123. Interview with Bookfunnel creator Damon Courtney, part 1

“I set out really just to write myself a set of instructions that I could give to readers who joined my list. And ended up building BookFunnel.”
-- Damon Courtney


In this How To Write the Future podcast episode, “Interview with Bookfunnel creator Damon Courtney” host, Beth Barany interviews Bookfunnel creator Damon Courtney where Damon shares the inspiration behind creating the author service and why authors need their own mailing list. Together they discuss the many helpful features the platform has and Beth shares why she has been a long-time customer.


ABOUT DAMON COURTNEY

Damon Courtney is the creator and CEO of BookFunnel, an ebook and audiobook delivery service for authors and publishers. 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. He is also the self-published author of his very own fantasy trilogy and continues to spin stories in his head that he hopes to some day get around to writing.

Website: https://bookfunnel.com


ABOUT THE HOW TO WRITE THE FUTURE PODCAST

The How To Write The Future podcast is for science fiction and fantasy writers who want to write positive futures and successfully bring those stories out into the marketplace. Hosted by Beth Barany, science fiction novelist and creativity coach for writers. We cover tips for fiction writers and get curious about the future of humanity.


ABOUT BETH BARANY

Beth Barany, an award-winning fantasy and science fiction novelist, teaches novelists how to write, edit, and publish their books as a coach, teacher, consultant, and developmental editor.

RESOURCES

Bookfunnel: https://bookfunnel.com

GET HELP WITH YOUR WORLD BUILDING - START HERE

Free World Building Workbook for Fiction Writers: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/world-building-resources/

• SHOW PRODUCTION BY Beth Barany
• SHOW CO-PRODUCTION + NOTES by Kerry-Ann McDade

c. 2024 BETH BARANY

https://bethbarany.com/

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CONNECT
Contact Beth: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/podcast/#tve-jump-185b4422580
Email: beth@bethbarany.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethbarany/

CREDITS
EDITED WITH DESCRIPT: https://get.descript.com/0clwwvlf6e3j
MUSIC: Uppbeat.io
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Transcript

BETH BARANY: 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome to How to Write the Future podcast. I'm your host Beth Barany. I am a science fiction and fantasy writer and a writing teacher and creativity coach. I have run this podcast because I am passionate about how storytelling can rewrite the future for ourselves, for our readers, and yes, let's just say it for humanity. I believe that with our creative tools of writing what we vision through our words, we can help make so. So today I have a special guest with me, Damon Courtney, who runs Bookfunnel. And Damon, I am so excited to have you here today with us. Welcome.

DAMON COURTNEY: 0:37

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

BETH BARANY: 0:39

Great. So today we're gonna talk about list building, email marketing, direct sales and who knows what will also pop out because we're creative people. So Damon, why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners? And I'll just say, I am a user, a heavy user of Bookfunnel. I love it so much. I've been using it for a few years now. So has my husband. And we also have a pen name that we run together. So that's three author names that we're using. I use it so much and I really appreciate all the work you've done to create it. And so I can tell folks that you run Bookfunnel and please tell us more about yourself.

