This week, Crys talks to author Alicia McCalla on building her own online store and using it as an avenue of marketing as well as a way to draw her readers deeper into her worlds. They discuss when you should consider direct sales of your ebooks and audios, when you should consider developing merchandise, and Alicia shares her most costly mistakes, so you don’t have to make them yourself!
Show Notes
Alicia McCalla https://aliciamccalla.com
You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Story https://amzn.to/2WcIADR
Author Iris Bolling https://irisbolling.com/
Alicia’s Recommended Resources:
Print On Demand https://www.printful.com/
Print On Demand https://printify.com/
Classes on Merchandising and Selling https://www.creativelive.com/instructor/megan-auman
Wholesale TED https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC8wczy7734jKPhiR2UkS9A
Transcript
Episode 20: Alicia McCalla on Direct Sales and Merchandising
Crys: Hello friends Welcome to the Write Away Podcast I’m Crys Cain with my cohost JP Rindfleisch And this is a bonus episode of sorts before I brought JP on I scheduled a few interviews with some friends that I really wanted to talk to about their special knowledge and this is one of those I recorded it JP listened to it And we’re going to talk about it a little bit before we get into the interview this is an interview with Alicia McCalla who is a friend of ours From the author success mastermind She has been working this year on putting a shop on her website for direct sales and merchandising And JP has some specific knowledge in this area that Alicia and I do not I’m really excited to hear your thoughts before we jump into the interview
JP: first of all I loved the interview Alicia is very expressive and she definitely knows how to whip you into shape I was very motivated after listening to this
Crys: It’s the Marine in her
JP: It is the marine in her and I’m just glad she’s not my Sergeant Cause I would be told what to do and I would have to deal with it my experience with it is more on the art side I do have a shop up on RedBubble and Zazzle I can’t say that it’s you know amazing I put my art up there so that people can buy it if they want I have a little bit of experience sharing it on social media and seeing the uptick on that but it hasn’t been something that I’ve deeply explored because it’s trying to find the fine line between advertising and annoying since I’ve had RedBubble up I’ve made under a hundred for the products that I’ve had but I can see that every time you add more products to it it bumps up the sales your stockpile of things slowly adds more and more as you build
Crys: did you learn anything from the interview or was there anything particular that stood out to you that it’s something that you haven’t been doing that you want to be doing
JP: I’m all over the place that’s one of my big ideation problems that I have I like to chase shiny things I really like Alicia’s approach she schedules things like crazy and always has everything relate back to each other she’s extremely thoughtful in that process and she Puts bumpers and boundaries on what she wants to do So she’s got her writing career which is her primary focus And then she actually sets boundaries on merchandising which is–I think she says in the interview it’s a one week Pomodoro method to work on merchandising and having that kind of schedule is amazing It sounds wonderful to me it’s probably something that I will start implementing for all the other side projects that I do want to work on another piece that I’ll take away from it is the level of authorship approach she brings up that new authors which is myself shouldn’t be so focused on merchandising That definitely let me Make room to put that on the back burner which is important because like I said earlier I am an ideation person and I love to chase shiny new objects I just need an Alicia in my ear to tell me No not yet Just put this on the back burner You can think about it but that’s it And then later on I can be like okay I can think about this for 25 minutes a week and then we’ll be fine
Crys: One book that I love for anyone who has any interest in merchandising whatsoever and is an amazing book For any stage of the author journey–beginner middle or later–is You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Story i I talks about looking in your story for things that at some point in the future if you make it big you might be able to create an item out of it Creative merchandising opportunity out of symbols meanings behind symbols When you look at star Wars when you look at star Trek when you look at Harry Potter what we buy are things that are so infused with symbols that were in the story that gained meaning in reading the story I think if that’s something that if your brain can handle it along with all the other new author things it’s not a bad thing to be thinking about at every level of your creation process That’s not going to work for everybody but if your brain works that way You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Story and I will link it in the show notes It Is an amazing resource
JP: sounds to me Like we have another potential book club
Crys: Ooh
JP: I know I have a copy of it I have yet to read it but you keep bringing it up So I guess it’s going to be on my list very soon
Crys: Alrighty then let’s get into the interview
I am here with my friend, Alicia McCalla, author of superhero fiction generally portraying women of color.
Alicia: Yes, ma’am I do super heroes. I do vampire huntresses,= I do dark paranormal, so black science fiction and fantasy for the most part
Crys: And what we’re talking about today is merchandising and direct sales because you have really dug into that this year.
