Your Instructors
David Viergutz
- Multi-Seven-Figure Ecomm Operator
- Founder of Epistolary.com
- Speaker at Author Nation & SPF Live
Monica Leonelle
- Creator of the Book Virality Stack
- Author of Novelist MBA
- Fandom & Virality Strategist
Chelle Honiker
- CEO of Athenia Creative
- Publisher of Indie Author Magazine
- Creator of StorytellerOS
Guest Instructors Include
Johnny B. Truant
Bestselling Author · Live Event Sales
Malorie Cooper
NYT Bestseller · Fluent in FB Ads
Lee Savino
USA Today Bestseller · Author Coach
Russell Nohelty
USA Today Bestseller · Integrated Ecosystem
The Problem Authors Won't Speak Out Loud.
You've built an audience, you've written good books. But Amazon and the other retailers are a black box and you don't really own the customer.
Websites that sit idle
Most author websites are digital brochures—pretty, perhaps, but functionally inert. They don't sell. They don't capture. They don't build.
Marketplaces that extract
Every sale through a retailer is a reader you'll never know. No email. No relationship. No leverage. The platform grows; you stay dependent.
Traffic without ownership
Followers aren't yours. Algorithms change. Accounts get suspended. If you don't own the list, you don't own the business.
Platforms you don't control
Terms of service shift. Payouts shrink. Visibility evaporates. Building on rented land means accepting someone else's rules.
The Foundational Shift
Tools Fail Without the Right Mental Model
Direct sales isn't simply a different distribution channel. It's a fundamentally different way of thinking about your author career.
Traditional publishing—and the marketplace model that followed—taught authors to think like content producers: write the book, hand it off, hope for the best. The platform handles the rest.
Direct sales requires you to think like a business owner. Your website isn't a brochure. It's infrastructure. Your email list isn't a newsletter—it's your most valuable asset. Your offers aren't just products; they're the architecture of reader relationships.
"This program begins with how you think—because without that shift, every tactic and tool we teach you will eventually fail."
We don't rush past this. Mindset isn't a warm-up exercise. It's the foundation everything else is built upon.
What This Program Is
Clarity matters. Here's exactly what you're joining—and what you're not.
This is
- Exactly which settings to configure and exactly which buttons to push—no guesswork
- Evergreen program with instant on-demand access to every lesson, plus live Q&As and hotseats with David—attendance optional, every session recorded
- Step-by-step Shopify setup: theme config, product pages, checkout optimization
- Klaviyo flows that make money on autopilot—welcome sequences, abandoned cart, post-purchase
- Exact app recommendations for upsells, bundles, and profit optimization
- Community build-along with peer accountability and expert review
- The next best thing to 'done for you'—specific, actionable guidance at every step
This is not
- A writing or craft course
- A passive video library you watch alone
- A list of tools, hacks, or shortcuts
- Focused on Amazon or marketplace optimization
- Theory without implementation
- Surface-level tactics without systems thinking
Learning Objectives
What You'll Walk Away With
There are no vague promises but instead, this course is designed to produce specific outcomes and assets designed to build your career on a platform you control.
Most importantly: a properly configured ecommerce storefront—a foundational asset for your author career that you'll use for years to come.
Understand the Logic of Direct Sales
Grasp why direct sales works differently—and why it creates sustainable leverage that marketplaces can't offer.
Structure a Website for Ownership
See how a properly architected website becomes the operational center of your author business, not just a landing page.
Connect Traffic, Email, and Offers
Understand how these three elements form an interconnected system—and why optimizing one without the others fails.
Think Like an Operator
Shift from creator to business owner. Learn to see your career as a system to be built, not a lottery to be played.
Build a Foundation That Scales
Create infrastructure designed to grow with you—not systems that break as your readership expands.
Curriculum Overview
Six Weeks. One Foundation.
Each week opens the Monday before its live call, so you have a full week with the lessons before you bring questions. 11.5 hours of core teaching across 134 lessons, plus 3.9 hours of bonus sessions.
Week 1 · Opens August 17
Mindset & Building Your Store
The shift from author to business owner, then the full Shopify build: plans and domain, payments, checkout, shipping and taxes, product listings for ebooks, audiobooks and print, and the store design decisions that convert.
3.1 hours · 41 lessons
Week 2 · Opens August 24
BookFunnel Setup & Delivery
Connecting BookFunnel to Shopify so files reach readers on their own. SKUs, delivery actions, bundles and box sets, the post-purchase experience, and testing the whole chain before a customer ever hits it.
55 min · 12 lessons
Week 3 · Opens August 31
Conversion Rate Optimization
How readers actually buy, and the levers that move them: product page structure, audiobook samples, review display, upsell placement, cart and checkout. Plus premium pricing, anchoring, bundles and international pricing.
