Episode 076 - BookFunnel with Damon Courtney
April 27, 2021
Damon Courtney of BookFunnel shares information on how authors can use customized landing pages, opportunities offered by email integration, the power of giveaways to attract readers and strengthen ties to fans, the financial benefits of selling direct, and the rise of wide audio.
Damon Courtney is the creator and CEO of BookFunnel, an ebook delivery service for authors and publishers. Though he would like to be a highly successful indie author, he can only lay claim to publishing a single fantasy trilogy that he does really like, despite its lack of sales. But self-publishing three novels did lead to the creation of BookFunnel, so he’s got that going for him. As a lifelong software engineer, Damon is an expert in just about everything technical and can offer unique insight on publishing as it relates to software and technology.
"What's beautiful about <audio>, as the author, for me, at least the hard part was writing the book. Once you've got the book, getting it translated, getting it put into audio, it has a cost associated with it, but you've already built the IP. You've already built the content. So now you're just selling the content in a different form." —Damon Courtney
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Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast, today my guest is Damon Courtney. Hey Damon, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Damon: Hey, Matty, how you doing?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Damon Courtney is the creator and CEO of BookFunnel, an ebook delivery service for authors and publishers. Though he would like to be a highly successful indy author, he can only lay claim to publishing a single fantasy trilogy that he does really like despite his lack of sales. But self-publishing three novels did lead them to the creation of BookFunnel, so he's got that going for him. As a lifelong software engineer, Damon is an expert in just about everything technical and can offer insight on publishing as it relates to software and technology.
[00:00:37] And that is what we are going to be tapping into today. We are going to be talking about BookFunnel, not surprisingly, and some of the activities that surround it, but I thought it would be fun to start out and just ask you to describe a little bit your author background and what did you encounter in your author experience that led you to develop BookFunnel?
[00:00:56] Damon: So I write fantasy with elves and wizards and dragons, and I came to indy publishing by way of my wife bought me a Kindle for Christmas one year. She didn't want to cause she knew I would end up spending tons of money buying books. And actually one of the first books that I bought turned out to be a self-published book. And I didn't know it at the time. I just saw a really cool fantasy cover that had swords on it, and it was three bucks. I'm like a book for three bucks, that's awesome. So I read it and I got to the end of it.
[00:01:22] And the author note just described the process, and I thought, wait, you can just publish books yourself? You just put them out there and do that? And so I got the idea of, you know, I always wanted to write a book. Why not me? Which is great, because I think that's the whole indy revolution of publishing books, right? I've read so many amazing self-published books now from people who probably never would have published a book in their life, if not for the revolution of self-publishing to come along and that same person to go, you know what, why not me? I have an idea. Why not my book? ...
[00:00:05] Damon: Hey, Matty, how you doing?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Damon Courtney is the creator and CEO of BookFunnel, an ebook delivery service for authors and publishers. Though he would like to be a highly successful indy author, he can only lay claim to publishing a single fantasy trilogy that he does really like despite his lack of sales. But self-publishing three novels did lead them to the creation of BookFunnel, so he's got that going for him. As a lifelong software engineer, Damon is an expert in just about everything technical and can offer insight on publishing as it relates to software and technology.
[00:00:37] And that is what we are going to be tapping into today. We are going to be talking about BookFunnel, not surprisingly, and some of the activities that surround it, but I thought it would be fun to start out and just ask you to describe a little bit your author background and what did you encounter in your author experience that led you to develop BookFunnel?
[00:00:56] Damon: So I write fantasy with elves and wizards and dragons, and I came to indy publishing by way of my wife bought me a Kindle for Christmas one year. She didn't want to cause she knew I would end up spending tons of money buying books. And actually one of the first books that I bought turned out to be a self-published book. And I didn't know it at the time. I just saw a really cool fantasy cover that had swords on it, and it was three bucks. I'm like a book for three bucks, that's awesome. So I read it and I got to the end of it.
[00:01:22] And the author note just described the process, and I thought, wait, you can just publish books yourself? You just put them out there and do that? And so I got the idea of, you know, I always wanted to write a book. Why not me? Which is great, because I think that's the whole indy revolution of publishing books, right? I've read so many amazing self-published books now from people who probably never would have published a book in their life, if not for the revolution of self-publishing to come along and that same person to go, you know what, why not me? I have an idea. Why not my book? ...
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[00:01:53] I had published my fantasy trilogy and I was trying to get sales and trying to get the book out there and get people to read it. And the big advice at that time, and it's still pretty true today from a lot of the author gurus, was, Oh, you need to build a mailing list, build a newsletter, and start getting readers onto it so that you can have a direct connection with those readers. And the way you do that is give them a free book or a free short story or a free cookie, whatever. Something to entice them and also to hopefully give them a sample of your writing, right?
[00:02:21] If you're trying to reach out to readers that have never read your stuff before, free is a great way to get somebody, to give you a try with no obligation. Just read my stuff. And if you read this story, you'll get an idea for the kind of books that I write and my writing style and hopefully come away with, Oh, I like this, I'm going to go and get the book. And so that's what I was trying to do. I was like, okay. You read the advice and like, I can do this--to the keyboard! And I immediately wrote a short story that actually turned out to be more of a novella--it was 20,000 words. And I really liked it.
[00:02:52] I was like, okay, I'm going to give this away for free for everybody who signs up for my newsletter. How do I do that? Well, you just attach some files to the email and then people will figure it out. And I thought, no, nobody's going to figure that out. I might figure that out, but a lot of people are going to have trouble with that.
[00:03:08] So that was what really led to the creation of BookFunnel was I need to make this experience easier. If I'm going to offer somebody a free book, then I need to be able to help them get it to their device, to their Kindle or to their Kobo or to their computer or whatever it is they want to read on. Because if they can't read the thing that I've given them and what good is it? At the time, advertising was just coming around as a thing. Authors were just discovering, Oh, you can buy Facebook ads. You can do Google ads. And Amazon ads didn't even exist yet. You spend a little bit of money to get people to your book, but if they can't read it then it's not going to do you much good.
[00:03:41] So that was really where the genesis of BookFunnel came from, was like, I need something, a piece of software. My wife is fond of saying that you see every problem and something that can be solved by software, but so far, I'm not wrong and most problems can be solved with software.
[00:03:54] Matty: What year was that? That you first developed BookFunnel?
[00:03:57] Damon: I started it in 2014. So we released it in 2015, so it would have been Black Friday, 2014. And the reason I remember that is because I'd had the idea for a while. My wife, Julie, runs the company with me and I had talked to Julie about it and said, Oh, I have this idea and I think it's going to work, but I'm not ready to do it just yet. And then sometime around about a week before Black Friday, I realized that the only way that I could build what I truly wanted to build with BookFunnel was I needed to buy a bunch of different devices, like an iPad and an Android tablet and a phone and a Kindle and a Kindle Fire and all these different tablets and devices, because I needed to see how did each of them work in getting a book to them? What was the best way that I could possibly support all of these devices?
[00:04:42] And so it was about a week out from Black Friday, and I'm looking at all the Black Friday deals. For anybody who's not in the US, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, when all the US retailers mark all of their stuff on super big discounts and specials. And so I thought this is my opportunity. I could buy a bunch of these devices a lot cheaper than I normally would throughout the year. That was probably Black Friday, so Thanksgiving 2014 is when I really started earnestly working on this software.
[00:05:08] And then the first beta of it, and I say beta, it was a beta that nobody but me had ever seen, launched sometime around May of 2015. And then we really opened our doors and actually started taking on authors in October of 2015. So a little over five years now that we've actually been doing it.
[00:05:25] Matty: I think a lot of people will come to BookFunnel, know of BookFunnel, for that exact reason, the getting free copies of books to people like reviewers or blurbers or whoever that might be. And I'm a happy subscriber to BookFunnel. But whenever I go in there to load a new book, to provide it to, let's say, advanced readers, there are all these things that are listed in the left-hand pane that I either am not taking advantage of yet, but I may be taking advantage of them, but I'm no I'm seriously, under-utilizing it.
[00:05:56] And so how I'd like to frame up our conversation is to talk about some of the services, but not delve so much into the services themselves, because I think people can go and see on the BookFunnel site how those things work, but what are best practices that you're seeing in terms of how people are using them. And so I would imagine probably BookFunnel's primary service is still providing free downloadable copies to readers. Is that true?
[00:06:22] Damon: Absolutely. That was the core of what we built it for. And really when we first launched, we didn't even collect email addresses. We were just the download delivery side of it. And we talk about the left nav is what we call it, so the left side navigation and we talk about that all the time, because we started off like any software company where we do this little bitty thing, and then we added something and we added something and we added and added and added and all along in the last five years, everything we've added has been because authors have asked us, Hey, it would be really great if you guys could do this.
[00:06:50] And we say no to some things, but if an idea is a good idea, it's a good idea. And so we try our best to say, Okay, we could solve that problem. How could we implement that? And as an example, you talk about delivering advanced reader copies. Authors were already using BookFunnel's downloads to deliver advanced reader copies, but they wanted different things.
[00:07:09] Well, I want everybody to get their copy of the book, but I don't want them to then go and share that link and a bunch of other people get a copy of my book. This is an advanced book that I haven't even released yet, so I don't want it to go out there to the world. So we built a feature called certified mail that lets you mail books directly to people. And at its core, we still help them get the book to their reader because that's the core of what BookFunnel does. But we just added features that were very specific to sending out advanced review copies. Okay. A week later we send out a reminder that says, Hey, it looks like you haven't downloaded your copy yet. And then later on in an update we added it so that when the book is released, we auto send out a follow-up email that says, Hey, it's time to go and review your book, click here to go and leave reviews on Amazon and BookBub and Goodreads and all the places.
[00:07:53] And those came about because authors said, Hey, it would be great if BookFunnel could do this thing for us, it would make our lives a lot easier. And so that's what we do all the time. All the tools that we build are, Let's make author's lives easier so that they can get back to writing and do their thing.
[00:08:09] But all the things that we do so, certified mail is for advanced reader copies. We also have Gift a Book, where you can just send a single book to a single reader. Non-fiction authors will use it, you can actually do it from your mobile phone. So if you're standing there and you meet somebody at a conference, you go, Oh, Hey, you know what? I think you'd really like my book. What's your email address? I'll send you a copy. And boom, you immediately give them a copy right from BookFunnel. We have a lot of authors that use that to send out birthday copies. So they'll ask their readers tell me when it's your birthday and I'll send you a free book.
[00:08:37] And they do that a lot, which I think is really cool. I love when authors use the things that we built to make readers happy, because we build to solve a problem, but over the years, the more that I see indy authors continue to use BookFunnel in really cool and creative ways.
[00:08:51] I love that. I'm a reader first. All of us, every author is a reader first. I haven't met an author, who's writing books, and is like, Yeah, I don't really read. It's not really my thing. So we're all readers first and we love reading. And when I say I see authors that are using our tools to make readers happy, that make me happy.
[00:09:06] So the tools along the way, I would say going back to your question of best practices, a lot of it really depends on where you are and your author journey. If you're just starting out, so you've just published your first book, then our promotions board, where you can join in group promotions with other authors of your genre is a really great place to get started because your goal, if you're just starting out, is to try and get people to read your book.
[00:09:29] If you just published your first book, your first problem is going to be visibility. How do I get people to read my book? Just as an example, let's say that you write fantasy, like I do. Well, then going and finding a group of 30 other fantasy authors who have already built a newsletter of readers who read fantasy, if I can get my book in front of those people are predisposed to like the kind of writing that I'm doing.
[00:09:52] And the more niche you can get into that, you know, romance is like this. It's huge. And so now you're, Oh, if you're in romance, you want to get down into a smaller niche. You want to do Christian romance. You want to do small town romance. You want to do contemporary romance. And you want to find those other authors that are doing that same thing. So if you're just starting out, our group promotions are a fantastic way to start to build a small readership of people who are going to check out your book.
[00:10:17] Now, if it's your first book, I would say don't give that book away for free. We recommend that you write a short story, a novella. Write something that, A, shows off who you are as a writer, so it has your voice, it has your genre. You know, don't write something like, Hey, here's my sweet Christian romance and here's a horror short story that I wrote. Don't do that, right?
