The Comprehensive Guide to BookFunnel

by | Jul 29, 2026 | Platform | 0 comments

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You’ve heard the name BookFunnel. You’ve seen it recommended by fellow authors and seen it in the back matter of books. Maybe you’ve even clicked a BookFunnel link to download a free book or a reader magnet. You know authors use it to grow massive newsletters of tens of thousands of subscribers, but how do they do it?

How do you make BookFunnel work for you, so you can go from a few newsletter subscribers to thousands of subscribers who are excited to read your next book?

I asked Damon Courtney. He’s a fantasy novelist, podcaster, software engineer, and the founder and CEO of BookFunnel.

Table of Contents

What exactly is BookFunnel?

Damon: We deliver ebooks and audiobooks directly to readers on behalf of authors and publishers and have been doing it since 2015. We now have many additional features for authors and readers.

If you set aside all the features, we simply help you send an ebook anywhere you might want to send a digital book. (We don’t do print. BookVault and Lulu are great companies that deal with print books).

Anytime you want to send digital content to readers directly, that’s where we step in. If you publish your book on Amazon and somebody buys it, Amazon delivers that book to the reader. If you want to deliver a reader magnet or an audiobook to backers after a crowdfunding campaign, we can deliver those digital products.

Many people first experience BookFunnel as readers when they receive a book from us. We meet people at conferences who say, “Oh, I use BookFunnel all the time,” and they’re not even authors.

If you meet a fellow named Thomas at a conference and think he’d really like your book, you’d love to send him a free copy. But you can’t jump on Amazon and say, “Send a free copy of my book to this guy I just met.” You can’t do that on Kobo or Google Play or any of them. But you can with BookFunnel.

How has BookFunnel changed over 10 years?

Thomas: BookFunnel has evolved over the last 10 years. You began mainly as a reader-magnet tool. You provided an easy way to deliver reader magnets and grow your email list.

Over time, BookFunnel became a direct-sales tool. The same technology that delivers a free ebook can also integrate with your website store or a platform like Payhip to deliver paid ebooks.

In between those two stages was the crowdfunding era. My first Kickstarter was before BookFunnel launched, so I did it the old-fashioned way. We emailed PDFs and hoped backers could figure out how to load them onto their devices. It was a mess.

That’s what makes BookFunnel so useful. After a Kickstarter, you might have 100 or 200 backers who need ebook copies. Emailing PDFs isn’t ideal. They’re awkward to read and easy to share, which means your book could easily be circulating online.

BookFunnel solved that problem with a simple ebook delivery system that integrates with Kickstarter and now BackerKit.

Damon: We recently launched an integration with BackerKit that includes a feature called Instant Rewards.

Many authors now use crowdfunding to create special editions, like beautiful leather-bound books and other premium products. They’re great, but they can take months to produce. If you’re considering crowdfunding, understand that fulfilling physical rewards is far more complex than delivering digital content.

Instant Rewards bridges that gap. You can tell backers, “Your special edition will arrive in nine months once it’s printed and shipped, but you’ll get the ebook today.” You can also offer exclusive content, such as a novella written only for campaign backers.

BackerKit integrates that process with BookFunnel. The moment someone backs the campaign, BookFunnel automatically emails them their book and adds it to their BookFunnel library.

Can you stop ebook piracy?

Damon: Readers want instant access to their digital rewards. No one can completely stop piracy. I’ve worked in software long enough to know it’s a losing battle, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make some effort.

PDFs are the right format for some content. Coloring books, for example, are meant to be printed and colored, not read as EPUBs. The same is true for gaming manuals packed with artwork and images. But for most fiction and nonfiction books, an ebook format provides a better reading experience.

When books are delivered through BookFunnel, the files are watermarked so we know where they came from and who received them. Hopefully your books never show up on pirate sites. If they do, the recipient’s email address is embedded in the file. In a PDF, it can appear at the bottom of every page.