1.5 hours · 17 lessons
Week 4 · Opens September 7
Klaviyo, Email & SMS
Your list is the asset. Account setup and the Shopify sync, sending domain authentication, lists versus segments, and the flows that earn while you sleep — welcome, post-purchase, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, winback.
1.6 hours · 22 lessons
Week 5 · Opens September 14
Ad Copy & Meta Ads
Writing hooks, cliffhangers and offers that sell books, then putting them to work. Business Manager and pixel, catalog, audiences, creative in Canva, testing without disrupting winners, reading your metrics, retargeting.
3.2 hours · 29 lessons
Week 6 · Opens September 21
Organic Content & Scaling
Content where every road leads back to your store: research, a calendar you'll keep, trust, collaboration, SEO. Then the growth levers, and building the thing so it runs without you.
1.2 hours · 13 lessons
Bonus Sessions
Six guest modules included with your seat, yours to keep. They open after week two so they never compete with the core build.
Johnny B. Truant · 1.2 hours
Live Event Selling for Authors
Selling books in person, from someone who has moved tens of thousands of them face to face. What changes when the reader is standing in front of you.
Malorie Cooper · 1.2 hours
Reader Magnet Ad Campaigns
Writing a reader magnet that earns the opt-in, then wiring the pixel through BookFunnel and building the ad and warm email funnel behind it. Eight lessons, start to finish.
Lee Savino · 21 min
Sell Your Backlist
The books you already wrote are inventory. Turning a backlist into recurring revenue instead of a back catalogue nobody visits.
Greg, Curios · 33 min
Direct Sales Made Easy with Curios
A co-founder's walkthrough of launching a direct storefront with delivery and fulfillment built in — the route to take if a full Shopify build isn't what you want.
David Viergutz · 8 min
Bookvault: Print on Demand & Shopify
Connecting Bookvault to Shopify so international print orders get produced and shipped without you touching them. Setup, real print costs, and the two settings that quietly break fulfillment.
Russell Nohelty · 29 min
The Integrated Publishing Ecosystem
Using retailers and direct sales together so each channel feeds the next. Subscriptions, retail, crowdfunding and direct in a sequence built to grow the business without burning you out.
Cohort 2 Featured Instructor
Monica Leonelle
New This Cohort
Psychological Triggers and Fandom Elements
Some books get read. Others build fandoms. Monica breaks down the psychological triggers underneath that difference and the fandom elements you can build into your work and your storefront on purpose.
Monica Leonelle came to publishing sideways. Software engineer, then analyst, then marketing executive, before turning that whole toolkit on her own creative business.
She is the creator of the Story Symmetry Framework and the Book Virality Stack, the systems she uses to move an idea from daydream to something that intrigues, entertains, and spreads. She writes fantasy and romance alongside nonfiction for authors, including Novelist MBA and The Accelerator's Formula for Authors.
Her work sits exactly where this cohort lives: why readers care, why they tell someone else, and how you engineer that instead of hoping for it.
Credentials & Frameworks
What She Covers
- The psychological triggers behind reader devotion
- Fandom elements you can design on purpose
- Word-of-mouth and organic virality
- Story structure that earns repeat readers
- Turning casual readers into a community
Stacked Bonus
Go Deeper on Your Own Time
Monica teaches the framework live, and it stands on its own. Underneath it, David stacks his own courses on fandom, psychological triggers, and copywriting, drawn from years of studying word-of-mouth well outside publishing. Yours the moment you enroll.
Fandom
How reader communities actually form, and what you can do on purpose to start one instead of waiting to get lucky.
Psychological Triggers
The levers underneath why a reader clicks, why they buy, and why they come back for the next one.
Copywriting
Turning all of it into words that sell without sounding like a pitch.
Included free with your seat — yours to keep.
New This Cohort
The Indie Author Training Plugin
Taught by Chelle Honiker
The plugin connects this course to the tools you actually run. Ask it about your own store and the answer comes back from the lessons with your setup in view. Then hand it the work and let it make the changes. Built around Claude, and taught step by step.
The Course, Inside Your Assistant
Every lesson in Sell Direct becomes something you can just ask. Questions get answered against your own store, with the course as the source.
Connected to Your Real Tools
Web connectors link it to the platforms you're already running, so it reads your Shopify settings and your Klaviyo account directly.
Skills That Do the Work
Skills give it hands. Hand it a product listing or an email flow and it builds the thing while you watch.
Private and Specific to You
Your questions and your store data stay yours, and every answer is grounded in your own business.
Chelle Honiker
Automation strategist for authors and publishers
Chelle co-founded Indie Author Magazine in 2021 and watched a passion project turn into a full publishing operation. Rather than drown in it, she built the systems that ran it. Those systems became the foundation of what she now builds for other authors as CEO of Athenia Creative and creator of StorytellerOS. She does not teach theory here. She teaches the workflows she uses every day to keep a magazine shipping monthly with a small team.