[00:10:37] If you have something that can lead into what you're writing and whether you're writing in series, or if you're in romance and you're writing about this little, small town, if you can create a little short story that shows off what people are going to get. It's sort of just a taster of, This is me, this is who I am as an author, so if you're like this, you're definitely going to like my books. And then you start putting that out there in front of the right readers, the readers who are already ready to read the kind of book that you're selling, and that's a good start for you.
[00:11:06] Matty: So there are a whole bunch of things I want to ask about that. One is going back to the idea about the Certified Mail, where you want to very specifically target a particular copy that you're sending out to a particular person. And I think that for any platform like BookFunnel, one of my concerns has always been what you were implying that you don't want to send out a link and suddenly someone's posting it on social media.
[00:11:29] Now, if I'm sending out a link to the short story that I send to my email newsletter subscribers, then, okay, that kind of sucks, but it's not that big a deal. Whereas if I'm sending out a link to a yet to be launched book to a reviewer, then I want it to be very secure. How do you recommend that authors balance that difference between making it as easy as possible for the person you want to get it while still reasonably guarding against its suddenly being blasted out to a bunch of people that you don't want to get it?
[00:12:01] Damon: So certified mail was built for exactly that reason. And generally what we tell people is you should try to build a review team of people who genuinely want to read your book and will genuinely leave a review. And if you already have, if you don't have that team of people yet, so you're just starting out, I wouldn't work too hard at getting a bunch of reviews initially. Really just trying to get people to read the book initially is a good start, right? Because reviews will build up organically.
[00:12:26] What you want to do, though, is if you can use something like promotions to get you some readers onto your list, and then send out a letter that says, Hey, you guys are on my list. You got the free short story. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to read a copy of my book for free, I would love to give you a copy in exchange for an honest review. Now what you'll get from that is you'll get a few dozen readers who say, Yeah, I'll read a copy and leave a review. So already you're targeting a group of readers who have reached out and said, yes, I will be a reviewer of this book.
[00:12:57] So that's where Certified Mail comes in and says, Okay, you're only going to send this book to the people that you specifically want and send it to. And the way that Certified Mail works is rather than creating a page that's out there for the whole world to see, every single reviewer gets their own individual download link that is only good for them to download their book.
[00:13:16] So if you took that link and put it on social media, it would die instantly because once they download their copy, that's it, no more copies can be downloaded, which is very different than just a sort of mailing list sign up. You can share that with everybody, give it to everybody in the world. Anybody who wants to sign up and get my free short story, my free book. Absolutely. If somebody is going to drive traffic for you, let them.
[00:13:39] But that's why Certified Mail doesn't create just a landing page that can be shared to anybody. Every single person that you send that book to gets their own individual unique link that we then track and say, Oh, yep, Matty downloaded that copy, that link is now gone. It's no good anymore. They can't use that link and spread it around to other people. So there is a balance there.
[00:14:00] Matty: The scenario where you're trying to use BookFunnel as part of the process of getting people to sign up for your email newsletter, and I trust mentally that is very important, but I've had episode after episode about email newsletters and I still just can't get my brain around it. But the process I'm using is that I will solicit people to go to my website where there's a subscriber sign up form. I'll specify on my website page that if you sign up, you get a free Ann Kinnear Suspense Short, and then I'm using my email service to send out an email that provides a link to BookFunnel where they can go to get their book. Is that the way I should be doing it, or am I making it more cumbersome than it needs to be?
[00:14:43] Damon: First of all, which mailing the service are you using?
[00:14:45] Matty: MailChimp.
[00:14:47] Damon: Okay. So BookFunnel integrates directly with MailChimp. There are two ways that you can do that. You can do it the way that you're doing it, which is more of the author owns the experience, right? So it's your landing page on your website. Your sign-up form is obviously going to MailChimp, but ultimately you control a lot more of that process.
[00:15:04] I would say it's not really cumbersome at all. It's actually a great sequence because in your welcome email, you say, Hi, welcome to my list. I'm so glad you decided to join. I'm Matty, here's the kind of books that I write. And by the way, don't forget your free short story. Here's the link to go and get that.
[00:15:18] And then that link takes them back to BookFunnel where they can just download the book. And they can email a copy to themselves. They can download it directly to their reader. It just depends. That's where BookFunnel comes in and walks them through the process of, Great, you have a Kindle, what kind of Kindle you have? Okay, great. We know how to get your book there. Let's get your book over there. No, that's really how it's done.
[00:15:36] The other side of that is BookFunnel is the landing page for you. We handle the sign up, we handle the book delivery, and then we send those readers over to your MailChimp for you. I don't think that one is wrong and the other one is right. They both have about the same number of steps. It really just depends on whether you the author wants to own more of that experience. And I will say, I generally encourage authors, if you're doing like Facebook ads or something like that, you could drive Facebook ads directly to a BookFunnel landing page, and it would be really simple. And the reader can just fill in a few details and, boom, they've got their book.
[00:16:08] If you're doing links in the back of your books, which I highly recommend that you do, if you have a reader who reads your books and they get to the end of that book and they liked it, at that moment, you should definitely be trying to collect them onto your newsletter because, if you like this book, I have more stuff to give you. And that's what you want as your indy career is build that connection with readers. Anything that you put into your back of your books, you can absolutely put a BookFunnel link back there.
[00:16:32] But what happens if two years later you decide, I don't want to use BookFunnel anymore? All the copies of that book out there that you sold up to that point, they all point back to my service and not back to your website. Now that sounds counterintuitive being the service that makes the money. I would assume that I want you to go to my website, but as an author and as a technology guy, I think it's better to go to your website because you will always own that domain and you will always control that experience.
[00:16:59] I mean, you can't know that a reader bought that book two years ago and the copy that they're currently looking at has a really old link in it. And so they get to the end and it says, Hey, download my free book and then click on it. And it says, page not found, it doesn't exist anymore. That's a bad experience. You don't want that to happen. So I want readers to go to my website. And then once they sign up, Oh yeah, sure. I deliver it through BookFunnel and here's your free book. You can go get it from there. So honestly, I think your processes is exactly the way that most authors want to set it up.
[00:17:28] Matty: And what is the print codes functionality you mentioned.
[00:17:31] Damon: So Print Codes is something that we built a few years ago. A lot of authors, not in the time of COVID right now, but before the COVID times, authors would go to conferences and actually interact with other human beings face to face. And we had a lot of authors that were saying, Hey, when I go to conferences, I take bookmarks and I take post cards, and normally I just hand them out, and it's a fun little thing that I do. But I'd really love to be able to give people a free ebook. I certainly don't want to cart a giant box full of books and try to go hand out free paperbacks. But I would love to give people a free ebook. Is there a way that we can do that?
[00:18:04] And so we built a feature called Print Codes that does exactly that. You generate a batch of, let's say, 500 print codes. Each code is completely unique. You go off and you can go to printers. You can use MOO Cards or Vistaprint or all these different services, and they'll actually take a CSV, import the codes, and print you out 500 business cards. Authors come up to me at conferences and giving me their business cards with BookFunnel print codes on the back because they just want to show me, like, Look, look, see, which I think is awesome. I love that.
[00:18:32] And so you get 500 cards printed and each one has an individual code on the back. So now at a conference, or even just if I carry them around as my business cards, not only are you saying, Hey, I'm an author, here you go. But you're also saying, Hey, you know what? Here's a free copy of my first book in series. I think you'd really like it. And they turn the card over, and it's got a little code on the back. That code is unique to them. And once they redeem that code, then the code is dead, and it can't be shared with anybody else.
[00:18:57] So just like the certified mail thing, you can generate these unique codes where you can hand them out individually and know that that person's going to get the book and no one else is going to get the book. And Print Codes is that thing where you can generate all those unique codes.
[00:19:10] Now they don't have to use them. We call them Print Codes because we tried to be very clear, this is what we designed it for, so that you can print them on cards, on business cards, on post cards, and things like that. You don't have to use them that way. You can absolutely hand out codes via your email list or any way that you want to do it, but that was why we built it. And it is neat. I have a lot of authors that come up now and they'll hand me a postcard or a business card with a BookFunnel Print Code on the back.
[00:19:34] And it's always neat to see the authors are out there and actually using the stuff that you built, right? The biggest fear for any software developer, just like any author, right? You write a book, and you may tell yourself, you may tell other people that you don't care if anyone reads it, but you're lying. You're totally care if someone reads it. And it's no different being a software developer. I build this stuff, and I think, Man, I hope people find this useful. I really hope that they use this, because if they don't, I sure spent time developing it for nothing.
[00:20:01] Matty: Yeah. I spent several decades in the corporate world as a project manager in IT, and so I'm very sympathetic to what you're saying. And so did you say those were QR codes that you're printing out?
[00:20:12] Damon: You can generate QR codes for it. So QR codes can be generated from any kind of link or URL or anything like that. We set up a website called GetMyBook.com. And if you go to that website, there's just a big entry box that says, Hey, give us your book code and we'll go in and we'll fetch your book for you. So that code that you print on the back of a card for example, is your book code. But you can also generate a link from that code and that you can turn into a QR code.
[00:20:37] So we don't generate QR codes for you, but there's tons of free websites out there where you can just paste in a CSV, and it'll say, here's all your QR codes. So if you really wanted to print out a QR code on the back of a bookmark and things like that, you would do that where it's like, Here's the link where you can go get your book, or you can just scan this QR code, and it'll take you right there.
[00:20:54] Matty: It would be cool if someone liked to read on their phone, that they could take that business card, or even a little tent stand that you would have in your in-person tables when we can do that again, and you would scan it and then the book would show up on their phone. Is there a way of using what you're describing in that way?
[00:21:12] Damon: Not right now, but it's a cool idea. It would be something that we could build.
[00:21:16] Matty: Yeah. Yeah. I think I saw that at a bookstore, and it wasn't for books, but I think they used it for scan this to link to our website or have an easy access to our hours or something like that. It was just something where in the past, they probably would have handed out a sheet of paper that had whatever the information was on it, but they had thought of this nice QR code way of doing it.
[00:21:39] Damon: I think that's really neat. So BookFunnel, we started off with the idea of, we want to get the book to the reader and the device that you already have. A lot of reader, I read on my phone and I used to read in the Kindle app, and I read in the Kobo app a lot. So the idea was I want to get the book to the app that you're already reading in. And that's great, but we found over the years, in the five years that we've been doing this, it still surprises me how many readers we get every day that have never read an ebook before.
[00:22:03] And we indy authors, we live and breathe this stuff all day long. And so we just can't fathom the idea that someone in 2021 has not read an ebook before. But it happens every single day. We answer hundreds of emails a day, but a small portion of them will say, I've never read an ebook before. How do I do this? And so over the years we've tried to make that process easier and figure out how can we help somebody who's never read any book before to get their ebook as quickly as possible. And as a result, we have our own app, theBookFunnel app, and we built our own ereader into the app. So if you download our app, you can just start reading. If you don't have a Kindle app or something that you already read in, don't worry, you can just read right in our app.
[00:22:41] And then we also built, in that same technology, we built a browser-based reader, a cloud reader, that where you can tap a link and boom, you're immediately reading the book. And then we also did the same thing for our audio books. We started offering audio books last November. So BookFunnel can deliver audio books alongside your eBooks now. I think it would be really cool if somebody could scan a QR code and immediately, because of the browser-based reader, as soon as you scan it, you're reading the book, you're looking at the book cover, you tap forward, and you are just you're right into chapter one. And that is something that we get built that browser-based reader that we have, or the browser-based audio player.
[00:23:15] How neat would it be if you're sitting there at a cafe and you scan a little QR code, and now you're listening to the first two chapters of my audio book. And then of course you get to the end and we say, Hey, why don't you step on over here and buy the rest of it? I think that's neat. I love stuff like that.
[00:23:29] Matty: Yeah, it would be cool if you had a book that took advantage of the locations. So I live outside Philadelphia. All of my books have some part that is set in or outside Philadelphia, but I also have two books that are set in Sedona, Arizona, and soon to be two books that are set in Maine, and it would be cool to find a ... I'm trying to think of what kind of business you would go to, somewhere like a laundromat, I don't know. I'm trying to get somewhere where the proprietor of the business wouldn't care if people started reading or listening to a book, and you had one of these little tent stands there that would say, Hey, you want to hear a story that just takes place down the road? Scan this and you can listen to it while your laundry goes around in the washing machine.
[00:24:09] But it seems like there are all kinds of cool ideas like that, where you capture people where they are at the moment and you make it as easy as possible for them to get into whatever you think is going to be appealing to them because of that scenario.