DAMON COURTNEY: 1:16

That's awesome. That means we'll have some really good in depth questions cause it won't be surface stuff. So I, I actually started in the world of self publishing by self publishing my own fantasy trilogy. So I'm an epic fantasy reader. dabble in sci fi, a little bit as we do, but primarily epic fantasy. And back in 2011, when, self publishing was really just getting started, I read a self published book that turned out to be really amazing and learned about this. And then immediately, dived in and learned this whole world of self publishing and decided, I could do that. I've always secretly wanted to. I am the forever dungeon master of my group and have been for like 30 years. And so I tell stories all the time, whether it's just not actually typing them down. So I published a fantasy trilogy. And, as I did that, I started doing my own list building. This was back in 2013, and I was reading all of the-- some of them are still around-- Joanna Penn and Mark Dawson that were still around today and others who aren't anymore so much, but reading all of their blogs and learning, the process. So I made the mistake of writing the books and not thinking at all about how I might market them or sell them, which means they basically did not sell at all. But once I started looking into that, I like this idea of list building. I love the idea that, as an indie author, they're like, wow, I can actually reach out and just talk directly to my readers, right? I don't have to have somebody, some middleman in between. But the prevailing wisdom at the time, which is honestly is still pretty prevalent today was that, oh, you should have some sort of a a cookie, which we later come to call a Reader Magnet, which was a short story or a novella or something shorter in length that you can say, Hey, sign up for my list and and I'll give you this free thing and then, hopefully you'll like that and you'll go on and read my books, right? Marketing, advertising companies have used it forever as a loss leader, a thing that they give away to get you in the door or whatever. And, I thought, that's a great idea. So I sat down to write a 2,000-word short story and ended up with a 25,000-word novella because I'm an epic fantasy author and we can't shut up. And in the end, I really liked it. And I thought, okay, great. Now I got this thing. I'm going to go build my list. How do I get the thing to people? And, it turns out. There wasn't a really good answer for that. I'm a techie guy. So it it was for me being able to send it to my Kindle at the time seemed like a pretty, easy process. But having gone through it, I thought, I don't know that everybody could actually figure this out. And so I set out really just to write myself a set of instructions that I could give to readers who joined my list. And then, Oh, here's how you get it to your Kindle and your iPhone and whatever else. And ended up building Bookfunnel. It really came about because I needed it first and, I've been a software engineer my whole life. And I truly believe like the best software in the world comes from people who were scratching their own itch first. I think the same thing about books. As self published authors, I know that the books that I started publishing were the books that I wasn't finding in traditional publishing back in 2011. When Game of Thrones hit in 1994. fantasy publishers decided nobody wanted heroes with good intentions anymore. They wanted murderers and people that were like dark antiheroes, which is great. I like some of those books quite a lot, but I still, I'm an optimist, I'm a high positivity. My heroes don't always have to do the right thing, but in the end, I have to know that they're going to turn around and do what is right. And so a lot of that wasn't out there and that was the books that I started writing. I was like, if nobody else is going to write it, I guess I'll just go write it myself. and that's where Bookfunnel was born from.

BETH BARANY: 4:35

Wow, that's so great. So we get a little bit about your background as a software engineer, fantasy writer, which by the way, also I've written a young adult adventure fantasy trilogy that will continue. that's great. And to scratch your own itch, that's how you built Bookfunnel. That, that totally makes sense. and you had the skills and the ability to do it. That's fabulous. So for writers who are just starting out, do you want to talk a little bit about the importance of why authors need to have their own list? And I still get this question today, hard to believe, but I still get it. So let's talk to a science fiction, fantasy writer, any fiction writer who is putting out their first book, or soon, soon will be putting out their first book, or already has, and they're like, oh no, now what? And they maybe don't see the importance of having their own list because, oh my gosh, there's all this social media. What would you say to them?

DAMON COURTNEY: 5:25

So the first thing that I hear a lot is, and I'll put myself into this camp, which is, I hate being on people's mailing lists, therefore I don't want one. and that's a perfectly valid thing to say, except that you are not your customer, you're not your reader. And even having said that, there are authors that I'm a super fan of, right? So I don't follow tons of authors mailing lists. But the authors that I'm a super fan of, I don't want to miss when they have a new book out. I generally have found that most of the tools that are out there in the world that might notify you when a new book is available are not very good. Like even when you follow authors on Amazon, Amazon won't tell you when that author has a new book out unless they feel like it and decide that they might tell you four weeks later, I don't want to know four weeks later, I want to know now, and the best way to do that is most authors today, especially in the self publishing world, they have their own list. Now, the reason that having your own list is important. Social media is fantastic. It's allowed us to reach people in a way that we never have before. And you should absolutely be doing that in whatever way makes you comfortable. I'm not a huge social media guy. So for me, that's not something that I want. But the biggest reason that you want to keep your own list is those platforms will and already have changed the rules of the game. They changed them all the time. Used to be if you had a group on Facebook and you sent a, a message to the group, everybody in the group would get the message. And then Facebook decided, no, only 10 percent of the people in the group get the message. And for 20 dollars, we'll send it to everybody else in the group. So it becomes like an extortion racket. Whereas if you have, and then, I've seen it happen. I see it happen every week. Somebody's Facebook page gets closed. They got an email and Facebook says, you look like you're doing something squirrely and they haven't, they've done nothing. And yet boom, their cage is closed. You can go and argue. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you don't. And now that group that you built, you, you like, say you build a fan group on Facebook and if you like Facebook and your fans are there. You should have one, but you should also have their email address so that if any of these other platforms shut you out, no one can take away the email address and your ability to contact that reader directly. And that is why I think it is so important. To me, it's just the spirit of being indie, right? There truly is no one between you and talking to your readers, except sending out an email, which is always going to be an open system where you can send things to people. And the fewer barriers between you and building those relationships with your readers, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