Alicia: I have. I wanted to look at ways to increase, um, my revenue and look at ways to be able to support myself so I have multiple streams of income.
Crys: And why did you look into merchandising specifically versus anything else?
Alicia: I did look at some of the other things that were available to me, like creating courses or maybe becoming a coach or even something completely different, like investing or maybe selling insurance or something like this.
I decided that I didn’t want to pull myself in too many different directions and I wanted something that could help to drive more traffic to my website and drive more traffic to sign readers who might like my books.
Crys: When writers are thinking about merchandising and direct sales, it can seem pretty overwhelming. How did you start?
Alicia: One of the hurdles that writers might have is an understanding of what it means to do merchandising. I started ,actually, with getting some courses–not from other writers, but course, from other people who do merchandising.
And also people who are in the handcrafted movement. I looked at people who are already creatives or people who are already making money in the creative industry. that was creative live, um, and I also did some direct courses to people who just did merchandising.
I went opposite of looking at writers who do it. and I do want to say this, when I did look at writers who were doing merchandising, their merchandise was always connected with whatever books or products that they had were already currently selling. And my merchandise is adjacent.
So it could be that I wrote a book and it connects like my last, my empire Hunter’s book. I made, I got a character and I created a last vampire Hunter clothing line and series, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It could just be merchandise that could have been my books or could have been something that I would do, but not necessarily.
Crys: You’re approaching this differently than most people, in that most people are driving their existing fans toward the merchandise, and you’re using the merchandise to bring awareness to all of the things you have to offer .
Alicia: Yes, to my brand. We didn’t talk much about me being a school librarian, but I spent many years doing Scholastic Book Fair.
I love this idea of having these high action or high interest books connected with different forms of merchandise. Could be little pillows. It could be little tchotchkes, it could be pens–anything that would help to bring interest for other readers. And for me, it’s an emporium, right? So it could be clothing items.
My platform, of course, is black speculative fiction. And so it could be fantasy items with black people as the protagonist, or it could be African attire. That’s one of the areas that I would like to go with. Somebody could buy one of my unique superhero t-shirts and then possibly in the future, they could buy earrings that were African inspired or even pants that were African inspired to go along with it.
Crys: That’s really fun. What was the first thing you did you put on your website to sell?
Alicia: The first thing I put on my website to sell was the audio book. So that was another area that I moved into because I was very much interested in turning my website into a place of commerce. So I started with direct selling audio book.
I just put up my three story audio book that I had from my podcast. I started to sell it direct.
Crys: Did you pick that just because it was the easiest to get out there? Because you’re using BookFunnel, and they make it so slick, to–
Alicia: –to do it, yeah. Yes. One thing is I heard that there were some authors, ike Iris Bolling, who had been selling her books direct.
That concept was milling around in my head, and when I went to a workshop and understood what BookFunnel could do when you connect it with your WooCommerce, it just made a lot of sense to me to try that. So right now I only have the one audio book and I’ve made a few sales. I made $20.88 cents with that since it’s been a month.
It’s surprising in a way,be cause you wonder, would anybody buy an audio book? Right. And yes.
Crys: You’ve had that on a deep sale for most of that time, right?
Alicia: 99 cents. So in a way, most of my sales were 99 cents. Generally it’s priced there for $2.99. I think I made quite a few sales with that, actually, at least not 20, but somewhere around there. I did a good job.
Crys: What’s your timeline for getting all of your stories available in some form on your site? Is that in the plans?
Alicia: I’m going to take my time with that. Every month I’m working towards my merchandising. So once a week I set aside,maybe three to four Pomodoros to either add a book product or add some type of merchandise.
It’s not my intention to let the merchandising drive everything. It’s my intention to be a writer first, and then have the merchandise be my secondary thing. So I may take me a full year or maybe a year and a half to get everything up the way I’m thinking that I would like it to be.
Crys: One of my questions is: when do you think other authors should start looking at merchandising? If it’s a thing that they’re interested in at all.
Alicia: These are great questions. I think I generally consider myself to be an intermediate author, so I’m not really a master of anything yet, but I’ve had about maybe four or five books out there for several years. So I’m not in any way a newbie author.
I would think someone who was brand new to writing, I don’t know that they should be starting off in merchandising because that might be a little bit tricky for them. You need to learn how to write right first.
For me though, being an intermediate author, I think is fantastic because as I’m learning or building my brand. It’s getting more synthesized. I’m getting some great SEO for my website and more and more customers are coming to me. And those people who are already my readers are getting deeper and deeper into my world and my way of thinking.
