This is a companion piece to Authors Who Sell Direct Are Winning the Long Game.
Bestselling author Sacha Black, who writes lesbian romance under the name Ruby Roe, has seen her career take off after getting on TikTok and investing in direct sales. She started in 2017 using WooCommerce + WordPress but switched to Shopify in late 2023, not long after she had a viral TikTok post in December of that year. She made £8,000 that month, triple her usual earnings, and by mid-2024 was earning £10,000 to £12,000 per month, peaking near £30,000 per month this year after bringing her fulfillment in house. She initially worked with a print-on-demand provider, but she switched to doing her own print runs and warehousing in January 2025 so she could sign books and offer other goodies in the book shipments. She rents a space in a creative industrial park and has hired several people to support her business, including an operations manager, a warehouse person to handle order fulfillment, and social media assistance.
Black says three things fuel her direct sales:
- Every book is signed. It doesn’t matter what readers order; if it’s shipped from Black’s warehouse, it’s signed. Readers value this personalization far more than she expected.
- Fans get the book first. Anyone who pre-orders directly receives books before anyone who buys through retailers such as Amazon.
- Every order includes “goodies.” Extras might include stickers, character art, and other branded items. Black says, “It’s like a present! There is no mail better than book mail. That’s why I do this, because I love book mail. So I’m like, yeah, we’re sending presents to the readers. I just love it. It literally fills me with joy every time I see a parcel going out the warehouse. And I know this is not for everybody. This is bonkers. I get that I’m like 0.1 percent of the community, but still, I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do this. It’s bloody brilliant.”
Also, Black says it’s important to have exclusive content available directly that can’t be acquired elsewhere. For her, that includes three novellas that can only be purchased on her website. These exclusives drive repeat visits and fear of missing out.
TikTok and Instagram are the key platforms that Black uses to reach readers; she posts about three videos a day on her main TikTok account and credits the platform for her career breakthrough. She says, “I love the camera. My camera power is better than my mathematical analytics for advertising basically because this industry is about visibility, right? That’s it. You need visibility, so the two big ways are advertising or social media at the moment.” But she has even been able to back off Amazon ads without seeing a sales dip.
Black also has an email list of about 10,000 subscribers, built organically over time, that’s highly responsive. “The mailing list is extremely lucrative. We put an email out, and it’s like ping, ping, ping, ping, ping orders.” She continues to use crowdfunding for her work; each campaign has exceeded six figures. (Here’s her most recent campaign.) She fulfills these campaigns herself for control and quality.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