[00:24:21] Damon: I think local coffee shops would be great for that. Starbucks obviously is not a local coffee shop, but they've been doing it for years where they had a deal with Apple where you could, if you were sitting there in the store and today's free song is this. And so you're sitting there listening to the song, playing at Starbucks and you scan this little code and Apple through iTunes would give you that song for free.
[00:24:41] And every day they changed the song. And so the song of the day is this. And then they had an app, Starbucks would sponsor the app of the week or whatever. So it's like, Hey, you're sitting there and you're having a coffee. Why not play Flappy Bird and we'll give you a free copy of it this week. And the next week it's going to be a different app.
[00:24:56] Obviously, indy authors, unless you have a really big name, you're probably not likely to get a deal with Starbucks. But there are so many local coffee places. A lot of people go, and they sit, and they drink their coffee, and they want to enjoy maybe reading through their news or whatever. If I were sitting there and I saw a cool poster for a book that, like you said, was talking about a book that happens just down the street, that's cool. Yeah, I'm sitting here -- click -- let me take a little picture and I'll give it a read.
[00:25:21] Matty: I wanted to get back to the audio, which you had mentioned. So I have a free short story that I use as my email magnet. And I wanted to add me reading the short story as an extra. So I could say now, if you sign up for my email newsletter, you not only get the ebook, but you also have the option of downloading a movie and audio of me, if you'd rather listen to it. What would be the mechanism for me to bake BookFunnel into the process of making that available to my subscribers?
[00:25:49] Damon: You can upload eBooks and then you can upload audio books and you can upload other media, which if it's short, you would just upload a single MP3 file. And then if it's not going to be a bunch of chapters, you wouldn't have to do a full-size audio book, you could just do it in a single file. And we support that up to two hours. So anything short of two hours, you can just distribute the single file and it's super, super easy for people to download.
[00:26:09] What I would probably do then is I would put it the welcome email of your newsletter, I would say, Thank you for signing, whatever you've already got, and then here's the free ebook that I promised you. If you prefer audio, click here to download and listen to it in audio. And then what's cool with that is not only are you offering both, which some people might download both, right? Some people might get the e-book or audio book. What I have generally found is once people move to audio and they become an audio first consumer, they'll leave the eBooks behind. If you have it in audio, they will absolutely prefer to consume your content in audio.
[00:26:43] What's beautiful about that, as the author, for me, at least the hard part was writing the book. Once you've got the book, getting it translated, getting it put into audio, it has a cost associated with it, but you've already built the IP. You've already built the content. So now you're just selling the content in a different form. And audio listeners are a completely separate audience, for the most part, from ebook listeners. So the way that I would set it up and your newsletter is here's the ebook. And if you prefer audio, you can listen to it and audio right here.
[00:27:13] I don't know how good your MailChimp Kung Fu is, but you can actually set it so that if somebody clicks on the audio link, before they get bounced to BookFunnel to do the download and then BookFunnel helps them through the process of listening and how to do all of that, you put a little tag on their user that says, Ah, this guy likes audio. And we have a lot of authors now that are actually, they have reader magnets up on BookFunnel that are audio, just like you're talking about, short story, novella-length audio that they're giving away for free as they build up their list. And they're now building two separate lists. These are my ebook readers. These are my audio book listeners, because there really is a separation. There's crossover. There are people who might do both, that do eBooks and audio books. But a lot of times, if you give people the choice between ebook and audio book, you're going to find out really quickly which one they prefer.
[00:28:00] If they click audio, chances are good they're an audio book listener, and they will go for that audio book first. And by tagging them and putting them into a separate group, what you're going to get is when you have a new audio book out, I definitely want to tell these people over here about it. Because they have all pushed themselves over into this list that says I prefer audio.
[00:28:20] So I think that welcome email is where you'd want to put it. And that's where you can get a great split, because the audio listeners, they won't even touch the ebook. They're going to click that audio first and, boom, now you know, as an author, that guy is an audio listener. That's who I want to target if you take your data and you go and you want to create a lookalike audience in Facebook, I don't want to get into Facebook ads and all the complexities of that, but you can take your audience and say, I want to an audience that looks like this. But I want to grab specifically the readers on my list who are audio listeners, because I want to target a list like that, so that when I run my audio book ads, I'm getting slightly more focused direction to people who prefer listening to audio books over e-books.
[00:29:01] Matty: Well, I'm clearly going to have to have the same kind of conversation with somebody from MailChimp, because that's another one where I go in there and I'm just like, Oh man, I am so underutilizing this. But I'm thinking what I'd like to do for my short stories is I was going to start out reading the one that I give away, but then I was thinking over time, I might add the others. I have, I think, six altogether, read the other ones. But then at some point, have my narrator, my actual novel length book narrator, do the short stories. And then I could go back and say, okay, you heard me read OUR DANCING DAYS, but now you can hear an actual professional actress read it.
[00:29:39] And that would be a fun way. I think it would be two quite different experiences. I'm not a performer, but I think people enjoy hearing the author read it, but they wouldn't want to hear me read a whole novel. But it would be nice to be able to go back to those people. And the other thing I was thinking about segmenting it is because the release date of audio books is often, you're not able to coordinate it with the release of the print book, you could be targeting people appropriately based off when the release of their favorite medium was available.
[00:30:08] Damon: Audio book listeners, because of that and through no fault of authors, right? If I put my ebook up on Amazon, it's ready within usually, less than a day. They say 48 hours, but really, I've never seen a book that took longer than a day or two. But audio books now, who knows. Three months, six months, one month, two weeks, who knows? So you're right. You can't really coordinate those two together. But what we have seen from audio book listeners is they feel a little bit neglected, because the ebook always comes out first.
[00:30:36] And now, especially if it's a series that they've really been waiting on that next book, it's the fifth or sixth book and a series and I'm a reader, man, I'm waiting for that book. I'm champing at the bit. I want that new book and, the ebook? And the audio book is when? Three months from now, are you kidding me?
[00:30:52] And so, yeah, if you can notify the ebook readers first and say, Hey, the new release is out there. And then maybe just quietly don't tell the people who have segmented to the audio list yet. And then when that audio book does come available, that's when you want to hit those people.
[00:31:07] Because you only get so much attention from people. And if you send everybody the ebook, which is not a bad thing to do, but the more you can segment your list, the more you can individually send the people that want something exactly what they want, the better return rate you're going to get on that. Which is why we see more authors building an entirely separate list for audio listeners, they keep those people completely separate from their ebook readers.
[00:31:30] And this is a trick that you can do. So you're doing it in your welcome email sequence right now, right? Or let's say that you've recorded your short audio and you're going to start putting that and your welcome email. Hi, download the ebook or download the audio book. Hear the author, hear me reading it on my own. I'm not a professional, but I do a pretty good job. Like sell it a little bit. Right? Because some people actually love it. They do love to hear what their authors sound like. Put that into your welcome sequence, but then also once you get that ready, maybe send it out to your existing list and see how many of them who are already on your list would choose.
[00:32:02] Or using one of your other short stories that's not necessarily your reader magnet, so you said you've got multiple short stories in this universe, well, that's great. Take one of those. Do the same, recording your own, and then send that to everybody on your list and say, Hey, I have a short story. Some of you may not have ever read it. I also recorded it myself in audio. And again, everybody who clicks on the audio in that email gets moved over to this list that says, ah, that person's an audio book listener.
[00:32:29] So you can actually take the list that you already have and try and poke a little bit and figure out, okay. If I give you a free thing, which one would you take? Would you take the ebook or would you take the audio book? And if they'll take the audio book, they're probably an audio book first listener. Doesn't mean they won't read your ebook. I know a lot of all the audio listeners that will, because they know the audio book always comes out late, they don't want to be behind the curve. And especially if you have really rabid fans who talk about your books and things like that. I want to avoid all the spoilers, whatever, fine, I'll just read the ebook. I don't want to wait two months for the audio book to come out. But all in all, they would much rather listen to the audio book if you have that available. But send out that email and segment those people and figure out who are the audio listeners.
[00:33:12] Matty: I wanted to loop back to something we talked about right at the beginning, and that is using BookFunnel or these kinds of services for getting reviews. So when I've sent out advanced reader copies, for example, I'm only using BookFunnel to serve up the link to the people I sent it to and make it easy for them to download. So I already have my list of people that I'm sending it to. But you had mentioned the fact that there are our groups, genre and sub-genre groups, that are using BookFunnel that you can capitalize on for this kind of thing. Can you describe that a little bit? What that community looks like and how it interacts?
[00:33:48] Damon: I've seen two major ways that authors use BookFunnel to get reviews. So we don't have a review service or anything specific to reviews, we do the delivery like through Certified Mail, but actually finding reviewers is not something that we've built. Now that said, indy authors are clever people, so they came along and said, Hey, we're already doing these group promos. I already, have my contemporary romance book and I'm joining in a promo with a bunch of other contemporary romance authors. Hey, why don't we do a promo where we all offer free copies for review. And let's just see if we can share some of our readers.
[00:34:20] Because if you've built up something of a list, chances are good that some percentage of that list is probably going to be your review team. And so a lot of those authors are willing to share. What's great is when you find a reader who's willing to do reviews, they'll review anything. As far as they're concerned, I'm happy to give you the review. If you're happy to give me the copy of the book for free, because I love to read and I love to read in my genre. So if you'll give me a book in my genre, yeah, sure, I'll give you a review for that.
[00:34:49] And so authors are using BookFunnel group promos to share, Hey, my review team loves contemporary romance. And the beauty of the author reader relationship is even if you write as fast as you can, you can never write fast enough to satiate all the readers. And especially in genres where readers, sometimes when we see these readers that read two books a day, three, four, or five books a week they're reading.
[00:35:12] And so the great thing is, the readers are always looking for more to read. And as an author, I'm looking for things that I can give to my readers that are going to make them happy. Well, I only have so many books and say you're super-fast and you're releasing a book a month. They read that book within a day of me publishing it and I got 29 more days of stuff that I've got to fill. So, hey, if you like my books, here's Matty's book and it's in the same genre and she's looking for reviews. I love you guys, I love my readers. Would any of you guys be willing to Matty a review. And you'll find that a lot of readers will absolutely jump on that. And so group promotions, authors use those as reviews. They start to build review promotions where the specific point of the promo is I'm giving this copy in exchange for a review. That's what I would really like from you.
[00:35:56] The other way is if you're just starting out or even if you don't have a review team yet, is using those group promotions and then, And so a little bit of MailChimp fu here, but putting them on a separate list. So as they join into your list, you're segmenting them and saying, okay, these are a new reader that, that got my free book through a promotion, so they haven't read the book yet. They probably don't know a lot about who I am, but I'm specifically trying to build up a reader team right now.
[00:36:24] So what I want to send them is, Hey, here's the free book, here's the free short story that I promised you. Also, if you are interested, I'm really looking for reviewers and for people to join my review team. If you're on my review team, you get the books early before everybody else, and you get them for free and exchange for an honest review. So click here. If you'd like to join my review team. And hitting those people right as they come into your list, you will absolutely start to build up a list. And some of those people will, nah, they just get their free book and then move over to your list. But others will absolutely click on that link. And so as you're building up the list, initially, you're also starting to build up a smaller percentage of that list of people who say, yeah, I'll do a review. I'll do that. So you can build that review team using those group promotions and finding those readers.
[00:37:11] And it all just depends on what your target is, right? When you start to get new readers onto your list, what are you trying to do? Well, I really want to sell them more books. I want to find reviewers and reviews, or I just want to put them on my list so we can talk about it, and then I'm going to sell them stuff later on. Or I have audio books that I want to push to them. If your focus is getting reviews, then the messaging that you send out as new readers join your list is, join my review team because that's the focus that you want to drive to.
[00:37:40] Matty: Yep. I'm going to be taking plenty of to-dos out of our conversation here. What of the other services that I wanted to talk about is bundles? So a BookFunnel has a bundle functionality. Can you describe that?
[00:37:54] Damon: We have a lot of authors that have a pretty solid back list. And we started seeing this more and more where, if you have a bigger backlist and especially if you have multiple series, I'm willing as an author, if I have 30, 40 books in my back list and I have three major series that are going on, I really don't care which of my books you get for free. And in fact, I would like you to take the first book and all three of my series for free, because I want you to get hooked and buy all of them.