I don’t want to say they becoming super fans, but I think I’m definitely giving a clear vision to people in terms of who I am and what my brand is all about in a way that I never had done before
Crys: How are you promoting your sales online, both for your book and for your merchandise?
Alicia: I do a mixture of both. Of course, I use all my social media venues to do it. Well, actually I start with my list. So I have a subscribers list about 604 people and they’re fairly active. I have about 30% open rate and I generally email once a week. I’m pretty good with that. People are pretty active there.
Then I move on to my social media. I have Twitter and Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. And of course, GoodReads cause that’s one of them.
But the one that is I find the most relevant and useful is Pinterest.
And also my blogging. I’ve always loved blogging. When I first started, I was blogging a lot. I was blogging two, three times a week and I got wonderful at blogging and I have a lot of hits on my website. Buy at low, very low conversions.
At that time, conventional wisdom for fiction authors was,you do not need to do blogging. It’s a waste of your time. You need to just be working on books.
And so there is a lull in my personal career where I just stopped blogging. Maybe about a year ago or year and a half ago. I said, you know what? I love blogging. It was fun to me. I’m good at it. And so then I began to do research on the power of driving traffic or content marketing to your website.
And so I just started blogging, but I blog now with a purpose. Originally I was blogging, I think, to find other writers, right? Because some of the topics that I was talking about were not topics that readers were interested in. Now I’m very intentional about my blogging.
My content marketing is more towards readers. I blog 11 to 15 times a month because that’s what the statistics say has an indelible mark on your SEO. And when I blog, I pin them on Pinterest and I see a surge in traffic. Sometimes blog posts, when I put them up between, Pinterest and social media, I might get a hundred views.
Within the last few months, I got about 300 views on one blog post. I know that SEO traffic is being driven there. It’s not anything that I am doing. That, along with the Pinterest, because the Pinterest article continues to get repinned.
Pinterest is great because there’s always that constant discoverability factor that maybe you don’t get in social media and regular Facebook once it’s gone.
I don’t know that people really find it later too. You know what I’m saying? But in Pinterest it’s always discoverable.
Crys: I have only done direct sales with one of my audio books.
I got into BookFunnel’s beta testing for their full length audio books. And yours counted as a short, so they’ve had that functionality for at least a year.
Alicia: That’s why I went for the short. And when I did the audio book, I did actually, go on Fiverr and find a sound recording person and he added sound effects and different things to it. That was about 70 bucks or something like that. I haven’t quite made that money back yet, but you know, it was fun to do.
Crys: We know that BookFunnel makes it really easy to hook up and sell eBooks, sell audio books. With your merchandising, that process was a little more complicated and different wasn’t it?
Alicia: It was a lot more complicated. That’s an understatement!
The first thing I think most writers might have to consider is optimizing their website for sales. You know, what does this look like? I actually, in the vvery beginning, when the idea was put to me that I needed to put a cart on my website. I was like, no no no no no no.
I got out of fear and aversion to turning my plate, my website into this place of commerce, which is difficult.
I did struggle and I did research. I struggled between do I want to do Shopify? Shopify is what a lot of those handmade artists are doing and they swear by it and they’re like, Shopify is perfect. It’s easy. You can put your stuff up. You can do a lot, But my purposes were substantially different because as a writer, I really, really wanted to drive traffic to me.
I really want to increase the SEO on my website, and I really want to want it to have that independent financial, I wouldn’t say dynasty, but you know what I’m saying? I wanted it to be my spot and my home, to be the place where we’re not only customers were finding me for the merchandise, but also readers.
They needed to know that. I think on Shopify, they would have had the merchandising experience, but they might not understand that I was an author
Crys: And you’re not making all of the items that you’re selling yourself by hand. How did you find the provider that you wanted to use? What were your requirements?
Alicia: I did more research on that. I took a class in merchandising, just to learn what all the options were. there are three options right now for people, mostly print on demand. So you have Printify, you have Printful, and then you have AllyExpress to do drop shipping.
Those are pretty much your three options that you can do if you don’t want to deal with inventory, shipping things to people and that kind of thing. And by the way, I do have my signed copies through WooCommerce on my website, and I would have to ship those. I’m okay with shipping something like that. But in general, I don’t want to get involved with having to ship the merchandise.
Print on demand has its own caveats. You really need to look at your policies and make sure you’re quite clear. You’re print on demand, it’ss hard for people to do returns. They can’t really return. If they do, they will be shipping it back to the print on demand to the printers and not you.
There’s some serious considerations for using print on demand.
Crys: What’s the main difference for people who are looking at doing this? Between print on demand and drop shipping?
