Nothing here is anti Amazon, anti bookstore, or an argument for leaving a publishing deal. Keep the publisher, the listings, and every account already selling copies. All of it keeps working exactly as it does now.
We install one more channel beside them. What most authors do not expect is that the direct channel makes the other channels sell more, because every ad putting the book in front of a new reader also sends some of them straight to the retailer they already have an account with.
About 30%
of total sales across our author accounts come through retail, with no advertising pointed at it
Those accounts run paid traffic to their own store and nothing else. Retail still picks up roughly a third of the volume as a byproduct, and when an account goes dark on advertising, most of that volume goes with it.
So the retail plan stays untouched, and the direct channel runs beside it. You get the volume in both places and you keep the customer in one of them.
On the bestseller lists: most direct sales do not report to them, and that is a real tradeoff. It is also a timing question rather than a choice. Retail runs the launch window. Direct runs alongside it and keeps running long after, and the list built along the way is the reason the next book opens bigger than this one.
Every launch generates demand once. The only question is who keeps the people it produced.