[00:38:20] And so more and more authors were building up this idea of what they call the starter library, cause it's a really enticing offer. There are a lot of authors that are offering a free short story and their free and develop. Nope. I have a huge backlist. Here's three free books if you sign up for my mailing list. And you're going to get a lot more traffic from people if they're signing up and getting three free books.
[00:38:40] Now assuming that you write all in the same genre or all of those series are in relatively the same genre, then I really want you to get all three of them. I want you to read all three of those series, because I think you're going to like them. And so bundles allowed you to take multiple books and put them onto a single landing page so that once you're signed up, I don't have, Here's link one, here's link two, here's link three. Nope. Here's a single link. Go here and then click on each of these books and download them the way that you want. And then, so that's what bundled pages allow you to do.
[00:39:09] You can also create bundle pages and things like if you have a series, you could create it so that the first book in the series is free if you sign up for my newsletter, and here are the other six books in the series. But you send them to one really beautiful bundle landing page where you put a header graphic across the top, and you can just put a little bit of text describing what it is, and it says, Hey, get the first book for free, just for signing up for my newsletter. And then here's all the other book covers.
[00:39:35] What's really neat about that is that is really enticing. Showing somebody that the book cover of your first book is great. But if I'm looking at the other six books in your series, and I can see they've all got dragons on them, I'm down. I'm ready to go. Let's go. And especially for series readers, that’s a big thing, right? If I'm a series reader, I want to know how many books do you have in the series? And even better for me is the series complete. Because as a series reader, I like to binge books. I will grab a book and if I love it, I'm going to read through the whole series.
[00:40:04] So I almost never read standalones anymore unless the stand-alone is part of a world of a series that I've read somewhere else. So if you're trying to give me a book, this is just me personally, but I see it a lot in series readers, if you're trying to give me a book, that's a standalone. I'm not really interested. I want to know that if I start reading book one, I'm going to have a lot of content to devour. It goes when I fall in love with something I will do and the entire series all the way through. So bundle pages, let you set up an entire series.
[00:40:31] And when you create a landing page on BookFunnel, there are several major types, but really what we're talking about here is there's a newsletter signup landing page, and then there's what we call a sales landing page. Now on a sales landing page, they're not signing up for your newsletter. They have buttons that will take them to the other bookstores, where they can then purchase the book. So you could set up a bundle that says here, click on the first book in the series and you sign up for free and you get the first copy for free. But the other books in that bundle, they are all sales landing pages. They are going to drive you to whichever store you want. Google Play. You can go to Kobo if you like Kobo. You can go to Kindle. Here's the other books in that series.
[00:41:07] But the BookFunnel bundle page lays all that out for you really beautifully, where your newsletter cover can be this big, huge book cover over to the left. And then the other six can be beautifully displayed right over here to the right, but they're a little bit smaller because I want to drive your focus to that big book cover over there to the right, cause a free book is great and people are going to love that. And then by the way, once you get the free book, here's the entire rest of the series. And for series readers, that's really important to know that, A, it is a series and, B, man, they got seven books. Sweet. If I pick up book one and it's awesome, I got a lot of content that I can go through before I'm going to run out a story.
[00:41:42] Matty: I'm assuming that an author could only do that if their first book in the series was permafree on the retail site. So for example, if you're selling your first and series for 99 cents or $1.99 or something like that, then it would be violating at least Amazon's terms of service to then offer that for free through the scenario you're describing. Is that true?
[00:42:06] Damon: So Amazon has their enforcement policy where they say that they have what's called a most favored nation clause in their contracts, which says that if you set the price somewhere else, then you have to give us the same price. The problem is, if the price that I've set can't be set on Amazon, then you can't fault me for violating the contract. Amazon doesn't let you set a price below 99 cents. So even if I set my book free, now you can email Amazon and say, Hey, my book is free over here, and they sometimes will match it for free and sometimes they won't. You're offering a book for free through your newsletter.
[00:42:38] I mean, if you can do it permafree I think that's great. Readers can get bounced to the store because the stores are going to help you out. If you get to the end of a book in Kobo, Kobo is going to say, Hey, you just finished book one. You probably want to buy book two, click right here and go and buy a book two. So they're going to give you that little bit of an extra boost that you get. But everybody in the industry does it. And it's sort of a technical you're violating the contract, but Amazon doesn't let you make it free. So there's really nothing else that I can do here other than just offer my stuff and just see where it goes.
[00:43:08] Matty: I'm very big now on starting to send people to PayHip to purchase my books directly from me, not through a retailer. How would you accommodate that in theBookFunnel world, if individuals either want to send readers to purchase on their own website or send them to a platform like PayHip?
[00:43:24] Damon: So on our sales landing page, which is what I was talking about bouncing people to other stores, we actually built that in from their beginning because I want authors to sell direct. I think authors selling direct either through PayHip or through their own store, through a Shopify store, is amazing. And when I first built sales delivery, I did not think that would be the case. I didn't think that readers would actually want to do something like that.
[00:43:45] But over time what I found is that readers love their authors. They love them to death. And especially as indy authors, they feel a bit of a connection. I mean, I grew up reading the big giants of fantasy, right? Never did I ever think that I could just like tweet at them and they would reply to me because that, wasn't a thing when I was a kid growing up, but now you really can. My son reads a lot of books and he can go and actually tweet at the author, and the author says, Dude, I'm so glad you love my books. And that's huge. That's a big thing that indy authors can do.
[00:44:14] And of course, trad pub can do it too now because we have the tools, but indy authors are seen a little bit more personal, right? It's almost like real sports stars, I don't want to go bother him. Indy authors are like, Oh no, they're in indy. I definitely want to send them an email and tell them how much I love my book. And that's perpetuated by indies. I always put an author note in the back of all of my books, which didn't get a lot of sales, but they did get some, and I said, Hey, email me, here's my email address. Send me an email. Tell me you love the book. I would love to hear from you. And that's something that indies can do that you'll almost never see in the traditional publishing world.
[00:44:46] The sales pages that we've built, we specifically built them with direct sales in mind, through PayHip and Shopify in your store. So when you build a sales landing page, you can say, here's my link to Amazon. Here's my link to Google Play. Here's my link to Kobo, Barnes and Noble. And here's my direct sales link, which can go to PayHip or anywhere that you want. And when that page gets displayed to a reader, there's an icon for Amazon, for Kindle. There's an icon for Kobo and an icon for Barnes and Noble. And there's a big, giant button that says Buy from Me. And we put that button right on top, front and center, with the price.
[00:45:20] And we have authors that do that and say, Hey, you can buy these books on any of these stores, but you can also buy directly for me and I get a bigger share of the profit. Or they will do things like, you talked about you don't want to violate Amazon's contract. Technically if you're offering the same exact item for sale, the same SKU, then according to your Amazon contracts, the most favored nation clause says that if you offer it for 99 cents, then you have to get Amazon and the same price. So you can't say, Oh, you can buy it for $2.99 on all the stores, or you can buy it for 99 cents from me. That's technically not allowed, though we see people doing it.
[00:45:54] But what you can do is you can create a new item, which is, Hey, listen, if you buy it from all these stores and I'm happy to have you buy it wherever you like it the most, but if you buy it directly from me, I've included two free, short stories at the back of the book. And so now they have an incentive to buy from you. And again, that big Buy from Me button is right on top of all of those little icons for the other stores.
[00:46:15] Now, some readers will still choose to go through to the Kobo store because that's where I read my books and I'm comfortable with that, and I'd rather do that. But we purposely try to make the direct buy option the biggest one on the page, because that's what we focus on. I want authors to set up their own bookstores. I want you to be selling your books yourself.
[00:46:33] Matty: I wanted to wrap up our conversation by asking you what trends do you see coming down the pike and if you want to share BookFunnel's development plan, of course, I'm happy to hear that, but I'm hoping that you'll comment on things that people could use existing BookFunnel functionality for, but it's something that they may have been using all the functionality of BookFunnel for years, but here comes this new thing in the publishing world and here's this existing BookFunnel function is going to help support that. Do you have any thoughts on that?
[00:47:07] Damon: Oh, two. One, I think it's fantastic that you're already doing direct sales through PayHip, which is awesome. We built direct sales, and the way that we built it was we handle the delivery part, you handle the sales part. Because you can go build a Shopify store or a PayHip store or WooCommerce, however you want to do it, and we will step in to handle the delivery part once the sale is made. That has been probably one of our biggest driving features over the last couple of years. A lot of people are still joining for group promotions and newsletter sign-ups and that's still the core of what we do.
[00:47:38] But more and more authors are doing that direct sales piece where they're realizing, Hey, if I've already built a fan base, if I've got 3000 people on my newsletter, if I'm already driving Facebook ads, I can buy Facebook ads that go straight to Amazon and Amazon gets a 30% cut on all of my books, or I can drive Facebook ads to my website and I take 95% of the profits. So if I'm the one driving the traffic, why would I drive the traffic to your site when I can drive them to my site? And so direct sales has been a huge thing that more and more authors are dipping their toes into.
[00:48:10] And the second piece that goes hand in hand with that is audio books. They have been blowing up like crazy. Audio books are now where eBooks were back in 2011. They're growing at a tremendous rate and it's an entirely different audience from ebook readers. So by starting to move into audio books, you're not going to cannibalize a lot of your ebook sales because you're actually going to reach an entirely different audience of people who are audio book listeners.
[00:48:36] And as we released audio books last November, we build these things and we say, we think we know why people are going to use them, but we don't always know. Sometimes we just say, Hey, we built this cool thing. Let's see what you guys do with it. And so audio books was one of those. A week after we opened our doors in 2015, and we got the first request for when it's booked from up and live her audio books, like what is a great, we just did eBooks a week ago.
[00:48:58] Matty: Can we just enjoy this for a minute?
[00:49:00] Damon: Exactly. Right. And that's how it always feels. And any author is the same. You know, it's a great book. When's the next one coming. I just published that! So we got our first request for audio books a week after we had just launched our service. And we finally launched audio books last November. It took a long time to get to it. And it took a long time to build it and really perfect the process to be what we wanted it to be.
[00:49:24] And so as authors started joining in to our beta program to do audio books, we saw a lot more authors that were doing sales with their audio books than they were doing the sort of giveaway thing. And maybe that was because a lot of the authors had already been doing short form audio and giving those away. So talking about recording your short story or recording a novella, they were already doing that on BookFunnel. So then when it came time to upload the actual full audio book of their books, I'm not giving away that I'm selling that, but I want to sell that directly from my website.
[00:49:57] And I think the biggest reason is, the audio book authors are really pushing hard, gung-ho on direct sales, more so than we've ever seen a push in eBooks for direct sales. And I think the biggest driver of that is Audible only gives you 25% of every sale of every audio book that you make. If you sell an audio book direct from your website or through somebody like PayHip, which I know Joanna Penn is now selling all of her audio books on PayHip, she has a great video that sort of describes how to set it up. If I sell my audio book through PayHip, I get 90% of the sale. If I sell it through audible, I get 25%. And now we're discovering, Oh, you don't actually get 25%. You get 13%. So 90% versus 13%. I now can see why more authors are definitely digging into direct audio sales more than any of the traffic we've ever had on direct ebook sales.
[00:50:52] We have some authors and publishers that have their entire ebook stores online available, and they do thousands and thousands of sales a month directly through us. Now they didn't pull their books from Amazon and Kobo and all the other stores, they're selling as wide as they can, but, Hey, listen, if you're already here, if you buy over here for me, I'll kick you a free short story, or you can buy it a little bit cheaper from me if you buy this box set, I'll give you the box set and it's going to be, it's going to save you a lot of money. If you go buy all the books individually from the stores, you're going to pay a lot more money. You can buy it direct from me.
[00:51:23] But the cool thing is that I can price that box set at a really great discount for readers and because of the royalty rates, I can actually make as much money selling readers a cheaper box set than if you went and bought all my books on Amazon, because Amazon takes a cut. And it's not a bad thing that they take a cut. But at some point, if I'm driving the traffic, if the fans already love me and they'll buy my books directly for me, I should be the one taking the money.
[00:51:52] Matty: That could be a fun way to use that organic / inorganic division that you talked about because I think that the people who are in your organic email list may be the ones that are most likely to heed your call to buy direct. Whereas the ones that are just finding out about you on Facebook are probably going to be more comfortable, No, I want to go to Amazon. I want to go to Kobo, because I understand that ecosystem.
