124. Interview with BookFunnel creator Damon Courtney, part 2

“I want you to own the relationship with your reader. It should be your website they're buying on, not mine. So they're buying on your website. They're experiencing your process.”
-- Damon Courtney 


In “Interview with BookFunnel creator Damon Courtney, part 2” How To Write the Future podcast host, Beth Barany continues her interview with Damon Courtney where he explains the importance of direct sales with BookFunnel, explains its features. Plus they discuss how traditional publishing is following the independent publishing in the realm of success. Damon also shares what’s next for Bookfunnel!

Be sure to listen to part 1 of our conversation here: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/2024/10/21/interview-with-bookfunnel-creator-damon-courtney-part-1/


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


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Transcript

124. Interview with BookFunnel creator Damon Courtney, part 2

BETH BARANY: 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.

[00:27] Part 2 Intro

BETH BARANY: So today enjoy part two of my conversation with Damon about BookFunnel. And book marketing and be sure to listen to part one. Where he told his story about how he got started in BookFunnel. 

For those of you watching or listening on YouTube, something. I was a little off about the recording. So in some of the parts of this interview, as well as in part one, I don't show up on camera. Just want to let you know.

[00:57] Direct Sales and Direct Sales Delivery with BookFunnel

BETH BARANY: So, there we are, we're writers. Maybe we have some books out, maybe we have a handful like me. I have three series out. I'm working on a new book in my sci-fi mystery series. And now I've got some experience under my belt, and I'm looking at the next trend, which has actually been building for a long time, which is direct sales.

I've been watching direct sales for a good decade, knowing that eventually, hopefully, the tech would get better. I tried to do direct sales years ago with my fantasy trilogy, and I was just frustrated that I took it down. And, that particular vendor I still find frustrating to work with. So I have been watching this space and I know that, and we had Russell Nohelty on, and his show is up already, talking about the future of publishing. And one of those things is direct sales --is becoming viable for people. And I've been watching BookFunnel be in there. And I was just telling my husband the other day, I'm like, look, I can have someone buy over here, but then give them the BookFunnel link and they can go and get it a BookFunnel and BookFunnel can handle any tech issues that they might have.

I was like so relieved. and so tell us more about book sales, tell us how BookFunnel is operating in that space. And any secret or not so secret, plans that you have as you go forward. 

DAMON COURTNEY: So we actually launched the direct sales delivery. So direct sales delivery was the first feature request that we got a week after we'd opened our doors.

And so it was guys, we just got here. Like I spent almost a year of my life building BookFunnel to get it to where it was. And then we launched it and people were like, can you do this? We launched in 2015 and it took two years before we finally launched direct sales.

In 2017, we knew that it wasn't going to be a feature that every author needed. You either had to be like super independent, like you just yeah, I'm going to sell myself. or you had enough of a fan base that you could actually drive that traffic.

But here we are six years later. And in the last couple of years, that has been, a lot of the growth, a lot of the authors that are joining BookFunnel are doing it so that they can deliver direct sales. 

[02:55] the way we built our system

DAMON COURTNEY: The way we built our system was quite simply based on my experience as an author, which was, when you sign up for BookFunnel and you have an account with us, we don't take a cut of your sales. We're there to deliver the thing that we're told to deliver ebook, audiobook, bundles of ebooks, however you want to do it. But we're not actually part of the sale. you sell on a platform like Shopify or Gumroad or Payhip or PayPal, or however you want to sell it.

We integrate with four or five different platforms with more on the way. The idea is that you're going to do the sale because again, I want you to own the relationship with your reader. It should be your website they're buying on, not mine. So they're buying on your website. They're experiencing your process and then oh cool.

Now you finished the purchase. Great. BookFunnel Would like to step in and help make sure you get the book to your Kindle. Or get your audiobook onto your iphone or whatever you're going to do but we step in there at the end, which means that we're not a part of the sale. So the money is all flowing to the author, other than BookFunnel has a subscription fee., But what we heard from most of our authors, as they started to set up direct sales, was they already had a BookFunnel account.