BETH BARANY: 7:55

So well said, and I couldn't agree more. I've been building my email list as a professional and as an author as soon as I could, right from the beginning. As soon as I knew, I felt confident saying, I have a book coming out, or hey, I help writers. So I, I am definitely in your camp. Let's tell the world, let's tell people what is Bookfunnel specifically. a new author for a very small amount, I think it was, the Basic is like 20 a year, right? Yeah. Can sign up and have a Bookfunnel account. so how does that fit into list building?

DAMON COURTNEY: 8:26

So the shortest version is, I used to say the Bookfunnel, like we deliver eBooks outside of the stores and now we do eBooks and audiobooks and we do all kinds of things. We just passed, actually today, October 23rd, was the day we opened our doors eight years ago. this is now eight years that we've been in business and we've built a lot of things since then. This is Bookfunnels birthdays today. so yeah. It's really cool. It's really exciting that we've been around that long and we've continued to grow. So the short version of what Bookfunnel is at its core is we deliver eBooks and audiobooks directly to readers outside of the traditional store system, anywhere you can think of where you might want to use that. So I told the story. When I originally built it, I was building my. mailing list, my newsletter, the two terms are interchangeable, but I'm building my mailing list. And I had a novella that I wanted to give away to people when you joined my list. And, back in the day, people would just email PDFs and EPUBs and MOBIs and just email all that stuff around. And readers were just expected to figure all this out on their own. So Bookfunnel, really, at its core, what I started with was just helping readers get the thing that they got, the PDF or the EPUB, whatever it was, whatever format, and get it to the device that they read on. So I like to say that Bookfunnel is platform agnostic. Let's say you wanted to just, as a simple thing, you wanted to gift a copy of your book, of your ebook to some friend, or you want to, hey, I'll send you a copy. You can do that on Amazon. You can go to Amazon and you can buy a copy as a gift, but it doesn't really actually buy a copy of that ebook as a gift. It actually just creates a gift card for the amount of that ebook. And then if they decide to use it to buy a bag of Cheetos, then, they're not actually going to get your book. And then of course you're counting on the fact that either they have a Kindle device or they already read in the Kindle app or they're on Amazon. Now, Amazon's the biggest retailer in the world. So that's not necessarily a bad assumption, but you don't really know, right? And so if you send a book through Bookfunnel, which we have lots of different features, but the simplest thing, you send a book through Bookfunnel, Bookfunnel doesn't care what device they have on the other side. If they've got a Kobo, they've got a Barnes and Noble Nook. If they've got an old Nook tablet, if they've got a BlackBerry, we still see now, I guess we don't see BlackBerrys anymore. But up to a couple of years ago, we actually did see them. Bookfunnel is going to help them get the book onto their device. We have lots of different ways that works. and then if they have any trouble at all, they can contact our support. And our team is well versed in all of these devices and exactly how to get a book to them. And now that includes audiobooks as well. So when you're talking about list building-- So you can go about it of Oh, I'm going to have this list and I'm going to put this, the link to the back in the back of my books. And I'm not going to give away anything. I'm not going to give them a short story or any of that sort of stuff. If they want to join, then they have to really want to join and you will build a list that way, right?

BETH BARANY: 11:05

Yay.

DAMON COURTNEY: 11:05

It will take a very long time and it will be a very big slog because, you're asking somebody to be a super fan from the very beginning, rather than-- Anybody who's in marketing and I will say my background is in engineering, it is not in marketing, but you run a company and you start to learn a lot about marketing. And there's a journey that readers have to take and that is, Oh, I find a new author, I read their book and I go, Hey, that was pretty good, right? I'm actually reading a new author right now. And I read the first book, I was like, Oh, that's really good. Oh, I'll pick up the second book in the series. Now, the second book in the series was even better. I will say like the first book I think was the first book he ever wrote. And I'm careful of that. I'm a little more forgiving when I know that's your first one. Cause I know my first one was not my best. So as long as I like your characters and I'm seeing some world building again, fantasy. If I'm seeing all the hallmarks of this is, it's a little rough on the edges, but it's really good. By the time I read the second book, I really liked it. Now I'm into the third book and I'm a super fan, right? So now is the time when I absolutely would join your list just to know when the next book is going to come out, but expecting people are going to get there without leading them a little bit is-- You're going to get some, right? There will be some who just love your stuff. And they're like, Oh my God, I can't wait to sign up for your list. It's going to be a little bit easier if you offer them a cookie. if any of your authors have kids, you know that, you can always get a little bit more action with some cookies.

