What if discovering strong indie books were as simple—and as trustworthy—as walking into your favorite bookshop? In this episode, Alliance of Independent Authors director Orna Ross and campaigns lead Melissa Addey introduce ALLi’s new Big Indie Author Bookstore. They explain why it was launched now, how it differs from a standard indie author book list, and how it helps members gain greater visibility and credibility. The discussion also looks at how ALLi will work with readers, librarians, bloggers, and booksellers to connect the right readers with the right books.
Listen to the Podcast: The Bookstore Indie Authors Deserve
Show Notes
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About the Host
Orna Ross launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller’s “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.
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Read the Transcript
Orna Ross: Hello and welcome to Self-Publishing with ALLi. I'm Orna Ross, Director of ALLi — the Alliance of Independent Authors — and it's my great pleasure to be here today with our team member Melissa Addey, who is Campaigns Manager and Bookstore Lead for the Alliance. We're going to be talking today about what I feel is the most exciting project ALLi has had in a while: our new big Indie Author Bookstore, which Melissa has been leading. Hi Melissa.
Melissa Addey: Hello. Good morning. Yes, it's a very exciting opportunity to talk about this at last — I've been living all things bookstore now for months on end.
Orna Ross: This was your very good idea. It was you who brought it to the management team. Do you want to kick off there and say what made you personally feel that this was a good idea for indie authors, and why you wanted to see it become a thing?
The Origin of the Idea
Melissa Addey: This goes back a couple of years now. I would go around talking enthusiastically about indie authors, and then the inevitable question, once you've got people excited, is: all right, and where would I find some of those? And I'd always stumble to a halt, thinking: I have a few names in mind, but I don't know which genres you like, and I don't have thousands of books in my head to offer you as options. I'd mention a few names and not be quite sure I'd matched their interests.
And I thought: wouldn't it be amazing to have a place where there were thousands of indie author books, where I could just easily send someone? Because there is no other place. You can't go onto Amazon and press a button that says ‘show me all the indie authors please.' That's not a thing. It doesn't exist. So it was so exciting that ALLi took that on and started building it. These things take a really long time to build — it's astonishing how long you have to tweak each little bit to get it just right. But what we've got now is a really exciting bookstore where you can search by genre, by name, by title. And I think that's such an exciting thing to be able to offer people as a showcase of what self-publishing looks like today.
Orna Ross: Absolutely. And we should say it's an ALLi member bookstore. Just by joining the Alliance of Independent Authors, when you're filling in your author profile, you get the opportunity to say whether you want to be included in the bookstore or not.
And we have lots of plans. This isn't just a static catalog. There are lists of indie books online, but no list can be comprehensive — there's just too much going on in the indie world. As we speak, indie authors have probably published hundreds more books since we started this conversation. That can be overwhelming, and I think that's one of the reasons why literary influencers — booksellers, librarians, festival organizers and so on — feel overwhelmed by the indie author space. They need this.
It's not curated in the sense of us saying these are the best indie books. What we know is that people who take the trouble to join the Alliance are very committed — the very fact that they're members means they're taking their publishing seriously and publishing to a certain standard. Talk to me a little bit about some of the things we've been planning to make sure the right people see this store — to make it a showcase, not just something that sits unused on the internet.
Reaching Readers, Influencers, and the Industry
Melissa Addey: So we know that readers are keen to read indie authors. On TikTok, I regularly see people say, ‘I would like to read more books by indie authors — drop your links below,' and then there'll be maybe a hundred, two hundred links. But that's just one post by one person that you happened to see. People are trying to find those books but getting random selections rather than being able to browse a big catalog.
So we're certainly going to be reaching out to all the places where we can find readers — on social media platforms, showcasing those books and encouraging people to browse through. We're also interested in book influencers: reviewers, magazines, podcasts. Things like Indie Author Month coming up in April, where every year people try to celebrate indie authors and support them — but they struggle to know where to find them. We're going to be reaching out and saying: this is a place where you can easily find books across all different genres, including award-winning books and all kinds of levels of writing.
And then we're looking at the industry. With London Book Fair coming up, there are publications like the Bookseller and Publishers Weekly that we'll be reaching out to. Beyond that, from ALLi's income survey data, we know that as authors grow and build their catalogs, they often start licensing out some of their rights to publishers. Publishers and agents start paying attention at certain revenue levels. So this is a place where we can reach out to those people and say: this is where you can browse for indie authors who are doing particularly well and might be of interest.
Orna Ross: Great. So in short, ALLi will be allocating resource each month to bringing people to the store and guiding them to find the authors they're looking for. I should also say that when we call it a bookstore, we're not doing any of the transactional work ourselves. What we're doing is providing a link to the author's preferred purchase link — that might be an Amazon listing, it might be their own website. And that brings me to something really important: how our members can build this bookstore into their current marketing plans.
Discoverability, AI Search, and Why Multiple Platforms Matter
Melissa Addey: Ricardo Fayet did a fantastic piece for us at SelfPubCon last autumn about how AI is changing discoverability and how searches get made on the web. He was talking about the importance of your books appearing across multiple sites. It is not good enough for them to appear in one place, because when AI-driven searches happen, they fan out across multiple searches and need to find books mentioned over and over again in different locations. He was talking about how important it is for your book to be presented consistently across multiple places, because the AI then returns it as a credible source that matches the search.