That approach is called social DRM. DRM stands for digital rights management, but social DRM relies on accountability rather than restrictions. The message is simple: “Don’t share this. Your email address is attached to it, and we’ll know where it came from.”

Thomas: The biggest way to fight piracy, and Steve Jobs made this case with iTunes years ago, is to make it easier to buy legally than to get it illegally.

At that time, it was easier to get a song from Napster than to buy a legal digital song, because the record companies wouldn’t sell you a digital copy. You had to buy a physical disc, put it in your CD player, rip it, and burn a copy.

Steve Jobs made the case that iTunes was so simple that it was cheaper to just buy your songs legally. The Pirates were making less than minimum wage pirating songs.

The same is true with ebooks, and that’s why I like BookFunnel. Both BookFunnel and Story Origin platforms solve this “make it easier to get it legitimately than to pirate it” problem, and that’s the goal.

How do you grow an email list from scratch?

Thomas: Many authors haven’t finished a novel yet, but they may have a novella or short story. If I have a reader magnet and want to grow an email list from scratch, how can I use BookFunnel to go from three subscribers to 100?

Damon: This is exactly why I built BookFunnel more than 10 years ago.

After self-publishing a fantasy trilogy, I wrote what I thought would be a short story. It turned into a 25,000-word novella, and I decided to give it away as a reader magnet. The problem was figuring out how to deliver it.

The first step is creating a reader magnet that leads naturally into your books. A good novella introduces readers to your world, characters, and writing style while creating interest in the series that follows.

Your reader magnet should answer one question for readers: If you enjoy this, will you enjoy my books? If the answer is yes, it has done its job.

Once you have your reader magnet, upload it to BookFunnel. That’s the easy part. The real growth tool is what we call group promos.

Let’s say you write space opera. On BookFunnel, you’ll find hundreds of science-fiction promos organized by authors, not by BookFunnel. You browse the available promos, find one that fits your genre, and request to join.

A typical promo might include 30 space-opera authors. Before joining, you can preview the promo and see all the covers. Ask yourself: Does my book belong here? If your cover, story, and genre fit, you’re in the right place.

The best part is that most promos welcome new authors. Every author started at zero.

Once you’re accepted, all 30 authors promote the giveaway to their email lists. Those subscribers are already space-opera readers, and that’s why they’re on those lists in the first place.

Suddenly, your book is in front of thousands of potential readers. Even if each author has only 100 subscribers, 3,000 readers are seeing your reader magnet.

The key is choosing the right promo. Know your genre and make sure your book truly fits. Authors often think they’re writing space opera, for example, while every other space-opera author can immediately tell they’re not. The closer the fit, the better the results.

Thomas: I have a great tool to help you find the best group promo genre for your book. If you’re not sure which genre your book is, I have a Trope and Genre Finder in my Patron Toolbox. It lists all the tropes in your book and scores the genre alignment. You may think, “I’ve written a space opera,” but when you run your book through the Trope and Genre finder, you may discover you’ve written more of a hard science fiction.

It either gives you confidence to submit or helps you submit to a genre you’re a better fit for.

Damon: Most authors write in the genres they love. That’s why understanding tropes is so important. Many new authors know their genre but don’t know its tropes.

If you’re writing space opera, maybe you have a ragtag crew flying a ship held together by faith and duct tape. That’s a classic trope, and readers love it. Tropes become tropes because readers keep coming back for them.

Once you understand your genre and tropes, you know how to position your book.

When you join a space-opera promo, every participating author sends that promo to their email list. When readers click through, they see all the books in the promotion, including yours. If your cover catches their attention, they visit your landing page, read your tagline and description, and decide whether they want your reader magnet.

When someone joins your list through that promo, you already know three valuable things about them:

1.     They read space opera.

2.     They subscribe to other authors’ newsletters.

3.     They open those newsletters and click links.

That’s exactly the kind of reader you want.