BETH BARANY: 12:27

Absolutely. That's great. And just to-- There is another way. I used to give away books through Smashwords, but it was a little harder. I had to generate the coupon and I had to jump through some hoops and then maybe explain a little bit. And then Smashwords allowed, and I think still allows, you to download different formats if you, the author, have uploaded all the formats, but they don't provide customer support. And as soon as I saw that you, that Bookfunnel offers customer support, I was so happy. I was like, oh, like a weight was off my shoulders and it was easier to give away books. So your system made it easier. And then there is another vendor out there that will let people know of a new book, and that's BookBub. So obviously we can use BookBub, but that's separate. That's not our platform, it's not our list, but it is a wonderful tool, and I recommend all authors add it to their marketing kit. Ah, I just wanted to throw that out there. People are thinking of all the different ways, to let the world know that they have a new book coming.

DAMON COURTNEY: 13:28

Yeah. And Goodreads is still around. It it can be something of a dumpster fire, but like it's still around and it still works. And if you do post when you have a new book out on Goodreads, people that are following you will get a notification that you have a new book out. It's again, I'm not pooh poohing social media or any of these. In fact, we should be looking at all of these tools. You should absolutely be on BookBub. You should be on Goodreads. You should be anywhere where readers might be looking because you don't know where those readers are going to come from. The author that I'm reading right now is actually someone that I have known that I've seen met at conferences over the last couple of years. I knew he wrote fantasy. Never really thought much about it like, oh, that's cool. That's great I'm, I love fantasy, right? And then when I was getting on the plane to fly home from the Novelist Inc. The NINC Conference in Florida just last month, I was actually sitting-- so, three of us. There were three authors that were flying home to houston me and two other authors that I had known, and I actually got the seat next to one of them and I said Hey, what are you reading? He's oh i'm actually reading Andrew's book and he gave me the title. I was like, oh really is it good? He said Yeah, it's really solid. So I grabbed the book and I started reading it on the plane. Like you don't know where your readers are going to come from. So the more places that you can be, that's great. But ultimately, no matter where they start their journey, no matter how they discovered you. And that could be, they read your book, they picked up a copy in KU, saw your book in some free promo on Free Booksy, whatever. But when they start, this is why Bookfunnel is called Bookfunnel-- But no matter how they got into the top of the funnel, you want to make sure that when they get down to the bottom, they're getting on to a thing that you have control over. Generally, that's going to be a mailing list. Who knows? There might be other tools that come around someday that make that better or do it in a different way. But ultimately you want to be able to communicate directly with your readers without someone else telling you, no, you can't do that. BookBub can just decide, we don't want to send those emails out anymore. It's too much hassle or Goodreads says, yeah, no, we're just going to knock it. Amazon owns Goodreads. So Lord only knows what Amazon will decide to do tomorrow. Yeah. and for me, I don't like that kind of uncertainty. I like knowing that I can communicate directly with the people that I'm trying to reach.

BETH BARANY: 15:26

That's wonderful. So I think you made a really great case, and maybe together we made a really good case why even today authors need to have a mailing list, and ideally a newsletter and notify their readers when a new book comes out. That's fabulous. Thanks for listening to part one of my conversation with Damon Courtney of Bookfunnel. Uh, thanks for also bearing with me that for some reason, the video didn't show my face. So if you're watching this on YouTube, there are some technical issues and, uh, I didn't show up on camera for part one. Also this interview took place in 2023. And so now Bookfunnel is nine years old. And I am releasing our conversation around the ninth anniversary of Bookfunnel. So congratulations to Bookfunnel. I am still a super user of Bookfunnel. I really love it for growing my email list as an author. So stay tuned for part two when I will continue my conversation with Damon. Write long and prosper.