How It Works
Evergreen Course, Live Cohort
Lessons open on Mondays, with live Q&A & Cohort teaching the following Monday. You have a whole week to work through each lesson. Come with questions.
Instant access to everything. The full program unlocks the second you enroll — every module and asset, no waiting and no drip.
The Live Cohort
The one part that isn't evergreen — join your classmates live for:
Hotseats
Bring your own store, funnel, or numbers and get them worked on live, in real time.
Live Q&As
Ask anything and get real answers on the call — not buried in a forum thread.
Expert Instruction
Ongoing teaching and direct guidance from David himself as you build.
Your Instructor
David Viergutz
David is a bestselling author with 20+ published novels across horror, thriller, and speculative fiction. But his work extends far beyond writing.
As the founder and operator behind multiple creator-led businesses, he has shipped millions of physical products and letters worldwide—building and scaling seven-figure direct-sales businesses entirely outside of Amazon.
David's Shopify store — 9,999+ orders, $1.84M in sales, 1.05M sessions
Businesses Founded & Operated
Epistolary.com
Storyletter publishing and direct-mail storytelling
FaeLetters.com
Direct-to-reader subscription fiction
CreatorUnleashed.com
Consulting and direct-sales strategy for creators
DavidViergutz.com
Multi-seven-figure author ecommerce business
Credentials & Recognition
Areas of Deep Expertise
- Shopify store and Klaviyo EMS buildout from a multi-seven-figure ecomm operator
- Direct sales infrastructure and strategy
- Shopify-based author websites and storefronts
- Paid traffic and funnel architecture
- Fulfillment, logistics, and operations at scale
David teaches from an operator's perspective—not theory, not trends, but systems that have been built, tested, and scaled in the real world.
The Cohort Experience
You Won't Build This Alone
Work through the lessons on your own schedule, then tap in for live Q&As and expert hotseats whenever you need direct help. The instructors show up so you're not building in isolation.
On-Demand Lessons
Work through the full curriculum on your own schedule. Every lesson is recorded and ready when you are.
Live Q&A with David
Drop in for live Q&A sessions with David and get real answers from an operator who's built this. Attendance is never required—replays are always posted.
Hotseats with Industry Experts
Bring your store, your funnel, or your numbers to a live hotseat and get specific, in-the-moment feedback from David and our guest instructors.
Direct Access While You Implement
David and our expert instructors make themselves available as you build—so you're never stuck guessing what to do next.
Forward Motion Over Perfection
This isn't about getting everything right. It's about getting the foundation built—then refining.
AI Plugin (Optional)
Connect the course to the AI assistant you already use. Ask about your own store and get answers specific to your setup, then hand it the work and let it build or update your tech stack for you.
What Others Say
Trusted by Industry Leaders
"David Viergutz is a powerhouse in the independent publishing industry. He has pioneered direct-to-reader sales building a formidable empire. The fact that he shares his knowledge and know-how is typical of the man and a credit to our community. I'm a big fan!"
James Blatch
CEO, Learn Self Publishing
"What is there to say? A horror author who understands readers better than they understand themselves. He's turned that into a business that's second to none."
Craig Martelle
Bestselling Sci-Fi Author
"Honestly, I can't keep up with David Viergutz, when it comes to sheer entrepreneurial willpower. He sees opportunities and acts on them with speed tempered by business wisdom. I never know what idea he'll absolutely floor me with next."
Kevin Tumlinson
Bestselling & Award-Winning Author
"Most people talk big and do nothing, while David quietly goes bigger than all of them. I've seldom met someone so driven and innovative, yet at the same time so generous and down to earth."
Johnny B. Truant
Bestselling Author
"I knew my voice would be heard and my creative vision respected. David understands that great storytelling begins with trust and artistic freedom. Working with him has been a partnership built on both."
Ines Johnson
Bestselling Author
"David and his team knocked it out of the park for my Author Decks. I came to him with a crazy idea and a PDF to turn marketing education into a beautiful product. He sourced the product and worked with a manufacturer to develop it. He has shipped it for me to customers all over the world with no issues, no drama, and at a great price."
Michael Evans
CEO and Founder
"Working with David feels like hooking your business to a power plant. His creativity turns problems into opportunities, and he always finds a way to make things work better than before. He builds solutions with care, delivers on every promise, and brings a level of integrity that's rare in this space. Reliable, resourceful, and relentlessly driven, David makes progress inevitable."
Chris Hopper
Bestselling Author, Voice Actor, Publisher
"David Viergutz is an expert operator and works with insane speed and decisiveness. It's incredible how much he can accomplish in such a short time! If you need something done, David will find a way, and do it right the first time!"