These aren’t random internet users. They’re active book buyers who love reading enough to exchange their email address for a free story.

And that’s the key: we’re talking about a reader magnet, not a free novel.

Some authors give away the first book in a long series, and that can work if they have 10 or 20 books to earn back the cost. But new authors shouldn’t give away their first novel.

There’s nothing salesy about charging for the book you worked hard to create. Reader magnets exist to allow readers to sample your writing for free, so you don’t have to give away your main product.

Thomas: Readers are more likely to read and finish your book if they paid for it than if they got it free. You owe it to yourself to sell your book at full price when it first comes out. Resist your soul’s temptation to start discounting. Don’t think, “I want to give my launch team a discount.” No, they need to pay full price. Your book is worth full price.

It’s a better deal than going to the movies, a better deal than going to the arcade. The standard price is already good, so you don’t have to discount it.

Check out the following episodes on pricing your books:

What makes a good reader magnet?

Damon: I advise authors not to give away a 25,000- or 50,000-word reader magnet. Make it 10,000 words if you want a novella. We see 2,000-3,000-word short stories all the time. Most of these readers have never heard of you, so they only want a sample.

This is why your reader magnet needs to accurately telegraph your writing. If I pick up a book by an author that’s new to me, I can tell within the first chapter or two whether their writing is doing it for me, even if the story is good.

Thomas: But don’t offer the first short story you’ve ever written. New authors often hear about the power of reader magnets, so they write a short story, get a cover, get it edited, and put it on BookFunnel. It’s the first short story they’ve ever written, though, and it’s not nearly as good as it could be if they’d honed their craft first.

Students in my Five-Year Plan course write a short story every month to improve the different aspects of writing. Short stories are like drills that help improve your novel writing.

If you’re normally a plotter, you should practice writing a short story by the seat of your pants. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s only a short story. Afterward, you’ll be a better plotter for having written something as a pantser.

Write more short stories to improve your craft. Write a dozen, then choose the best one to use as a reader magnet. That first impression will draw in readers. Authors tend to stick with a reader magnet much longer than they should. Your old reader magnet may not be your best work anymore, because you’ve improved since you made it. On a platform like BookFunnel, it’s not hard to swap out a reader magnet or have more than one. Making reader magnets is the limiting factor.

Damon: There’s a reason most writing programs spend so much time on short stories. They develop skills that novels don’t. Writing a compelling 2,000-word story requires different muscles than writing an 80,000-word novel.

Group promos are one of the fastest ways to build an email list. Then, when your first book launches, include a link to your reader magnet in the back matter with a clear call to action. Do it from day one. You never know where your early readers will come from.

Some will be friends and family. Others will discover your book through recommendations or stumble across it online. If they love your book, you want a way to stay connected. The worst outcome is a reader reaching the last page eager for more and having no way to hear about your next release.

Many successful authors continually refresh their reader magnets. Romance author Lucy Score, for example, writes a bonus scene for each book. Often, it’s an epilogue set a year later. Every book offers a different incentive to join her mailing list, helping her grow a massive audience.

That’s effective because most readers don’t become superfans after one book. They may enjoy the first, like the second even more, and become hooked by the third. Once they’re invested in the characters, they’re eager for bonus content, prequels, and behind-the-scenes stories.

Marketers know that readers rarely become devoted fans after a single experience. But once they do become fans, everything changes. They’ll buy the next book, back the Kickstarter, and pick up the special editions. That’s the power of building a relationship over time.

Are these subscribers actually going to stick around?

Thomas: Subscribers from group promos are usually lower-quality subscribers because they don’t know you yet. Some download your reader magnet and discover your books aren’t a good fit for them. Others use email addresses they rarely check. As a result, you’ll often need to clean inactive subscribers from your list.

That said, group promos are still valuable when you’re starting out. Think of them as kindling for a fire. They help you get those first readers and build momentum.