[00:52:12] Damon: And if you have a backlist, if you have a lot of books that are available and more that they can consume ... look, when I started reading indies, which was 2010, it must've been about to probably Christmas, 2010, I started picking up indy-published books because they were only a few bucks and they had great covers. They looked good and it turned out they were great, great books. I still read those authors today. Some of the authors that I found back then, the indies, some of them have even moved into traditional publishing. Others are still indy publishing, but they are on my direct buy list. As soon as I see them, I will hit that buy button.
[00:52:44] One of them, a fantasy author named Michael J. Sullivan, he now Kickstarts all of his books before he publishes them. And his Kickstarters go in for well over hundreds of thousands of dollars. But that is because he's built a fan base that are absolutely willing to push that button and buy that book directly from him. Kickstarter's just another direct sales way. He was going to publish the book anyway, but he figures, Hey, I'll pre-sell it through Kickstarter and I'll get all of my fans to support me. And then he does cool like special edition hardbacks and stuff like that. He really does it right, and it's really awesome what he does.
[00:53:17] For me, I read eBooks. But every time I see a Kickstarter for one of his books, boom, I sign up instantly and I will get the book immediately as soon as it's published. That's just direct sales through another route. And if a reader comes into your list and they're just reading a couple of your books, you're right, they're not going to buy direct from you. They're probably going to go to Amazon. They're going to go to Kobo, wherever they're comfortable.
[00:53:37] But once they fall in love with you, and we're readers, I can guarantee you right now if I just ask you to list and all that you can rattle off and author name immediately, that would be like, I love this author. I will buy any book they publish. Once you reach that level of super fan, 100% they would rather give their money directly to you and not to Amazon or Kobo or anybody else. They love you.
[00:53:58] Matty: That is great. Damon, thank you so much. This has been not only very interesting, but so much fun talking to you. So please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and BookFunnel and any other work you're doing online.
[00:54:10] Damon: Bookfunnel.com. We try not to be too secretive about it. You can email us there. You can email [email protected] if you have any questions about anything I've talked about or just anything in general, we get questions all the time that have nothing to do with BookFunnel, just publishing questions, right? Like you talk about segmentation, we get email questions like that all the time. And our support people are really, really helpful and really friendly.
[00:54:30] Matty: That's great. Well, thank you again, Damon. This has been so helpful.
[00:54:33] Damon: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:02:21] If you're trying to reach out to readers that have never read your stuff before, free is a great way to get somebody, to give you a try with no obligation. Just read my stuff. And if you read this story, you'll get an idea for the kind of books that I write and my writing style and hopefully come away with, Oh, I like this, I'm going to go and get the book. And so that's what I was trying to do. I was like, okay. You read the advice and like, I can do this--to the keyboard! And I immediately wrote a short story that actually turned out to be more of a novella--it was 20,000 words. And I really liked it.
[00:02:52] I was like, okay, I'm going to give this away for free for everybody who signs up for my newsletter. How do I do that? Well, you just attach some files to the email and then people will figure it out. And I thought, no, nobody's going to figure that out. I might figure that out, but a lot of people are going to have trouble with that.
[00:03:08] So that was what really led to the creation of BookFunnel was I need to make this experience easier. If I'm going to offer somebody a free book, then I need to be able to help them get it to their device, to their Kindle or to their Kobo or to their computer or whatever it is they want to read on. Because if they can't read the thing that I've given them and what good is it? At the time, advertising was just coming around as a thing. Authors were just discovering, Oh, you can buy Facebook ads. You can do Google ads. And Amazon ads didn't even exist yet. You spend a little bit of money to get people to your book, but if they can't read it then it's not going to do you much good.
[00:03:41] So that was really where the genesis of BookFunnel came from, was like, I need something, a piece of software. My wife is fond of saying that you see every problem and something that can be solved by software, but so far, I'm not wrong and most problems can be solved with software.
[00:03:54] Matty: What year was that? That you first developed BookFunnel?
[00:03:57] Damon: I started it in 2014. So we released it in 2015, so it would have been Black Friday, 2014. And the reason I remember that is because I'd had the idea for a while. My wife, Julie, runs the company with me and I had talked to Julie about it and said, Oh, I have this idea and I think it's going to work, but I'm not ready to do it just yet. And then sometime around about a week before Black Friday, I realized that the only way that I could build what I truly wanted to build with BookFunnel was I needed to buy a bunch of different devices, like an iPad and an Android tablet and a phone and a Kindle and a Kindle Fire and all these different tablets and devices, because I needed to see how did each of them work in getting a book to them? What was the best way that I could possibly support all of these devices?
[00:04:42] And so it was about a week out from Black Friday, and I'm looking at all the Black Friday deals. For anybody who's not in the US, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, when all the US retailers mark all of their stuff on super big discounts and specials. And so I thought this is my opportunity. I could buy a bunch of these devices a lot cheaper than I normally would throughout the year. That was probably Black Friday, so Thanksgiving 2014 is when I really started earnestly working on this software.
[00:05:08] And then the first beta of it, and I say beta, it was a beta that nobody but me had ever seen, launched sometime around May of 2015. And then we really opened our doors and actually started taking on authors in October of 2015. So a little over five years now that we've actually been doing it.
[00:05:25] Matty: I think a lot of people will come to BookFunnel, know of BookFunnel, for that exact reason, the getting free copies of books to people like reviewers or blurbers or whoever that might be. And I'm a happy subscriber to BookFunnel. But whenever I go in there to load a new book, to provide it to, let's say, advanced readers, there are all these things that are listed in the left-hand pane that I either am not taking advantage of yet, but I may be taking advantage of them, but I'm no I'm seriously, under-utilizing it.
[00:05:56] And so how I'd like to frame up our conversation is to talk about some of the services, but not delve so much into the services themselves, because I think people can go and see on the BookFunnel site how those things work, but what are best practices that you're seeing in terms of how people are using them. And so I would imagine probably BookFunnel's primary service is still providing free downloadable copies to readers. Is that true?
[00:06:22] Damon: Absolutely. That was the core of what we built it for. And really when we first launched, we didn't even collect email addresses. We were just the download delivery side of it. And we talk about the left nav is what we call it, so the left side navigation and we talk about that all the time, because we started off like any software company where we do this little bitty thing, and then we added something and we added something and we added and added and added and all along in the last five years, everything we've added has been because authors have asked us, Hey, it would be really great if you guys could do this.
[00:06:50] And we say no to some things, but if an idea is a good idea, it's a good idea. And so we try our best to say, Okay, we could solve that problem. How could we implement that? And as an example, you talk about delivering advanced reader copies. Authors were already using BookFunnel's downloads to deliver advanced reader copies, but they wanted different things.
[00:07:09] Well, I want everybody to get their copy of the book, but I don't want them to then go and share that link and a bunch of other people get a copy of my book. This is an advanced book that I haven't even released yet, so I don't want it to go out there to the world. So we built a feature called certified mail that lets you mail books directly to people. And at its core, we still help them get the book to their reader because that's the core of what BookFunnel does. But we just added features that were very specific to sending out advanced review copies. Okay. A week later we send out a reminder that says, Hey, it looks like you haven't downloaded your copy yet. And then later on in an update we added it so that when the book is released, we auto send out a follow-up email that says, Hey, it's time to go and review your book, click here to go and leave reviews on Amazon and BookBub and Goodreads and all the places.
[00:07:53] And those came about because authors said, Hey, it would be great if BookFunnel could do this thing for us, it would make our lives a lot easier. And so that's what we do all the time. All the tools that we build are, Let's make author's lives easier so that they can get back to writing and do their thing.
[00:08:09] But all the things that we do so, certified mail is for advanced reader copies. We also have Gift a Book, where you can just send a single book to a single reader. Non-fiction authors will use it, you can actually do it from your mobile phone. So if you're standing there and you meet somebody at a conference, you go, Oh, Hey, you know what? I think you'd really like my book. What's your email address? I'll send you a copy. And boom, you immediately give them a copy right from BookFunnel. We have a lot of authors that use that to send out birthday copies. So they'll ask their readers tell me when it's your birthday and I'll send you a free book.
[00:08:37] And they do that a lot, which I think is really cool. I love when authors use the things that we built to make readers happy, because we build to solve a problem, but over the years, the more that I see indy authors continue to use BookFunnel in really cool and creative ways.
[00:08:51] I love that. I'm a reader first. All of us, every author is a reader first. I haven't met an author, who's writing books, and is like, Yeah, I don't really read. It's not really my thing. So we're all readers first and we love reading. And when I say I see authors that are using our tools to make readers happy, that make me happy.
[00:09:06] So the tools along the way, I would say going back to your question of best practices, a lot of it really depends on where you are and your author journey. If you're just starting out, so you've just published your first book, then our promotions board, where you can join in group promotions with other authors of your genre is a really great place to get started because your goal, if you're just starting out, is to try and get people to read your book.
[00:09:29] If you just published your first book, your first problem is going to be visibility. How do I get people to read my book? Just as an example, let's say that you write fantasy, like I do. Well, then going and finding a group of 30 other fantasy authors who have already built a newsletter of readers who read fantasy, if I can get my book in front of those people are predisposed to like the kind of writing that I'm doing.
[00:09:52] And the more niche you can get into that, you know, romance is like this. It's huge. And so now you're, Oh, if you're in romance, you want to get down into a smaller niche. You want to do Christian romance. You want to do small town romance. You want to do contemporary romance. And you want to find those other authors that are doing that same thing. So if you're just starting out, our group promotions are a fantastic way to start to build a small readership of people who are going to check out your book.
[00:10:17] Now, if it's your first book, I would say don't give that book away for free. We recommend that you write a short story, a novella. Write something that, A, shows off who you are as a writer, so it has your voice, it has your genre. You know, don't write something like, Hey, here's my sweet Christian romance and here's a horror short story that I wrote. Don't do that, right?
[00:10:37] If you have something that can lead into what you're writing and whether you're writing in series, or if you're in romance and you're writing about this little, small town, if you can create a little short story that shows off what people are going to get. It's sort of just a taster of, This is me, this is who I am as an author, so if you're like this, you're definitely going to like my books. And then you start putting that out there in front of the right readers, the readers who are already ready to read the kind of book that you're selling, and that's a good start for you.
[00:11:06] Matty: So there are a whole bunch of things I want to ask about that. One is going back to the idea about the Certified Mail, where you want to very specifically target a particular copy that you're sending out to a particular person. And I think that for any platform like BookFunnel, one of my concerns has always been what you were implying that you don't want to send out a link and suddenly someone's posting it on social media.
[00:11:29] Now, if I'm sending out a link to the short story that I send to my email newsletter subscribers, then, okay, that kind of sucks, but it's not that big a deal. Whereas if I'm sending out a link to a yet to be launched book to a reviewer, then I want it to be very secure. How do you recommend that authors balance that difference between making it as easy as possible for the person you want to get it while still reasonably guarding against its suddenly being blasted out to a bunch of people that you don't want to get it?
[00:12:01] Damon: So certified mail was built for exactly that reason. And generally what we tell people is you should try to build a review team of people who genuinely want to read your book and will genuinely leave a review. And if you already have, if you don't have that team of people yet, so you're just starting out, I wouldn't work too hard at getting a bunch of reviews initially. Really just trying to get people to read the book initially is a good start, right? Because reviews will build up organically.
[00:12:26] What you want to do, though, is if you can use something like promotions to get you some readers onto your list, and then send out a letter that says, Hey, you guys are on my list. You got the free short story. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to read a copy of my book for free, I would love to give you a copy in exchange for an honest review. Now what you'll get from that is you'll get a few dozen readers who say, Yeah, I'll read a copy and leave a review. So already you're targeting a group of readers who have reached out and said, yes, I will be a reviewer of this book.
[00:12:57] So that's where Certified Mail comes in and says, Okay, you're only going to send this book to the people that you specifically want and send it to. And the way that Certified Mail works is rather than creating a page that's out there for the whole world to see, every single reviewer gets their own individual download link that is only good for them to download their book.
[00:13:16] So if you took that link and put it on social media, it would die instantly because once they download their copy, that's it, no more copies can be downloaded, which is very different than just a sort of mailing list sign up. You can share that with everybody, give it to everybody in the world. Anybody who wants to sign up and get my free short story, my free book. Absolutely. If somebody is going to drive traffic for you, let them.