Cameron Snow
Authors Direct Sales
"David Viergutz has completely revolutionised what it means to be an indie creator, with the foresight to break out from well-established norms and then create something far beyond what people thought possible."
Lee Mountford
Bestselling Author
"David is an innovative entrepreneur who's always open to new ideas and eager to experiment with creative ways to grow a business. His knowledge of the general business world, paired with his successful author career, gives him a unique mix of creative and strategic insight."
Maggie Beeler
Tropetails
"I trust him, believe in him, and frankly, it drives my output to be faster and higher quality across the board."
Justin Benedict
Veridian Management
"This course has been a great experience for me and David is some kind of genius."
C.E.
Student
The Archive
Every Past Instructor Module. Yours Free.
Every module our past guest instructors taught stays in the archive — and every cohort member gets the whole library at no extra cost.
20+ Hours of Expert Video
Deep-dive content covering every aspect of your direct-sales setup.
Founder's "Do It All" Checklists
Step-by-step checklists so you never miss a setting or wonder what to click next.
Live Event Sales for Authors
A complete course on selling books in person at live events
$195
Free
Hosted by Johnny B. Truant, who has sold tens of thousands of books directly to readers in person.
Included free with your seat — yours to keep.
Author Mindset & Mentorship Module
Build the long-game mindset that sustains a seven-figure author career.
$195
Free
Hosted by Lee Savino, seven-figure romance author, multiple USA Today bestseller, and longtime author coach.
Included free with your seat — yours to keep.
The Integrated Publishing Ecosystem
Using retailers and direct sales together so each channel feeds the next.
Free
Hosted by Russell Nohelty, USA Today bestselling author, veteran of 40+ funded Kickstarters, and founder of an 1,100-member Substack community.
Included free with your seat — yours to keep.
Direct Sales Made Easy with Curios
Launching a full direct storefront with delivery and fulfillment built in, without a Shopify build.
Free
Hosted by Greg, co-founder of Curios.
Included free with your seat — yours to keep.
Fluent in FB Ads for Authors
A focused module on running profitable Meta ads to your direct-sales store.
$195
Free
Hosted by Malorie Cooper, NYT bestselling author, seven-figure indie, and creator of Fluent in FB Ads.
Included free with your seat — yours to keep.
Is This For You?
This program isn't for everyone—and that's by design. Here's how to know if you're the right fit.
This is for you if...
- Authors who want ownership and control over their careers
- Long-term thinkers building for sustainability, not quick wins
- Creators ready to invest in infrastructure that compounds
- Writers who understand that platforms are tools, not foundations
- Authors willing to do the work to build something real
This is not for you if...
- People looking for shortcuts or overnight success
- Writers seeking craft instruction or writing advice
- Authors unwilling to step outside marketplace dependency
- Those who want someone else to build it for them
- Hobbyists not ready to treat their writing as a business
Founder's Pricing
A live 6-week cohort starting August 24. Early-bird pricing — save $200 through August 10.
The full curriculum is on-demand, so you can start today and move at your own pace. Alongside the lessons, David and our expert instructors make themselves available for live Q&As, hotseats, and deep dives on specific direct sales topics—every session is recorded, so attendance is never required.
Founder's pricing is for serious authors who want hands-on guidance and direct access to the instructors while they build.
What's Included
Start today and move at your own pace. Live support is there whenever you need it—and everything is recorded.
- Full 6-week curriculum, available on-demand
- Live Q&A sessions with David
- Hotseats with industry experts on your store, funnel, and numbers
- Deep-dive sessions on specific direct sales topics
- Every live session recorded—attendance never required
Upcoming Live Sessions
Six upcoming live sessions, each offered at two times so you can join whichever fits your schedule. All previous sessions are already recorded and available the moment you enroll, and every upcoming live session is recorded too.
Questions
Everything You Might Be Wondering
These are the questions cohort 1 actually asked, answered the way David and Chelle answered them on the calls.
Before you buy
I already have a Shopify store. Is this still worth my time?
I have several books. Should I start with just one?
What if I only have one book, and I write slowly?
Do I have to abandon my WordPress or Squarespace site?
My books are in Kindle Unlimited. Can I still do this?
Does this work if I'm outside the US?
My multi-genre store has always lost money. Is that the reason?
Do I need an LLC?
What about PCI compliance?
Money and access
What does it cost?
Do you offer refunds?
How long do I have access?
How the cohort works
When does it start, and what's the schedule?
What are the live calls for?
What if I can't make a call?
How do hotseats work?
Can I ask questions between calls?
How much time does this take?
What's included
What are the bonus sessions?
What's the AI plugin?
Do you cover audiobooks?
Can I sell things that aren't books?
Does it cover selling in person?
I use MailerLite. Do I have to switch to Klaviyo?
After you buy