Your highest-quality subscribers come from readers who join your list through the links or information you put in the back of your books. These readers have already bought your book, read it, and finished it. Those are three major filters. If they then join your email list, they’re far more likely to open emails, click links, and buy future books.

That’s why every book should have strong back matter. At a minimum, include a reader magnet and a clear call to action.

For print books, you can add a QR code in your back matter that sends readers to a landing page on your website, which can then connect to BookFunnel. I always recommend routing QR codes through your own website rather than linking directly to a third-party service. That way, you control the destination. If you ever change providers, you can simply update the redirect without reprinting the book.

It’s a little more work upfront, but that extra work pays off over time. Check out my free QR Code Generator in the Patron Toolbox.

Damon: It’s much harder to break into indie publishing today than it was when I published my first book in 2011. Back then, there wasn’t much to learn. Now it feels like there are a million things to figure out.

Part of the reason is that you’re not just publishing a book; you’re starting a business. You’re putting yourself out into the world as an entrepreneur. If you were launching any other business, you wouldn’t expect to learn everything from a couple of podcasts and jump right in.

When I wrote my first book, I was sure it would be terrible because I’d never written anything before. I hired a developmental editor to help me improve, and he told me, “I can tell it’s not total crap because you’ve spent your whole life consuming stories.” I’d watched movies and read books, so some part of my brain understood how stories work.

My book is an epic fantasy, but my editor told me he struggled with it at first because the story wasn’t unfolding the way he expected. Then he realized I was writing a Western.

I said, “What are you talking about?”

He said, “You’ve got settlers on the frontier, and the goblins are constantly raiding the village. It’s a Western.”

I stopped and thought, Oh my word, he’s right. I love Westerns, but it had never occurred to me that I was writing one.

As you put your work into the world, the goal is to write the kind of book you’d want to read. If you do that, you’ll find readers who want to read it too.

What’s the difference between a lead magnet and a reader magnet?

Damon: The people who join your list through group promos are leads, not readers.

At BookFunnel, we distinguish between lead magnets and reader magnets.

A reader magnet is something like a bonus chapter at the end of a book. It’s only valuable to someone who has read the book, reached the end, and enjoyed it enough to sign up for your list. Give that bonus chapter to someone who hasn’t read the book, and it won’t make much sense because they don’t know the characters or story.

A lead magnet is designed for people who have never read your work. It tells them, “If you enjoy this story, you’ll probably enjoy my books too.” Its job is to introduce new readers to your writing and lead them into the rest of your series. That’s where you ultimately want them to be.

Thomas: I love that distinction, and I haven’t heard it before. A lead magnet has to introduce you to a stranger, so it needs to be enticing in a different way.

Some listeners have been listening to Novel Marketing for years and never gotten on our email newsletter or tried the Patron Toolbox. Other people hear about the Patron Toolbox from a friend, sign up having never heard the podcast, and then start listening.

At the Novel Marketing Conference, some attendees had never listened to the podcast. One came because ChatGPT sent them. One came because they heard me speak somewhere.

There are different ways in, and different bait appeals to different fish. An experimental mindset about reader magnets and lead magnets can really help you grow your list quicker.

Is selling direct worth it for you?

Thomas: BookFunnel can also help with direct sales.

Joanna Penn and I had a small disagreement about Shopify and selling direct. A few months ago, I released an episode called The Shopify Trap, arguing that direct sales can become a distraction for authors who aren’t already well known. If readers don’t know who you are, building an expensive online store doesn’t solve your biggest problem, which is discoverability.

The episode was framed as a debate between Joanna and me, but we actually agree on the core point. If no one knows who you are, launching a store isn’t the answer. Where we differed was timing. Joanna tended to recommend selling direct a little earlier than I would.

Since then, the landscape has changed. The biggest shift is Payhip. It now handles sales-tax remittance and doesn’t charge a monthly fee, which dramatically lowers the cost and complexity of selling direct.