[00:13:39] But that's why Certified Mail doesn't create just a landing page that can be shared to anybody. Every single person that you send that book to gets their own individual unique link that we then track and say, Oh, yep, Matty downloaded that copy, that link is now gone. It's no good anymore. They can't use that link and spread it around to other people. So there is a balance there.
[00:14:00] Matty: The scenario where you're trying to use BookFunnel as part of the process of getting people to sign up for your email newsletter, and I trust mentally that is very important, but I've had episode after episode about email newsletters and I still just can't get my brain around it. But the process I'm using is that I will solicit people to go to my website where there's a subscriber sign up form. I'll specify on my website page that if you sign up, you get a free Ann Kinnear Suspense Short, and then I'm using my email service to send out an email that provides a link to BookFunnel where they can go to get their book. Is that the way I should be doing it, or am I making it more cumbersome than it needs to be?
[00:14:43] Damon: First of all, which mailing the service are you using?
[00:14:45] Matty: MailChimp.
[00:14:47] Damon: Okay. So BookFunnel integrates directly with MailChimp. There are two ways that you can do that. You can do it the way that you're doing it, which is more of the author owns the experience, right? So it's your landing page on your website. Your sign-up form is obviously going to MailChimp, but ultimately you control a lot more of that process.
[00:15:04] I would say it's not really cumbersome at all. It's actually a great sequence because in your welcome email, you say, Hi, welcome to my list. I'm so glad you decided to join. I'm Matty, here's the kind of books that I write. And by the way, don't forget your free short story. Here's the link to go and get that.
[00:15:18] And then that link takes them back to BookFunnel where they can just download the book. And they can email a copy to themselves. They can download it directly to their reader. It just depends. That's where BookFunnel comes in and walks them through the process of, Great, you have a Kindle, what kind of Kindle you have? Okay, great. We know how to get your book there. Let's get your book over there. No, that's really how it's done.
[00:15:36] The other side of that is BookFunnel is the landing page for you. We handle the sign up, we handle the book delivery, and then we send those readers over to your MailChimp for you. I don't think that one is wrong and the other one is right. They both have about the same number of steps. It really just depends on whether you the author wants to own more of that experience. And I will say, I generally encourage authors, if you're doing like Facebook ads or something like that, you could drive Facebook ads directly to a BookFunnel landing page, and it would be really simple. And the reader can just fill in a few details and, boom, they've got their book.
[00:16:08] If you're doing links in the back of your books, which I highly recommend that you do, if you have a reader who reads your books and they get to the end of that book and they liked it, at that moment, you should definitely be trying to collect them onto your newsletter because, if you like this book, I have more stuff to give you. And that's what you want as your indy career is build that connection with readers. Anything that you put into your back of your books, you can absolutely put a BookFunnel link back there.
[00:16:32] But what happens if two years later you decide, I don't want to use BookFunnel anymore? All the copies of that book out there that you sold up to that point, they all point back to my service and not back to your website. Now that sounds counterintuitive being the service that makes the money. I would assume that I want you to go to my website, but as an author and as a technology guy, I think it's better to go to your website because you will always own that domain and you will always control that experience.
[00:16:59] I mean, you can't know that a reader bought that book two years ago and the copy that they're currently looking at has a really old link in it. And so they get to the end and it says, Hey, download my free book and then click on it. And it says, page not found, it doesn't exist anymore. That's a bad experience. You don't want that to happen. So I want readers to go to my website. And then once they sign up, Oh yeah, sure. I deliver it through BookFunnel and here's your free book. You can go get it from there. So honestly, I think your processes is exactly the way that most authors want to set it up.
[00:17:28] Matty: And what is the print codes functionality you mentioned.
[00:17:31] Damon: So Print Codes is something that we built a few years ago. A lot of authors, not in the time of COVID right now, but before the COVID times, authors would go to conferences and actually interact with other human beings face to face. And we had a lot of authors that were saying, Hey, when I go to conferences, I take bookmarks and I take post cards, and normally I just hand them out, and it's a fun little thing that I do. But I'd really love to be able to give people a free ebook. I certainly don't want to cart a giant box full of books and try to go hand out free paperbacks. But I would love to give people a free ebook. Is there a way that we can do that?
[00:18:04] And so we built a feature called Print Codes that does exactly that. You generate a batch of, let's say, 500 print codes. Each code is completely unique. You go off and you can go to printers. You can use MOO Cards or Vistaprint or all these different services, and they'll actually take a CSV, import the codes, and print you out 500 business cards. Authors come up to me at conferences and giving me their business cards with BookFunnel print codes on the back because they just want to show me, like, Look, look, see, which I think is awesome. I love that.
[00:18:32] And so you get 500 cards printed and each one has an individual code on the back. So now at a conference, or even just if I carry them around as my business cards, not only are you saying, Hey, I'm an author, here you go. But you're also saying, Hey, you know what? Here's a free copy of my first book in series. I think you'd really like it. And they turn the card over, and it's got a little code on the back. That code is unique to them. And once they redeem that code, then the code is dead, and it can't be shared with anybody else.
[00:18:57] So just like the certified mail thing, you can generate these unique codes where you can hand them out individually and know that that person's going to get the book and no one else is going to get the book. And Print Codes is that thing where you can generate all those unique codes.
[00:19:10] Now they don't have to use them. We call them Print Codes because we tried to be very clear, this is what we designed it for, so that you can print them on cards, on business cards, on post cards, and things like that. You don't have to use them that way. You can absolutely hand out codes via your email list or any way that you want to do it, but that was why we built it. And it is neat. I have a lot of authors that come up now and they'll hand me a postcard or a business card with a BookFunnel Print Code on the back.
[00:19:34] And it's always neat to see the authors are out there and actually using the stuff that you built, right? The biggest fear for any software developer, just like any author, right? You write a book, and you may tell yourself, you may tell other people that you don't care if anyone reads it, but you're lying. You're totally care if someone reads it. And it's no different being a software developer. I build this stuff, and I think, Man, I hope people find this useful. I really hope that they use this, because if they don't, I sure spent time developing it for nothing.
[00:20:01] Matty: Yeah. I spent several decades in the corporate world as a project manager in IT, and so I'm very sympathetic to what you're saying. And so did you say those were QR codes that you're printing out?
[00:20:12] Damon: You can generate QR codes for it. So QR codes can be generated from any kind of link or URL or anything like that. We set up a website called GetMyBook.com. And if you go to that website, there's just a big entry box that says, Hey, give us your book code and we'll go in and we'll fetch your book for you. So that code that you print on the back of a card for example, is your book code. But you can also generate a link from that code and that you can turn into a QR code.
[00:20:37] So we don't generate QR codes for you, but there's tons of free websites out there where you can just paste in a CSV, and it'll say, here's all your QR codes. So if you really wanted to print out a QR code on the back of a bookmark and things like that, you would do that where it's like, Here's the link where you can go get your book, or you can just scan this QR code, and it'll take you right there.
[00:20:54] Matty: It would be cool if someone liked to read on their phone, that they could take that business card, or even a little tent stand that you would have in your in-person tables when we can do that again, and you would scan it and then the book would show up on their phone. Is there a way of using what you're describing in that way?
[00:21:12] Damon: Not right now, but it's a cool idea. It would be something that we could build.
[00:21:16] Matty: Yeah. Yeah. I think I saw that at a bookstore, and it wasn't for books, but I think they used it for scan this to link to our website or have an easy access to our hours or something like that. It was just something where in the past, they probably would have handed out a sheet of paper that had whatever the information was on it, but they had thought of this nice QR code way of doing it.
[00:21:39] Damon: I think that's really neat. So BookFunnel, we started off with the idea of, we want to get the book to the reader and the device that you already have. A lot of reader, I read on my phone and I used to read in the Kindle app, and I read in the Kobo app a lot. So the idea was I want to get the book to the app that you're already reading in. And that's great, but we found over the years, in the five years that we've been doing this, it still surprises me how many readers we get every day that have never read an ebook before.
[00:22:03] And we indy authors, we live and breathe this stuff all day long. And so we just can't fathom the idea that someone in 2021 has not read an ebook before. But it happens every single day. We answer hundreds of emails a day, but a small portion of them will say, I've never read an ebook before. How do I do this? And so over the years we've tried to make that process easier and figure out how can we help somebody who's never read any book before to get their ebook as quickly as possible. And as a result, we have our own app, theBookFunnel app, and we built our own ereader into the app. So if you download our app, you can just start reading. If you don't have a Kindle app or something that you already read in, don't worry, you can just read right in our app.
[00:22:41] And then we also built, in that same technology, we built a browser-based reader, a cloud reader, that where you can tap a link and boom, you're immediately reading the book. And then we also did the same thing for our audio books. We started offering audio books last November. So BookFunnel can deliver audio books alongside your eBooks now. I think it would be really cool if somebody could scan a QR code and immediately, because of the browser-based reader, as soon as you scan it, you're reading the book, you're looking at the book cover, you tap forward, and you are just you're right into chapter one. And that is something that we get built that browser-based reader that we have, or the browser-based audio player.
[00:23:15] How neat would it be if you're sitting there at a cafe and you scan a little QR code, and now you're listening to the first two chapters of my audio book. And then of course you get to the end and we say, Hey, why don't you step on over here and buy the rest of it? I think that's neat. I love stuff like that.
[00:23:29] Matty: Yeah, it would be cool if you had a book that took advantage of the locations. So I live outside Philadelphia. All of my books have some part that is set in or outside Philadelphia, but I also have two books that are set in Sedona, Arizona, and soon to be two books that are set in Maine, and it would be cool to find a ... I'm trying to think of what kind of business you would go to, somewhere like a laundromat, I don't know. I'm trying to get somewhere where the proprietor of the business wouldn't care if people started reading or listening to a book, and you had one of these little tent stands there that would say, Hey, you want to hear a story that just takes place down the road? Scan this and you can listen to it while your laundry goes around in the washing machine.
[00:24:09] But it seems like there are all kinds of cool ideas like that, where you capture people where they are at the moment and you make it as easy as possible for them to get into whatever you think is going to be appealing to them because of that scenario.
[00:24:21] Damon: I think local coffee shops would be great for that. Starbucks obviously is not a local coffee shop, but they've been doing it for years where they had a deal with Apple where you could, if you were sitting there in the store and today's free song is this. And so you're sitting there listening to the song, playing at Starbucks and you scan this little code and Apple through iTunes would give you that song for free.
[00:24:41] And every day they changed the song. And so the song of the day is this. And then they had an app, Starbucks would sponsor the app of the week or whatever. So it's like, Hey, you're sitting there and you're having a coffee. Why not play Flappy Bird and we'll give you a free copy of it this week. And the next week it's going to be a different app.
[00:24:56] Obviously, indy authors, unless you have a really big name, you're probably not likely to get a deal with Starbucks. But there are so many local coffee places. A lot of people go, and they sit, and they drink their coffee, and they want to enjoy maybe reading through their news or whatever. If I were sitting there and I saw a cool poster for a book that, like you said, was talking about a book that happens just down the street, that's cool. Yeah, I'm sitting here -- click -- let me take a little picture and I'll give it a read.
[00:25:21] Matty: I wanted to get back to the audio, which you had mentioned. So I have a free short story that I use as my email magnet. And I wanted to add me reading the short story as an extra. So I could say now, if you sign up for my email newsletter, you not only get the ebook, but you also have the option of downloading a movie and audio of me, if you'd rather listen to it. What would be the mechanism for me to bake BookFunnel into the process of making that available to my subscribers?
[00:25:49] Damon: You can upload eBooks and then you can upload audio books and you can upload other media, which if it's short, you would just upload a single MP3 file. And then if it's not going to be a bunch of chapters, you wouldn't have to do a full-size audio book, you could just do it in a single file. And we support that up to two hours. So anything short of two hours, you can just distribute the single file and it's super, super easy for people to download.
[00:26:09] What I would probably do then is I would put it the welcome email of your newsletter, I would say, Thank you for signing, whatever you've already got, and then here's the free ebook that I promised you. If you prefer audio, click here to download and listen to it in audio. And then what's cool with that is not only are you offering both, which some people might download both, right? Some people might get the e-book or audio book. What I have generally found is once people move to audio and they become an audio first consumer, they'll leave the eBooks behind. If you have it in audio, they will absolutely prefer to consume your content in audio.
