Please read about my goals for authors and readers.
Are you making Scrooge McDuck money?
Nobody goes into the book business to make Scrooge McDuck money 😁.
I am here because I love books and want to build something that readers and authors love.
I love reading, and I am passionate about this business.
Every business needs to make money to build great things and be sustainable. My financial goal is to reach $250,000 in revenue annually, which would cover our servers, software, and small team (I work for free for now).
How much do you pay yourself?
Nothing. I've been working full-time at Book DNA since December 2020 and am passionate about what we are building. At some point, I will need a small salary to help pay some of my living costs.
Who is funding Book DNA?
I am funding Book DNA from my savings (more about me and why I am building Book DNA). I started working on the project in December 2020 and launched the website in April 2021 (here is a timeline of our progress and features).
How will Book DNA reach financial sustainability?
We are primarily funded by memberships from authors and readers. That is 100% of my focus, given what I have learned over the last three years while testing different business models.
We also have financial support from affiliate book sales, book ads, and, eventually, some fun reader/book swag I am launching soon. I've tested many business models, and here is a longer breakdown of why it is impossible to earn enough from affiliate book sales to fund the website.
What will you do once you hit profitability?
Keep investing in the website and growing our development team.
Feel free to drop me an email or comment if you have questions.
How do the membership programs work?
Our author membership program.
This is an annual membership of $50 dollars, and 100% of what we raise goes toward building new features (and improving existing ones). I am so thankful to all the authors who have become Founding Members and joined our quest to build a unique indie book platform designed for readers and authors. Without their support, we wouldn’t be here.
What do authors get in return? There are some great perks, and I am working on a lot more.
Our reader membership
We are building a full app for readers, and we've already got readers who have signed up before we launched! Huge thank you to them for their support.
What else funds Shepherd?
Affiliate Advertising
Bookstore partners like Bookshop.org and Amazon give us a small percentage of any book sold (this comes from them and not from authors/publishers). As our traffic grows, this helps to offset our costs.
One of the big reasons there are no better book websites online is that it is tough to make enough money from book affiliate sales. This is because of the low cost of books, Amazon's low affiliate payouts, and how affiliate systems work (they often scrub many of the sales you send).
After testing and gathering data over the last 18 months, I have realized that it is practically impossible to earn enough through affiliate sales on Amazon or Bookshop.org to fund our operations. Basically, for every $1,000,000 in book sales we create, they only pay us ~$20,000. This makes it virtually impossible to fund the project fully through affiliate sales.
You can read a longer post on this subject here.
Comments
2 comments
Admirable. I with you, Ben!
Ben
Thanks Ben, slowly getting there and I expect as we get the website more built over 2022 and 2023 I can expand this page with more details too :)
Please sign in to leave a comment.