Payhip still takes a commission, but compared to Amazon’s 30% cut, 5% or 10% feels relatively minor. Coming from the Amazon world, I find Payhip much more attractive. As a result, I’m far less enthusiastic about Shopify for most authors.

There are still costs. You’ll need BookFunnel, and Payhip takes a percentage of each sale. But BookFunnel handles the technical side of ebook and audiobook delivery and integrates directly with Payhip.

I don’t recommend Shopify for most authors, but I do recommend BookFunnel, especially for authors who want to sell audiobooks, and increasingly for those who want to sell ebooks directly to their readers.

Damon: First, you want to make sure you have your own domain. It’s your little corner of the internet that you own and can always change. You need it because you may find at some point that Shopify is worth it for you.

Shopify starts around $35 a month now. If you’re not selling anything, you’re just lighting $35 a month on fire.

Damon: It may be a while before readers migrate to your platform and start buying. Readers are creatures of habit. If you’ve been exclusive to Amazon with a Kindle Unlimited strategy, you’ll have a hard time peeling them away.

We used to recommend Payhip first, until the taxes problem came up. Payhip always handled VAT in the European Union, which was perfect for Joanna Penn in the UK, who didn’t owe US sales tax as a non-citizen. For US authors, Payhip wasn’t initially an option, because it didn’t cover US sales tax. A recent update fixed that. Payhip now remits US sales tax, and since we’ve integrated with them for years, those authors are already connected.

This is where BookFunnel steps in, and why owning your domain is key. You point your domain at Payhip and build on top of that. If you ever grow to the point where readers are buying direct and you want Shopify’s tools, you can move as long as you own the domain. Your readers are trained to go to your author domain, so they don’t care what the shopping cart looks like. They care that they can buy the books and everything works.

Having BookFunnel as your backend helps in two big ways. First, we handle all the support. When readers have trouble with their ebooks or audiobooks, we help them. It can be as simple as, “I can’t get this to my Kindle,” which we answer hundreds of times a day. A reader might email us to say, “You reversed chapters 17 and 18 on that audiobook,” which we’ll go in and fix.

Sometimes a reader gets the wrong book because the author uploaded the wrong file. If we can spot the right file on your account, we’ll fix it and repair the reader’s library. Otherwise, we’ll email you. You get a 24-hour, 365-day support team handling all of it.

Second, if you move from Payhip to Shopify, Fourthwall, or any other platform, readers get their books exactly the same way. However you deliver a book, whether you’re gifting a copy, sending advance reader copies, or running group promos, every book a reader gets from a BookFunnel author lands in their BookFunnel library.

Whether a reader buys your book on Payhip, Shopify, or on your own WordPress site with WooCommerce, whenever they check out, the book appears in their library, and they know how to get it to their Kindle.

That’s the hardest part for readers. They’re used to Amazon or Kobo, where a purchase shows up on their device instantly. If readers use the BookFunnel app, the book appears the moment the purchase completes, and they can start reading.

They get an Amazon-like experience while buying directly from authors, which means you keep the money.

What makes selling direct easier now than ever?

Thomas: Selling direct has never been in a better place. BookFunnel handles ebook and audiobook delivery automatically, and now there’s BookVault, a separate company that’s the photo negative of BookFunnel, doing for physical books what BookFunnel does for ebooks. Together they let you create that Amazon-like experience where readers buy every version of your book on your website.

This competition between selling platforms makes it difficult for you to get canceled. If Shopify kicks you off, you brush the dust off your feet and set up on Payhip. Because you can do that, they’re less likely to kick you off in the first place, since they all hate each other and don’t want to hand each other customers.

It’s all automatic now. When I got started, it was manual, emailing ebook and audiobook files or hauling books to the post office. Now it’s automated, and you still keep the good margins of selling direct. You don’t keep all the money, because the credit card company takes a fee and you’re paying BookFunnel and BookVault. There are a lot of piglets at the trough, but you still get more than Amazon, the greediest piglet of all, especially on audiobooks.