[00:26:43] What's beautiful about that, as the author, for me, at least the hard part was writing the book. Once you've got the book, getting it translated, getting it put into audio, it has a cost associated with it, but you've already built the IP. You've already built the content. So now you're just selling the content in a different form. And audio listeners are a completely separate audience, for the most part, from ebook listeners. So the way that I would set it up and your newsletter is here's the ebook. And if you prefer audio, you can listen to it and audio right here.
[00:27:13] I don't know how good your MailChimp Kung Fu is, but you can actually set it so that if somebody clicks on the audio link, before they get bounced to BookFunnel to do the download and then BookFunnel helps them through the process of listening and how to do all of that, you put a little tag on their user that says, Ah, this guy likes audio. And we have a lot of authors now that are actually, they have reader magnets up on BookFunnel that are audio, just like you're talking about, short story, novella-length audio that they're giving away for free as they build up their list. And they're now building two separate lists. These are my ebook readers. These are my audio book listeners, because there really is a separation. There's crossover. There are people who might do both, that do eBooks and audio books. But a lot of times, if you give people the choice between ebook and audio book, you're going to find out really quickly which one they prefer.
[00:28:00] If they click audio, chances are good they're an audio book listener, and they will go for that audio book first. And by tagging them and putting them into a separate group, what you're going to get is when you have a new audio book out, I definitely want to tell these people over here about it. Because they have all pushed themselves over into this list that says I prefer audio.
[00:28:20] So I think that welcome email is where you'd want to put it. And that's where you can get a great split, because the audio listeners, they won't even touch the ebook. They're going to click that audio first and, boom, now you know, as an author, that guy is an audio listener. That's who I want to target if you take your data and you go and you want to create a lookalike audience in Facebook, I don't want to get into Facebook ads and all the complexities of that, but you can take your audience and say, I want to an audience that looks like this. But I want to grab specifically the readers on my list who are audio listeners, because I want to target a list like that, so that when I run my audio book ads, I'm getting slightly more focused direction to people who prefer listening to audio books over e-books.
[00:29:01] Matty: Well, I'm clearly going to have to have the same kind of conversation with somebody from MailChimp, because that's another one where I go in there and I'm just like, Oh man, I am so underutilizing this. But I'm thinking what I'd like to do for my short stories is I was going to start out reading the one that I give away, but then I was thinking over time, I might add the others. I have, I think, six altogether, read the other ones. But then at some point, have my narrator, my actual novel length book narrator, do the short stories. And then I could go back and say, okay, you heard me read OUR DANCING DAYS, but now you can hear an actual professional actress read it.
[00:29:39] And that would be a fun way. I think it would be two quite different experiences. I'm not a performer, but I think people enjoy hearing the author read it, but they wouldn't want to hear me read a whole novel. But it would be nice to be able to go back to those people. And the other thing I was thinking about segmenting it is because the release date of audio books is often, you're not able to coordinate it with the release of the print book, you could be targeting people appropriately based off when the release of their favorite medium was available.
[00:30:08] Damon: Audio book listeners, because of that and through no fault of authors, right? If I put my ebook up on Amazon, it's ready within usually, less than a day. They say 48 hours, but really, I've never seen a book that took longer than a day or two. But audio books now, who knows. Three months, six months, one month, two weeks, who knows? So you're right. You can't really coordinate those two together. But what we have seen from audio book listeners is they feel a little bit neglected, because the ebook always comes out first.
[00:30:36] And now, especially if it's a series that they've really been waiting on that next book, it's the fifth or sixth book and a series and I'm a reader, man, I'm waiting for that book. I'm champing at the bit. I want that new book and, the ebook? And the audio book is when? Three months from now, are you kidding me?
[00:30:52] And so, yeah, if you can notify the ebook readers first and say, Hey, the new release is out there. And then maybe just quietly don't tell the people who have segmented to the audio list yet. And then when that audio book does come available, that's when you want to hit those people.
[00:31:07] Because you only get so much attention from people. And if you send everybody the ebook, which is not a bad thing to do, but the more you can segment your list, the more you can individually send the people that want something exactly what they want, the better return rate you're going to get on that. Which is why we see more authors building an entirely separate list for audio listeners, they keep those people completely separate from their ebook readers.
[00:31:30] And this is a trick that you can do. So you're doing it in your welcome email sequence right now, right? Or let's say that you've recorded your short audio and you're going to start putting that and your welcome email. Hi, download the ebook or download the audio book. Hear the author, hear me reading it on my own. I'm not a professional, but I do a pretty good job. Like sell it a little bit. Right? Because some people actually love it. They do love to hear what their authors sound like. Put that into your welcome sequence, but then also once you get that ready, maybe send it out to your existing list and see how many of them who are already on your list would choose.
[00:32:02] Or using one of your other short stories that's not necessarily your reader magnet, so you said you've got multiple short stories in this universe, well, that's great. Take one of those. Do the same, recording your own, and then send that to everybody on your list and say, Hey, I have a short story. Some of you may not have ever read it. I also recorded it myself in audio. And again, everybody who clicks on the audio in that email gets moved over to this list that says, ah, that person's an audio book listener.
[00:32:29] So you can actually take the list that you already have and try and poke a little bit and figure out, okay. If I give you a free thing, which one would you take? Would you take the ebook or would you take the audio book? And if they'll take the audio book, they're probably an audio book first listener. Doesn't mean they won't read your ebook. I know a lot of all the audio listeners that will, because they know the audio book always comes out late, they don't want to be behind the curve. And especially if you have really rabid fans who talk about your books and things like that. I want to avoid all the spoilers, whatever, fine, I'll just read the ebook. I don't want to wait two months for the audio book to come out. But all in all, they would much rather listen to the audio book if you have that available. But send out that email and segment those people and figure out who are the audio listeners.
[00:33:12] Matty: I wanted to loop back to something we talked about right at the beginning, and that is using BookFunnel or these kinds of services for getting reviews. So when I've sent out advanced reader copies, for example, I'm only using BookFunnel to serve up the link to the people I sent it to and make it easy for them to download. So I already have my list of people that I'm sending it to. But you had mentioned the fact that there are our groups, genre and sub-genre groups, that are using BookFunnel that you can capitalize on for this kind of thing. Can you describe that a little bit? What that community looks like and how it interacts?
[00:33:48] Damon: I've seen two major ways that authors use BookFunnel to get reviews. So we don't have a review service or anything specific to reviews, we do the delivery like through Certified Mail, but actually finding reviewers is not something that we've built. Now that said, indy authors are clever people, so they came along and said, Hey, we're already doing these group promos. I already, have my contemporary romance book and I'm joining in a promo with a bunch of other contemporary romance authors. Hey, why don't we do a promo where we all offer free copies for review. And let's just see if we can share some of our readers.
[00:34:20] Because if you've built up something of a list, chances are good that some percentage of that list is probably going to be your review team. And so a lot of those authors are willing to share. What's great is when you find a reader who's willing to do reviews, they'll review anything. As far as they're concerned, I'm happy to give you the review. If you're happy to give me the copy of the book for free, because I love to read and I love to read in my genre. So if you'll give me a book in my genre, yeah, sure, I'll give you a review for that.
[00:34:49] And so authors are using BookFunnel group promos to share, Hey, my review team loves contemporary romance. And the beauty of the author reader relationship is even if you write as fast as you can, you can never write fast enough to satiate all the readers. And especially in genres where readers, sometimes when we see these readers that read two books a day, three, four, or five books a week they're reading.
[00:35:12] And so the great thing is, the readers are always looking for more to read. And as an author, I'm looking for things that I can give to my readers that are going to make them happy. Well, I only have so many books and say you're super-fast and you're releasing a book a month. They read that book within a day of me publishing it and I got 29 more days of stuff that I've got to fill. So, hey, if you like my books, here's Matty's book and it's in the same genre and she's looking for reviews. I love you guys, I love my readers. Would any of you guys be willing to Matty a review. And you'll find that a lot of readers will absolutely jump on that. And so group promotions, authors use those as reviews. They start to build review promotions where the specific point of the promo is I'm giving this copy in exchange for a review. That's what I would really like from you.
[00:35:56] The other way is if you're just starting out or even if you don't have a review team yet, is using those group promotions and then, And so a little bit of MailChimp fu here, but putting them on a separate list. So as they join into your list, you're segmenting them and saying, okay, these are a new reader that, that got my free book through a promotion, so they haven't read the book yet. They probably don't know a lot about who I am, but I'm specifically trying to build up a reader team right now.
[00:36:24] So what I want to send them is, Hey, here's the free book, here's the free short story that I promised you. Also, if you are interested, I'm really looking for reviewers and for people to join my review team. If you're on my review team, you get the books early before everybody else, and you get them for free and exchange for an honest review. So click here. If you'd like to join my review team. And hitting those people right as they come into your list, you will absolutely start to build up a list. And some of those people will, nah, they just get their free book and then move over to your list. But others will absolutely click on that link. And so as you're building up the list, initially, you're also starting to build up a smaller percentage of that list of people who say, yeah, I'll do a review. I'll do that. So you can build that review team using those group promotions and finding those readers.
[00:37:11] And it all just depends on what your target is, right? When you start to get new readers onto your list, what are you trying to do? Well, I really want to sell them more books. I want to find reviewers and reviews, or I just want to put them on my list so we can talk about it, and then I'm going to sell them stuff later on. Or I have audio books that I want to push to them. If your focus is getting reviews, then the messaging that you send out as new readers join your list is, join my review team because that's the focus that you want to drive to.
[00:37:40] Matty: Yep. I'm going to be taking plenty of to-dos out of our conversation here. What of the other services that I wanted to talk about is bundles? So a BookFunnel has a bundle functionality. Can you describe that?
[00:37:54] Damon: We have a lot of authors that have a pretty solid back list. And we started seeing this more and more where, if you have a bigger backlist and especially if you have multiple series, I'm willing as an author, if I have 30, 40 books in my back list and I have three major series that are going on, I really don't care which of my books you get for free. And in fact, I would like you to take the first book and all three of my series for free, because I want you to get hooked and buy all of them.
[00:38:20] And so more and more authors were building up this idea of what they call the starter library, cause it's a really enticing offer. There are a lot of authors that are offering a free short story and their free and develop. Nope. I have a huge backlist. Here's three free books if you sign up for my mailing list. And you're going to get a lot more traffic from people if they're signing up and getting three free books.
[00:38:40] Now assuming that you write all in the same genre or all of those series are in relatively the same genre, then I really want you to get all three of them. I want you to read all three of those series, because I think you're going to like them. And so bundles allowed you to take multiple books and put them onto a single landing page so that once you're signed up, I don't have, Here's link one, here's link two, here's link three. Nope. Here's a single link. Go here and then click on each of these books and download them the way that you want. And then, so that's what bundled pages allow you to do.
[00:39:09] You can also create bundle pages and things like if you have a series, you could create it so that the first book in the series is free if you sign up for my newsletter, and here are the other six books in the series. But you send them to one really beautiful bundle landing page where you put a header graphic across the top, and you can just put a little bit of text describing what it is, and it says, Hey, get the first book for free, just for signing up for my newsletter. And then here's all the other book covers.
[00:39:35] What's really neat about that is that is really enticing. Showing somebody that the book cover of your first book is great. But if I'm looking at the other six books in your series, and I can see they've all got dragons on them, I'm down. I'm ready to go. Let's go. And especially for series readers, that’s a big thing, right? If I'm a series reader, I want to know how many books do you have in the series? And even better for me is the series complete. Because as a series reader, I like to binge books. I will grab a book and if I love it, I'm going to read through the whole series.
[00:40:04] So I almost never read standalones anymore unless the stand-alone is part of a world of a series that I've read somewhere else. So if you're trying to give me a book, this is just me personally, but I see it a lot in series readers, if you're trying to give me a book, that's a standalone. I'm not really interested. I want to know that if I start reading book one, I'm going to have a lot of content to devour. It goes when I fall in love with something I will do and the entire series all the way through. So bundle pages, let you set up an entire series.
[00:40:31] And when you create a landing page on BookFunnel, there are several major types, but really what we're talking about here is there's a newsletter signup landing page, and then there's what we call a sales landing page. Now on a sales landing page, they're not signing up for your newsletter. They have buttons that will take them to the other bookstores, where they can then purchase the book. So you could set up a bundle that says here, click on the first book in the series and you sign up for free and you get the first copy for free. But the other books in that bundle, they are all sales landing pages. They are going to drive you to whichever store you want. Google Play. You can go to Kobo if you like Kobo. You can go to Kindle. Here's the other books in that series.