Alicia: So Printify and Printful are print on demand. You take your designs, you take your ideas and they have products in there that you can choose to sell it. You can do t-shirtsm mugs. You can do phone cases, whatever they have to be printed on. Then you can take whatever image that you like and have that printed on merchandise. Of the two, Printful seems to have more options and I kind of liked them, but they were difficult for a beginner to do.
Printify was a lot better for me as a beginner. I just took to it intuitively and I didn’t struggle with it at all. Of the two, I say Printful is probably better because it has more merchandise options, but Printify was easier to get into and much more intuitive and faster. I’ve enjoyed working with them.
Crys: Shat is different about drop shipping?
Alicia: drop shipping is a whole other aspect. if you’re drop shipping, you probably want to do that with Alec express. Some people might do AllyExpress themselves. They might go on there and go, “Hey, I want to get this origami spoon.” and you get six of them or whatever. And for a cheaper price.
A lot of the vendors there are like from China , and they create a product that you might like, and it’s a product that’s available in multiple places. You add it to your store and your backend, and then people can just buy these. Sort of like Walmart, Target.
They both have Dove soap, right?. You can get it here. You can get it there. That’s the same concept with AllyExpress. These are little items, some big items that you can put on your store, but they’re mass produced. I’m still learning about AllyExpress, but I like the idea because it’s a great way to add more products to your store that you don’t have to create. They’re already created and you can even research and go, Oh, these earrings really sell. I want these in my store because I know they’re already going to sell.
When you do print on demand, you kind of don’t know. This image that I have, is that an image that connects with people or not? You hope to be like the gym shoe like that one guy, Mike who sold the gym shoe with the butterflies and made like a hundred thousand dollars. You hope that happens, but you don’t know if I that’s going to go on, you know?
Crys: One of the things I want to point out is that selling on your website isn’t the only option. For Alicia’s purpose of bringing people into her universe, into her business, it’s the best option. It’s going to be the best option for most of us, longterm. Short-term, there are other options.
For instance, I did that audiobook for sale, and rather than and do all the steps I needed to install woo, commerce and sell on my website. I said, screw it. I’m going to go easy mode. because I only have one thing to sell. I’m only selling it through the end of the year, when it goes to the paid version of audiobook sales with BookFunnel.
I’m going to use PayHip. A wonderful thing about PayHip is that they handle all taxes in all countries. They are the seller on record. They simply pay you a royalty, just like Amazon. So you could sell anywhere without any restrictions or worries that you are not going to be legal somewhere in the world.
if you’re doing merchandising, there are other print on demand options. Zazzle, Redbubble, Society6. And when you do those, then you have a site on their website where you do just the same thing as Print.. Printful and Printful- – they don’t make that confusing at all.
Rather than hooking it up to front end on your website, everything just happens on their site. They send you money when you’ve learned enough. My co-writer and I have sold some items, mostly coffee mugs for our series, on Zazzle. And the reason I picked Zazzle is I just have more control over the pricing.
Others have better interfaces, have certain client bases . there’s a lot of options out there that you can dip your toe in the water.
Are you going to make a bunch of money? Probably not. But this is a long-term strategy.
Alicia: That was one of the largest considerations that I had. I knew that I wanted this to be longer term. When I sat down, I had multiple meetings, not just with me, but I have my contract with my web design person and a graphic designer to kind of see, “Hey, is this viable that will this work? What am I looking at short, long term? How would this impact me?” The whole thing.
I am really interested in being much more of an entrepreneur and being much more financially independent. Not to say that I’m a conspiracy theorist, but what if something happened to Amazon? What if something happens to iBooks or Smashwords or whatever? I’m okay with making, if I ever get to $70,000 a year, I’m okay with all that band direct sales and merchandise.
Crys: If you look at history, we can say with a hundred percent certainty that at some point Amazon will no longer exist. That’s just how the world works.
Is that going to be within our lifetimes? Is it going to be 200 years from now? Who knows?
Alicia: You don’t know. Because when I was 30 years ago, Montgomery Ward and Sears were at the top of their game. If you had said they’re going out of business, people would have been laughing in your face.
Crys: Sears is where you bought your washer and dryers. All of your kitchen electronics, you bought the Sears. You didn’t go anywhere. You didn’t go to Walmart!
Alicia: No! You really don’t know what that looks like.
Now you mentioned something about taxes on what I will say about that, Printify can handle the taxes. Jet pack is one of the plugins that you could put on your website along with WooCommerce.
