You can even upload assignments or surveys. Because there’s so many other learner types out there, you kind of want to cater to a bunch of different people. Some people really like the fact that they can watch a video of you doing things, as opposed to reading it over a book. So you can actually just bundle that product together. But yeah, what you mentioned is cross selling, which we also have. So instead of somebody finishing a purchase, and then getting a discount, there’s also a feature where you add something to your cart, and then Payhip will prompt your customer saying, ‘Are you interested in these other products, too, for a discounted price?’ So there’s all those little things that will eventually lead to a bigger revenue stream for you as an author. And you have control over all of that, because it’s your own website.

Carla King 22:16

And you know, at times I find that irritating when that happens. But I have to say, it often does apply, and especially when there’s a really deep discount.

Imelda Dharmawi 22:27

What I find is–it really depends on your intention, I guess. I always overhear–if there’s just so much demand, and there’s value in what you’re offering, people are really happy to accept that. I’ve never seen people reject a valuable offer. But if you try to be so in your face about it, your store is all a mess, it’s kind of hard. But we try to make it as easy as possible for everyone.

Carla King 22:56

And then when it comes to tax time–you are in Canada, and the UK, and the US. You’re worldwide. How the heck do you deal with all those tax laws?

Imelda Dharmawi 23:10

We get this question so much. In fact, we have users, really, literally signing up on Payhip due to taxations alone. We are actually compliant to be able to collect general EU and UK VAT on your behalf. And this is also a different rate for ebooks as well. So we’ve been compliant to do this for years now. People actually sign up to us because of this reason alone–because they didn’t really want to deal with all of those. For US sales tax, however, you can set it up correctly on our platform. But we’re not compliant to do that just yet, on your behalf. So you’re still needing to remit this on your own. But everything can be set up properly on your Payhip dashboard. Everything’s all good. It’s just the EU and UK VAT that we are actually compliant, to really take this weight off. It’s no longer your headache, essentially. So we’re able to take care of that for you.

Carla King 24:01

So the US issue is coming down the pipe, I hope.

Imelda Dharmawi 24:05

Yes, yes, for sure. That’s definitely one of the most requested features that we have on our platform.

Carla King 24:11

For people selling worldwide, it’s really important. I mean, I have–for some reason–a ton of people in Sweden and Denmark buy my books.

Imelda Dharmawi 24:20

Yeah, I know. You know, it’s a little scary when you don’t know what you’re doing as well. And you just want to–’just please take care of that for me.’ And we’re glad to do that for people. Thank you, Carla, for inviting me to this podcast. I really enjoyed this session a lot. And I hope that I’m able to contribute some valuable information to the audience.

Carla King 24:38

Definitely. And thank you to our listeners for joining us today and every week. For a list of guests and topics just check our schedule on the site, use your favorite search engine, or better yet, sign up for our mailing list at NonfictionAuthorsAssociation.com.

Quotes from our guest

“We also have what I call this small business personalization aspect. So I saw this joke on Facebook where people say, ‘Yeah, if you order from Amazon, you’ll get a box, your item, and probably an invoice. But if you order from small businesses, the box explodes with these love letters from all these small businesses, little trinkets of appreciation, and things like that.’ And that’s the kind of experience you get to give to your readers, right? So you’re not just selling a book–you can actually send them a lot of different things, and because you own those customers. They’re speaking to you directly, and you get to really curate what their experience with you would look like.”

“There’s just so many marketing ideas that are free. And that’s what I always tell people who are direct selling. I’ve seen some other authors actually create social media posts on this, where they say, ‘Yeah, if you’re direct selling, you’re going to do a lot of marketing on your own.’ And some people find that really overwhelming. But it’s really not the case.”

“Once you get into the platform, it’s just easy. We try to make this as easy as possible. There are tutorials all over the place. Support team is always constantly praised for being super helpful towards our sellers. So we’re always here if anybody needs us for sure.”