So they were already using us to build their list. They were using us for Kickstarter fulfillment, whatever. They were already using us for tons of other stuff. So it didn't cost anything extra to go and start building a store and delivering sales, at least not on the BookFunnel side.

And we built it like that on purpose. As an engineer, as an author, I didn't feel like that I deserve 30 percent of your money just for getting a book onto somebody's Kindle. I didn't feel that was a fair price.

We'll completely set aside how much of a chunk Audible takes when they send out your audiobooks. When we originally built it, we were just talking about eBooks. We didn't launch audiobooks until about three years ago. And so now. authors really can--, you can sell direct When we talk about selling direct, so most people imagine like setting up their own bookstore, right?

[04:39] Worth it to set up your own online bookstore?

DAMON COURTNEY: DamonJCourtney. com and you go to this big bookstore and it's Oh, that's such a hassle. I don't know how I'm going to set all that up. I don't have the bandwidth. I don't have the time for that. And that's true. And maybe you're not ready for that step. I would say if you don't have a fairly decent backlist, if you don't have at least five or six books out there, it's probably not going to be worth your time to go through that effort and set that up.

But there are ways that you can start to start dipping your toes into selling direct without going through that route.

[05:06] Kickstarter as a direct sales route

DAMON COURTNEY: Kickstarter. Kickstarter is selling direct. It's using a different platform, but it's the same thing. Brandon Sanderson set out and did his four books, and I'm a Sanderson super fan, right? Okay. So I backed that all the way to the top I,not the top. I didn't get all that. I don't like tchotchkes and swag, but all of the hardbacks, the beautiful little leather books that he's got, they're incredible. He put up a Kickstarter for four books that we didn't know the titles of, we didn't know who was in them, we didn't know what they were about, and nobody cared, right? 

[05:33] Superfans

DAMON COURTNEY: Which is the kind of fan that you really want as an author. You want that fan who's just like, I don't care what you're going to publish, I'll take it, right? Which is, when I use the term superfan, that is a fan who's going to buy whatever you write and publish for the rest of your life because they love you that much.

So Kickstarter is a way to sell direct. but it's it's one tiny little thing. You do one little Kickstarter, you do a little campaign and hopefully you get funded and everything works out. And you're like, That was pretty good. That worked. But you don't have to go do the whole store and build the whole setup.

You can, we have a lot of authors that just start by dipping their toes in and just setting up a bundle, right? So again, we're talking about if you have something of a backlist.If you've got one or two or three books out, go write the next book. I wouldn't spend a lot of time on this, but once you have some out, maybe you've got an older trilogy that's been sitting around.

[06:19] Bundle Your Books

DAMON COURTNEY: So rather than just like, Oh, I'm going to go hog wild and build my whole store, which for a lot of authors is the end game, but the short version is, I'm going to take these three books, I'm going to bundle them up. And you've either built a newsletter or you maybe want to run some Facebook ads or you're going to try something new.

And so you say, Oh, I'm going to bundle up these three books. We see authors doing this a lot with their, with their older backlist. You bundle up the three books, email your current mailing list and say, Hey, I'm having a special this weekend where I'm selling the first three books, the first trilogy that I ever published.

And a lot of, I know a lot of you probably never read it. I'm going to sell it for 5, right? And so you're not putting out a whole store. You're just sending them one link. You just send them a link in the email. They click on that. They can go through, they can purchase the trilogy. They can not. You can do all of that without having to really get into building out an entire store of stuff.

I think that most authors, most of the authors that are joining us there, that is their, that's where they want to be, right?

[00:07:15] Direct sales and Go wide

DAMON COURTNEY: They want to have: Damon J Courtney. com. They want to have their domain and you go to my domain and you can buy my books. And maybe you can also find them on Amazon and Kobo and other places. We have authors that sort of do both where you go to their store and their store is the primary place.