Selling direct is so much easier technologically than it used to be. Hopefully it eventually forces Amazon to give authors a better deal, but we’re years away from that.

Damon: There has never been a better time to be a writer. Traditional publishing had its breakout stars, but so many more authors who never got anywhere. Today I know so many people making a full-time living writing, and these tools are why.

We love BookVault. The developers are good friends, we hang out at conferences, and we’re in totally different businesses. I joke that BookFunnel will never move into their market, because I hear about their problems and I do not want them.

On the author side, it doesn’t matter. Build a WordPress site with WooCommerce, and you can integrate both BookFunnel and BookVault. A customer buys two ebooks and a paperback gift. The instant the transaction completes, BookVault grabs the paperback and ships it, BookFunnel grabs the ebooks and delivers them, and you never touch a thing.

How do you make your store better than Amazon?

Thomas: This lets you bundle, and that’s where your website beats Amazon. The challenge isn’t only that people don’t know who you are. Even famous authors lose sales to Amazon, because readers’ credit cards are already on file and they trust it.

To sell direct, you need a compelling reason for readers to buy from you. Price won’t do it, since Amazon can just price-match. But offering bundles on your website is a compelling reason. You can sell the paperback, audiobook, and ebook together, a $60 value for $25. The ebook and audiobook cost basically nothing to deliver, so your only real cost is the paperback.

BookFunnel’s new bundles feature, which we covered on Author Update, takes this further by letting you add bonuses to a purchase. I don’t think people appreciate how cool this is. You can include character compendiums, encyclopedias, cut scenes, deleted scenes, even the reader magnet itself. Since they bought from your website, you already have their email and can give them the bonus chapter right in the purchase.

Now your version isn’t cheaper than Amazon, but it’s better because of all the extras. Nonfiction has even more room to be better than Amazon. You can offer a spreadsheet template for your workout program, a printable checklist, a printable of the best quote from your book for the bathroom mirror, swipe files, or habit trackers. It can all be bundled with the purchase, but only when readers buy direct from your site, where you keep most of the money.

They can still buy from Amazon; they just don’t get the extras. Suddenly typing in a credit card number is worth the hassle, because buying direct gets them more value.

What can BookFunnel deliver besides books?

Damon: We built BookFunnel for digital media downloads. We’d done ebooks for 10 years and added audiobooks a few years back. We already had the infrastructure, so it was easy to let authors deliver other digital products.

The push came from nonfiction authors doing things we hadn’t imagined. One guy selling a meditation book included a PDF checklist for preparing your space and your mind, plus a two-hour recording of a babbling brook with flutes. Many of our features come straight from author suggestions. We tell them to email us their ideas. Often, we’ve got 95% of the tech ready and just need that push to launch the next feature.

He was delivering the ebook through BookFunnel, then emailing readers a Dropbox link for the other two files. It was a terrible reader experience, and we knew we could fix it. Now you can deliver anything. Bundle it all so that buying the spiral-bound paperback also delivers the MP3s, the spreadsheet, and the checklist, automatically.

We call the mechanism delivery actions. Every product on your site has a SKU or ID, and you tell BookFunnel, “When I sell this, deliver these files.” It doesn’t care what the product is, only the identifier. Sell a coffee mug with a free bonus story? BookFunnel doesn’t care. Sell paper workbooks with digital printables? It all goes right through. They buy the paperback, the digital delivery lands instantly, and you can bundle in as much as you want.

Some authors sell a 10-book audiobook box set only on their site. They skip Audible, which takes 75% and sells the whole series for a single credit, and hold out for full price. The trick is you don’t build one giant file. Put all 10 audiobooks on BookFunnel and set the delivery to send all 10 when someone buys.

Readers then see 10 books in their purchase, not one slick 3D mockup cover. They love that. You paid for 10 covers, so it’s a shame to waste them, and readers feel like they paid for 10 things and got 10 things.