For my audio books, I charge taxes very easily with that. I don’t have any problems now for my taxes. Since I’m collecting taxes from people, I will have to keep track of that and turn that money in. But in general, taxes are not that difficult to figure out how to collect them
Crys: We have lots of software for reasons like this.
You said something about your graphic designer and I want to ask, what kind of contract you guys have in place? Do you have a contract that dictates what you are licensing?
Alicia: I actually have two people that I usually work with. One, when I decided to optimize my website, I want it to be able to have as much flexibility as possible. I hired someone to do Oxygen for me because Oxygen is drag and drop similar to Elementor, but a lot easier to work with.
She was able to create something extremely unique with Oxygen. I paid her just for that The contract was just for her to get Oxygen set up, for the template to look the same as I wanted. So when people go to my website, I wanted a look for my author side. And then when people clicked on the shop, I wanted a look for the shop.
I paid this a designer to just do those. And that was that one time event. As far as a person, she does all my web things for me. I have a general contract with her and she handles pretty much anything that I would need to do with my website, all my updates, all those kinds of things.
We’ve been friends for years and she has also helped me with self publishing. So our relationship is fairly close just in general. She’s like one of my best friends.
Crys: How do you hire the graphics for the merchandising?
Alicia: When I first started, I didn’t know what to do. I have friends who are artists, and so I went all in my Facebook groups. I went all over the place looking for artists because I know a lot of people.
Everybody was like, “Oh, it’ll cost you a $900. Oh, it’s going to be this for … nine hundred dollars for one image.” I was like what? You can’t make money with that. Some people would give me names and then I would try to track those people down.
It was really a mess. I finally did find one artist to work with. I would not suggest that ever for anybody. I love her. I loved her work, but I put a lot into the one artist because I didn’t know what else to do in the very beginning. she did several images for me, and now I quite understand, once I really got into learning about merchandising, you need to go on or Fiverr.
Fiverr, Upworks, somewhere like that. And you need to be competitive with your pricing. So what I pay her a hundred bucks for, I coulda got from somebody else for 25 bucks or 30 bucks. And faster, sooner, because they’re used to doing it.
You have a level of protection in Fiver that you don’t have when you’re working with someone individually. The prices are sort of stable. You can take chances because some of those people, just five bucks. So if you want to, you can be like, okay, I just need a bust, or a face, or some words. Here’s my concept.
You could take that same concept that you have–one concept and not five , just one concept–and send out one concept. You can send to the $5 person, you can send it to the $15 person and you could send it to the $30 person and get three different designs and choose the one that you want. Decide which one of the designers you really want to work with–and usually get it within a few days.
If you’re going to be in business doing merchandising, you definitely want to work with something like Fiverr or Upworks with a competitive pricing structure that you can test out the market and don’t get attached. dDn’t get attached to designers or artists or anything like that.
Crys: It’s been a minute since I’ve used Fiverr. I think I really only used it as a service provider, not purchaser, but when you commission those pieces, do you have a legal agreement that says like what you’re allowed to do with it ?
Alicia: Yeah. you have to be very clear in the verbiage that you give them when you’re talking to them.
They will charge you different rates if you say, I want the copyright in the end. Some people may charge you $10 extra, $20 extra. If they get to the point, like, I’m going to charge you a hundred dollars extra–no, no, no. You go find somebody else because you can find a competitive rate for that.
But you want to make sure that in the end you are the copyright holder, that all that belongs to you.
Most of them, when you purchase the copyright, they’ll send you the Photoshop file so you will have it if something happens and you don’t want to go back to them for whatever reason. Then you have the file and you give that to somebody else to work with, if you need to.
Crys: That makes a lot of sense.
If somebody wanted to get started with merchandising tomorrow, what would you tell them to do first?
Alicia: I would tell them to get some education. Take some merchandising courses. Get an understanding of what that looks like. They’re going to have a lot of decisions to make.
Are you going to optimize your website for sales? Or are you going to use something like Shopify? Or are you going to do some of the other things like what you were talking about? Zazzle, RedBubble.
You have to figure out where you want to be with this. For me in the long term, I wanted to create a place for people to find not only my merchandise, but also to come in contact with me, for my books.
There is a huge difference and book sales and merchandise sales. I sold a hoodie, and it’s on my website for $39 99. I get $17 for every hoodie that I sell, which is vastly different. So you don’t have to sell nearly as many products with merchandise as you do with books,
Crys: That wraps us up for our conversation. My question for the listeners is do you have plans for direct sales or merchandising in your future? And if so, what does that look like for you? Let us know in the comments at writeawaypodcast.com
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