So when you click on a book, the first thing they're going to say is add to cart. I got a big button. It's like buying from me is what I really want you to do. But if you really prefer, you can also find my books on Amazon and Kobo and Google Play and Apple Books and like putting all the little, the other little icons down there.

And especially with people that are just discovering you for the first time, they may not be comfortable enough to buy directly from your website. They're going to go and maybe read you on Amazon or something like that, but your super fans, oh, they absolutely will come directly to you.

So BookFunnel answers hundreds of emails a day from readers, right? We hear from readers all the time. And what we're hearing from the readers that are buying from our authors is they love their authors. Like they love their authors more than, I don't care who publishes a book.

I follow Bane and Tor because they're fantasy publishers. I'm on Tor's mailing list, but I don't actually care if Tor is the one who published it. I care, when Brandon put his Kickstarter out. I'll get them directly from Brandon, right? I care about my authors. 

And your super fans, they're going to work the same way. The message we're getting from them as well. I would rather the money go directly to the author and, I don't want that Jeff Bezos to get a cut, whatever. I don't. I don't really care what the messaging is, but for readers and for authors, direct selling, I think is when we talk about really the future of publishing, I think that's, I think it's the most indie thing that you can do, right? There, there really is nothing between you and the reader buying your book. The money is just going right into your account. 

BETH BARANY: Yeah, I am so with you, Damon, and I have been doing what you're doing. I'm actually putting one book up, a week, or every time I send out a newsletter, which is about two to three times a month, and I'm using, I'll throw it out there, I'm using kofi.com, K O F I. com, just because it also has a donation feature, And I'm just playing around. I know there's other platforms that I could play around with, but I decided to... I like this one. So I'm just digging in and, but I love your idea of a bundle. I think I'm going to try that, on my fantasy trilogy The first book came out in 2011.

Yep. Yeah. So it's been a while. I love that you are. All in and supporting the indie author through direct sales, through list building. 

[09:36] What's next for BookFunnel

BETH BARANY: Is there anything coming around the corner, down the pike, that people who are fans of BookFunnel or may consider becoming users of BookFunnel that we can be looking out for?

DAMON COURTNEY: Our audiobooks are technically still in beta, because I haven't quite finished writing the billing software. That's really the short version of it. And so that has been really exciting for us because we talk about the future of publishing and we can talk about AI and people have their opinions on it and some good and some bad.

[10:04] Damon's Take on AI

DAMON COURTNEY: I see it as a tool like anything else. I'm a, I'm an engineer speaking as someone whose job may be completely disappeared, and unalive by AI. The more that I see it, the more that I see that, there is still a lot of room for creativity, but one of those places has it been advancing really quickly is AI narration of text, right? Of fiction in particular. We're a software as a service. So as long as you, as long as you, the check clears, our service is there to help indie authors do whatever it is that they want to do. And all the tools that we've built over the years have really been based on that.

Authors were telling us they wanted to do direct sales and we said, okay, I think we can deliver direct sales. Authors were telling us they really want to do audiobooks. And we said, oh, I think we can do that. And all of these things took a long time to build. I throw them out there like they were nothing, but they took years to build.

But,everything that we have built has been because indie authors needed the tools. And as far as I was concerned, I didn't want to just give indie authors the tools to match what traditional publishing could do. I wanted us to be better. I wanted us to be able to do more. We have traditional publishers that use BookFunnel now because they don't have the tools that we have.

[11:10] We have some better tools than traditional publishers

DAMON COURTNEY: We actually have better tools than they do in a lot of ways. Now they can get your paperback into an airport and Costco or whatever. But when it comes to digital media, they're still trying to figure some of this stuff out. We have authors on BookFunnels that are using AI for narrating their audiobooks because they don't have the money to actually pay. Narration is pretty expensive on, even on a 80,000-word book, you're looking at several thousand dollars to get an audiobook narrated. Yeah. 