How do you sell digital books in person?

Thomas: Authors also sell books in person, and sometimes a customer wants to buy an ebook or audiobook at an in-person sales event like a homeschool book fair.

BookFunnel has really cool mechanisms for selling in person and delivering digitally, which we covered in our other episode.

Damon: We recently added full integration with both Stripe and Square, which are payment platforms for selling direct.

Authors are doing more in-person conferences. When people come through the booth, they see the book, but they might want a digital ebook or audiobook. If you’re standing there and have one of our print codes, you can say, “I can sell you the ebook right now.”

In the other episode, we talked about print codes. Here’s how to hook someone who says, “I only listen to audiobooks.”

Picture an author’s table full of paperbacks. Ebooks are usually priced around $4.99, so authors often skip in-person ebook sales, thinking it’s not worth the hassle.

Instead, bundle the whole series and tell your customer who wants digital books, ” You can get all five books for $25. Just give me your email, tap your card, and it’ll be delivered automatically.”

Thomas: If you’re using Square, there’s a good chance the buyer’s email is already in the system. Say I’m at your book fair, and I only listen to audiobooks. I tap my card, Square already has my email, and I just hit okay.

As the author, there’s some initial setup to connect everything. But once it’s connected, it’s automatic. You get paid, and the reader gets the book.

Damon: More authors are doing in-person sales at conferences and farmers’ markets. In the world of AI, I can tell you that people still want to read great stories. You’ll have an easier time selling stories if you can make connections with readers. I know this will scare the introverts, but there’s no better way to make connections than to meet people one-on-one. If I walk up to your booth and we have a little conversation, I’m more likely to think, “This person sounds really cool, I’ll check out their book.”

Making those connections in person is the best way to reach the readers most likely to become super fans of your work.

Thomas: Selling in person is a great way to cut your reliance on the internet and on Amazon. There’s something wonderfully old-fashioned about cash on the barrel. Someone hands you paper money, and you hand them a book. I’m all for the digital side of tapping a card for an audiobook, but paper should never disappear.

I’ve long been a fan of BookFunnel. At first, I didn’t understand why it was necessary, since I wasn’t a Kindle user. Then I learned how much of a hassle it is to load ebooks onto a Kindle when you didn’t buy them from Amazon, and it clicked.

What final tips or encouragement do you have for authors wanting to try BookFunnel?

What sustains a writing career?

Damon: We also offer education on our YouTube channel, or the BookFunnel Podcast. We focus on self-publishing and the industry broadly, not just our own tool. If you’re nervous, there are plenty of free resources. If you do sign up, you get our support team, and all our author admins are self-publishing authors themselves, since we hire from within our community.

Whether you’re finishing your first book or still in the thick of it, remember that all of BookFunnel’s features exist to help you connect with readers. That connection, in my opinion, is the single best way to sustain a long-term author career.

Someone buys one book, likes it, and if you’ve got a series ready, they can dive deeper. It usually takes a few books before someone becomes a real fan, but that personal connection makes all the difference. I’ve met authors in person, then read their books and thought, “This person loves the same books I do.”

Brandon Sanderson is the biggest fantasy author in the world now, but he spent years hand-selling books across conference tables. Nobody who’s met him calls him a jerk. He’s one of the nicest guys around, and meeting him makes you want to read his work.

Matt Dinniman, who is blowing up right now with Dungeon Crawler Carl, is the same way. I watched him take an hour just to cross ten feet at a conference because everyone wanted to say hi, and he genuinely wants to talk to them.

When a human gives you that, you can’t help but think, “I should check out his books.”

Tools like BookFunnel can help you get your first book into the world, but they can’t make that connection for you. BookFunnel simply shrinks the distance between you and the reader. You still have to go make the initial connection.

Learn More About BookFunnel

BookFunnel.com

BookFunnel Podcast

BookFunnel YouTube

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