[00:41:07] But the BookFunnel bundle page lays all that out for you really beautifully, where your newsletter cover can be this big, huge book cover over to the left. And then the other six can be beautifully displayed right over here to the right, but they're a little bit smaller because I want to drive your focus to that big book cover over there to the right, cause a free book is great and people are going to love that. And then by the way, once you get the free book, here's the entire rest of the series. And for series readers, that's really important to know that, A, it is a series and, B, man, they got seven books. Sweet. If I pick up book one and it's awesome, I got a lot of content that I can go through before I'm going to run out a story.
[00:41:42] Matty: I'm assuming that an author could only do that if their first book in the series was permafree on the retail site. So for example, if you're selling your first and series for 99 cents or $1.99 or something like that, then it would be violating at least Amazon's terms of service to then offer that for free through the scenario you're describing. Is that true?
[00:42:06] Damon: So Amazon has their enforcement policy where they say that they have what's called a most favored nation clause in their contracts, which says that if you set the price somewhere else, then you have to give us the same price. The problem is, if the price that I've set can't be set on Amazon, then you can't fault me for violating the contract. Amazon doesn't let you set a price below 99 cents. So even if I set my book free, now you can email Amazon and say, Hey, my book is free over here, and they sometimes will match it for free and sometimes they won't. You're offering a book for free through your newsletter.
[00:42:38] I mean, if you can do it permafree I think that's great. Readers can get bounced to the store because the stores are going to help you out. If you get to the end of a book in Kobo, Kobo is going to say, Hey, you just finished book one. You probably want to buy book two, click right here and go and buy a book two. So they're going to give you that little bit of an extra boost that you get. But everybody in the industry does it. And it's sort of a technical you're violating the contract, but Amazon doesn't let you make it free. So there's really nothing else that I can do here other than just offer my stuff and just see where it goes.
[00:43:08] Matty: I'm very big now on starting to send people to PayHip to purchase my books directly from me, not through a retailer. How would you accommodate that in theBookFunnel world, if individuals either want to send readers to purchase on their own website or send them to a platform like PayHip?
[00:43:24] Damon: So on our sales landing page, which is what I was talking about bouncing people to other stores, we actually built that in from their beginning because I want authors to sell direct. I think authors selling direct either through PayHip or through their own store, through a Shopify store, is amazing. And when I first built sales delivery, I did not think that would be the case. I didn't think that readers would actually want to do something like that.
[00:43:45] But over time what I found is that readers love their authors. They love them to death. And especially as indy authors, they feel a bit of a connection. I mean, I grew up reading the big giants of fantasy, right? Never did I ever think that I could just like tweet at them and they would reply to me because that, wasn't a thing when I was a kid growing up, but now you really can. My son reads a lot of books and he can go and actually tweet at the author, and the author says, Dude, I'm so glad you love my books. And that's huge. That's a big thing that indy authors can do.
[00:44:14] And of course, trad pub can do it too now because we have the tools, but indy authors are seen a little bit more personal, right? It's almost like real sports stars, I don't want to go bother him. Indy authors are like, Oh no, they're in indy. I definitely want to send them an email and tell them how much I love my book. And that's perpetuated by indies. I always put an author note in the back of all of my books, which didn't get a lot of sales, but they did get some, and I said, Hey, email me, here's my email address. Send me an email. Tell me you love the book. I would love to hear from you. And that's something that indies can do that you'll almost never see in the traditional publishing world.
[00:44:46] The sales pages that we've built, we specifically built them with direct sales in mind, through PayHip and Shopify in your store. So when you build a sales landing page, you can say, here's my link to Amazon. Here's my link to Google Play. Here's my link to Kobo, Barnes and Noble. And here's my direct sales link, which can go to PayHip or anywhere that you want. And when that page gets displayed to a reader, there's an icon for Amazon, for Kindle. There's an icon for Kobo and an icon for Barnes and Noble. And there's a big, giant button that says Buy from Me. And we put that button right on top, front and center, with the price.
[00:45:20] And we have authors that do that and say, Hey, you can buy these books on any of these stores, but you can also buy directly for me and I get a bigger share of the profit. Or they will do things like, you talked about you don't want to violate Amazon's contract. Technically if you're offering the same exact item for sale, the same SKU, then according to your Amazon contracts, the most favored nation clause says that if you offer it for 99 cents, then you have to get Amazon and the same price. So you can't say, Oh, you can buy it for $2.99 on all the stores, or you can buy it for 99 cents from me. That's technically not allowed, though we see people doing it.
[00:45:54] But what you can do is you can create a new item, which is, Hey, listen, if you buy it from all these stores and I'm happy to have you buy it wherever you like it the most, but if you buy it directly from me, I've included two free, short stories at the back of the book. And so now they have an incentive to buy from you. And again, that big Buy from Me button is right on top of all of those little icons for the other stores.
[00:46:15] Now, some readers will still choose to go through to the Kobo store because that's where I read my books and I'm comfortable with that, and I'd rather do that. But we purposely try to make the direct buy option the biggest one on the page, because that's what we focus on. I want authors to set up their own bookstores. I want you to be selling your books yourself.
[00:46:33] Matty: I wanted to wrap up our conversation by asking you what trends do you see coming down the pike and if you want to share BookFunnel's development plan, of course, I'm happy to hear that, but I'm hoping that you'll comment on things that people could use existing BookFunnel functionality for, but it's something that they may have been using all the functionality of BookFunnel for years, but here comes this new thing in the publishing world and here's this existing BookFunnel function is going to help support that. Do you have any thoughts on that?
[00:47:07] Damon: Oh, two. One, I think it's fantastic that you're already doing direct sales through PayHip, which is awesome. We built direct sales, and the way that we built it was we handle the delivery part, you handle the sales part. Because you can go build a Shopify store or a PayHip store or WooCommerce, however you want to do it, and we will step in to handle the delivery part once the sale is made. That has been probably one of our biggest driving features over the last couple of years. A lot of people are still joining for group promotions and newsletter sign-ups and that's still the core of what we do.
[00:47:38] But more and more authors are doing that direct sales piece where they're realizing, Hey, if I've already built a fan base, if I've got 3000 people on my newsletter, if I'm already driving Facebook ads, I can buy Facebook ads that go straight to Amazon and Amazon gets a 30% cut on all of my books, or I can drive Facebook ads to my website and I take 95% of the profits. So if I'm the one driving the traffic, why would I drive the traffic to your site when I can drive them to my site? And so direct sales has been a huge thing that more and more authors are dipping their toes into.
[00:48:10] And the second piece that goes hand in hand with that is audio books. They have been blowing up like crazy. Audio books are now where eBooks were back in 2011. They're growing at a tremendous rate and it's an entirely different audience from ebook readers. So by starting to move into audio books, you're not going to cannibalize a lot of your ebook sales because you're actually going to reach an entirely different audience of people who are audio book listeners.
[00:48:36] And as we released audio books last November, we build these things and we say, we think we know why people are going to use them, but we don't always know. Sometimes we just say, Hey, we built this cool thing. Let's see what you guys do with it. And so audio books was one of those. A week after we opened our doors in 2015, and we got the first request for when it's booked from up and live her audio books, like what is a great, we just did eBooks a week ago.
[00:48:58] Matty: Can we just enjoy this for a minute?
[00:49:00] Damon: Exactly. Right. And that's how it always feels. And any author is the same. You know, it's a great book. When's the next one coming. I just published that! So we got our first request for audio books a week after we had just launched our service. And we finally launched audio books last November. It took a long time to get to it. And it took a long time to build it and really perfect the process to be what we wanted it to be.
[00:49:24] And so as authors started joining in to our beta program to do audio books, we saw a lot more authors that were doing sales with their audio books than they were doing the sort of giveaway thing. And maybe that was because a lot of the authors had already been doing short form audio and giving those away. So talking about recording your short story or recording a novella, they were already doing that on BookFunnel. So then when it came time to upload the actual full audio book of their books, I'm not giving away that I'm selling that, but I want to sell that directly from my website.
[00:49:57] And I think the biggest reason is, the audio book authors are really pushing hard, gung-ho on direct sales, more so than we've ever seen a push in eBooks for direct sales. And I think the biggest driver of that is Audible only gives you 25% of every sale of every audio book that you make. If you sell an audio book direct from your website or through somebody like PayHip, which I know Joanna Penn is now selling all of her audio books on PayHip, she has a great video that sort of describes how to set it up. If I sell my audio book through PayHip, I get 90% of the sale. If I sell it through audible, I get 25%. And now we're discovering, Oh, you don't actually get 25%. You get 13%. So 90% versus 13%. I now can see why more authors are definitely digging into direct audio sales more than any of the traffic we've ever had on direct ebook sales.
[00:50:52] We have some authors and publishers that have their entire ebook stores online available, and they do thousands and thousands of sales a month directly through us. Now they didn't pull their books from Amazon and Kobo and all the other stores, they're selling as wide as they can, but, Hey, listen, if you're already here, if you buy over here for me, I'll kick you a free short story, or you can buy it a little bit cheaper from me if you buy this box set, I'll give you the box set and it's going to be, it's going to save you a lot of money. If you go buy all the books individually from the stores, you're going to pay a lot more money. You can buy it direct from me.
[00:51:23] But the cool thing is that I can price that box set at a really great discount for readers and because of the royalty rates, I can actually make as much money selling readers a cheaper box set than if you went and bought all my books on Amazon, because Amazon takes a cut. And it's not a bad thing that they take a cut. But at some point, if I'm driving the traffic, if the fans already love me and they'll buy my books directly for me, I should be the one taking the money.
[00:51:52] Matty: That could be a fun way to use that organic / inorganic division that you talked about because I think that the people who are in your organic email list may be the ones that are most likely to heed your call to buy direct. Whereas the ones that are just finding out about you on Facebook are probably going to be more comfortable, No, I want to go to Amazon. I want to go to Kobo, because I understand that ecosystem.
[00:52:12] Damon: And if you have a backlist, if you have a lot of books that are available and more that they can consume ... look, when I started reading indies, which was 2010, it must've been about to probably Christmas, 2010, I started picking up indy-published books because they were only a few bucks and they had great covers. They looked good and it turned out they were great, great books. I still read those authors today. Some of the authors that I found back then, the indies, some of them have even moved into traditional publishing. Others are still indy publishing, but they are on my direct buy list. As soon as I see them, I will hit that buy button.
[00:52:44] One of them, a fantasy author named Michael J. Sullivan, he now Kickstarts all of his books before he publishes them. And his Kickstarters go in for well over hundreds of thousands of dollars. But that is because he's built a fan base that are absolutely willing to push that button and buy that book directly from him. Kickstarter's just another direct sales way. He was going to publish the book anyway, but he figures, Hey, I'll pre-sell it through Kickstarter and I'll get all of my fans to support me. And then he does cool like special edition hardbacks and stuff like that. He really does it right, and it's really awesome what he does.
[00:53:17] For me, I read eBooks. But every time I see a Kickstarter for one of his books, boom, I sign up instantly and I will get the book immediately as soon as it's published. That's just direct sales through another route. And if a reader comes into your list and they're just reading a couple of your books, you're right, they're not going to buy direct from you. They're probably going to go to Amazon. They're going to go to Kobo, wherever they're comfortable.
[00:53:37] But once they fall in love with you, and we're readers, I can guarantee you right now if I just ask you to list and all that you can rattle off and author name immediately, that would be like, I love this author. I will buy any book they publish. Once you reach that level of super fan, 100% they would rather give their money directly to you and not to Amazon or Kobo or anybody else. They love you.
[00:53:58] Matty: That is great. Damon, thank you so much. This has been not only very interesting, but so much fun talking to you. So please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and BookFunnel and any other work you're doing online.
[00:54:10] Damon: Bookfunnel.com. We try not to be too secretive about it. You can email us there. You can email [email protected] if you have any questions about anything I've talked about or just anything in general, we get questions all the time that have nothing to do with BookFunnel, just publishing questions, right? Like you talk about segmentation, we get email questions like that all the time. And our support people are really, really helpful and really friendly.
[00:54:30] Matty: That's great. Well, thank you again, Damon. This has been so helpful.
[00:54:33] Damon: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.
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