[11:35] AI Narration

DAMON COURTNEY: And the AI narration has gotten, it's, there's an uncanny valley, right? You can hear it and you're like, Oh, it's a little weird. But the thing is that what I'm seeing is a lot of people, they are already listening to eBooks on their phones, on their smart devices with voiceover or with an audio companion, that sort of text to speech, right?

Those things are terrible. Like as far as trying to listen to a book, he grabbed her around the waist, you know like they're better than they used to be but they're they were not designed to read fiction. They were designed to just read text off a screen and so they get you know, read and read they don't get a lot of the context.

So for some of those authors they're using AI audio narration tools to create essentially a better version of, Hey, listen, if you were going to read my ebook with a screen reader, here's a better version of that.

And they're selling them at the same price. Like the AI narrated audiobook is $4.99. It's the same price as if you bought my ebook. But for a lot of readers-

[12:33] Audio Listeners fall into 3 Camps

DAMON COURTNEY: What we have found over the last three years of delivering audio is that audio listeners are falling into three camps.

There's the camp that I'm in, which is that I don't like audio at all, and I read ebooks for everything. There is the audio first camp, which is, if you have an audiobook, they will take that first, always. But they'll still read eBooks and paperbacks if necessary, but they prefer audio. And then we have the audio only camp, which is if your book is not an audio, you are invisible to them.

And so the more platforms, the more formats that we can have all of our books out and available in the better. We don't have AI audio narration, to be clear, we're not doing any of that stuff. but the more authors that are getting into building out their direct sales, this is one of those things where they're saying, Hey, if you buy direct from me, I have this version of an audiobook.

It's narrated by AI. I didn't get a professional narrator, but if you really have to have my book in audio cause that's just what you prefer. Then you can buy it for the same $4.99 that I sell my ebook for. 

[13:36] Audiobook sales example - Joanna Penn

DAMON COURTNEY: And, Joanna Penn does this where she releases her ebook and then she has two versions of her audiobook that she has the AI narrated version, which you can buy for $4.99. And then there's the version where she has narrated it herself. And that is the $14.99, like a full audiobook. And for the audio lovers, they're going to take the one that gives them a real performance by listening to somebody. But for people who are like, I don't have 15 bucks, or I really just wanted to enjoy the book on the drive, on the drive to the office every day, I'll buy the $5 AI version.

[14:06] DIY Direct Sales with BookFunnel's help

DAMON COURTNEY: Yeah. Again, we didn't build that, but the tools that we've built are all in place to allow authors to do these kinds of -- As new things come out, we already have a lot of this stuff in place to let authors experiment and try these new things. And that's why I say: We're beating the pants off of traditional publishing because we're always out in front and trying new things. And then they come along after.

Like TOR has their newsletter and they have a once a month freebie that they give away, right? Like a reader magnet. And it's,it's great. I've picked up several new authors and that I fell in love with because I tried that, that free book TOR was offering.

But it's just funny that they started doing that a few years ago after the indies had been doing it for almost close to a decade now, right? so the tools that we have out there are really good. And I love seeing the way that authors are out there experimenting with what they can do with everything that we have today.

BETH BARANY: That's so wonderful. I really love what you're doing and I would just love to encourage everyone to check out BookFunnel. com, see if it fits your needs as an author. And, I want to have you back, Damon, when you have the next new big thing. I think I initiated this conversation because I saw I think that audio was coming.

So I'm really glad to learn more about that. Now I'm encouraged to experiment with that some more. yeah. And I think we're going to wrap it up here. So thank you. Thank you so much for coming on How To Write The Future. 

DAMON COURTNEY: Thank you for having me. I had such a good time. 

BETH BARANY: Thanks. 

Thank you for listening to part two of my conversation with BookFunnel creator, and founder, Damon Courtney. I hope you enjoyed it and be sure to listen to part one if you haven't already. Also, if you have questions about how to build your list as an author, come talk to me. I offer coaching and consulting for authors in that area as well. Of course specializing in science fiction and fantasy. All right. 

That's it for this week, everyone.

Write long and prosper.