So this bookstore is an additional visibility platform that adds to your discoverability. I suddenly realized, reading Ricardo's piece, that the discoverability I'd been relying on in the past — all about categories and keywords — is going to change. You need to make sure you're on these discoverability platforms. This is an additional one.
I've always had a bit of a gripe about how magazines that purport to show the latest books are actually showing a very small selection, always from the big five, always the same books. But equally, I recognize that we haven't made it easy for them to say: what are the latest releases from self-publishing? This will make it easier for them to select from indie publishing, and I hope to see indie books featured in reader magazines and other places that have previously been difficult to get into. So I think having your books in this store is an important part of your marketing strategy — it opens up opportunities that we previously just didn't make easy for the industry to access. If you want to be in a library, you need to be in the library catalog. You need to move a little closer to the systems they work within. I think this will help with those opportunities.
The Preferred Link and Selling Direct
Orna Ross: In the bookstore we're asking for one preferred purchase link — whatever the author wants that to be. You can put in a book linker or one of those services that shows all the places you're available if you're publishing wide. That is an option. But our research is firmly showing that one link is actually better for readers in terms of avoiding overwhelm. When people see too many choices, a proportion of buyers will just step away — the decision becomes too much trouble.
We're seeing a lot of people using their Amazon link, predictably. But we'd like to encourage indie authors to have their own transactional website. I know it's not easy — services like Shopify and WooCommerce make it relatively easy, with Shopify in particular being a straightforward setup. And just in terms of that indie spirit: we're the Alliance of Independent Authors, and the most independent thing you can do is offer your books for sale on your own website. With BookFunnel and BookVault and Ingram, it isn't as difficult as it used to be. The tools are just getting better and better.
If you're thinking about it, or if you've been resisting because it seems like too much trouble, I'd encourage you to take a look. Speaking personally — thinking about us facilitating indie purchases on indie author websites around the world — that just makes my heart sing. Because ultimately you get down to that close relationship between you and the reader, which is the serious advantage of being indie in this new world of AI. What AI can't do is have a genuine human-to-human relationship with a reader.
Melissa Addey: Yes, that's true. And the nice thing we've done with the bookstore is that you can put whatever purchase link you wish. The last time I looked at the data, about 12% of people were selling direct from their own website — quite low, clearly just the early adopters. Now it's at 30%, and another 30% are considering doing it in the next year. You're looking at a significant change in a very short space of time.
On a personal level, when I last updated my website — about two years ago — I made sure to build in the capacity for a store, even if I wasn't going to set it up straight away. If you're a little uncertain about it, just make sure your website has the capacity to do that. That's the first step. Then maybe just put one thing up — one audiobook, one easy download, your reader magnet. That's how you start. If you set it up like that, you can add as many products as you want. Even if your reader magnet goes through at zero price, the system is still exactly the same as it would be for a paid product. You now have a bookstore open that you can build on over time.
And in the ALLi bookstore, it doesn't matter if you put your Amazon link now and then later change to selling direct. You can just come back into the bookstore, change the purchase link, and it'll go straight to your own store. There's full flexibility to change it over time.
Support, Community, and Collaboration
Orna Ross: The other thing worth mentioning is the member forum. Melissa has done a great webinar about the bookstore — how to use it and how to get set up. She's there on the forum, I'm on the member forum, and other members of the team are there too. The kind of support you can't get with big retailers like Amazon — you can get with the ALLi bookstore. You can come in, talk about your difficulties, talk about how you're marketing a particular book or your overall marketing strategy. That support network around the bookstore is quite valuable.
Melissa Addey: It is. And it's been really interesting to see how different people take to uploading. We have members with huge back catalogs — fifty, a hundred books — and we put together a bulk uploading tool so they can upload quickly. And then there are people who prefer to do it one at a time, which is fine for a smaller catalog. It's been really useful to see where people get stuck, because we've been able to tweak the system to make it a little easier. So far it's been pretty smooth and gone really well.
I spent ages exploring it myself, because you can press a button and just look at all the poetry, then drill down even further to children's poetry. It's been really interesting. And if people can take just a little bit of their time to add their books, that catalog is growing and growing into an increasingly exciting showcase.
Orna Ross: And another way the bookstore can help is by letting you see other ALLi members who are in your genre. It's a big cross-genre catalog, but the search-by-genre function means you can find who else is writing in your area. It's not always easy to find that out — you can see the top sellers in the Amazon or Kobo rankings, but as you go down the list it gets harder. Through this, members will be able to identify potential collaborators in their genre and reach out through the forum.
We also categorize our membership — author-publishers at different stages — so people can find others at their own level. Associate members can see: as soon as I publish my book, I'm going to be on there. It gives an incentive and reinforces that you're not alone trying to publish your first book — you can have conversations with the author-entrepreneurs who have been there and done that. I think the bookstore will allow a focus on that in a different way than we've had before.
Melissa Addey: Yes. And I think one of the nice things is that we've always said: another author who writes in your genre is not competition — they are your ally. They are someone you can work with really well on newsletter swaps and other collaborations.
I've found all authors very generous with their time regardless of how they're published. But I've noticed something interesting: when I've reached out to indie authors about newsletter swaps, they're usually very willing and have all the marketing tools in place, because indie authors know the marketing is down to them. When I've reached out to traditionally published authors, they're often kind and generous and willing — but they don't always have those tools in place. Sometimes they don't have a newsletter. Sometimes they don't even have a website, because they've relied on everything coming from the publisher. And I always think: that's lovely, as long as it's going well. But one day if you part ways with that publisher, where is your footprint? Where's your website? Where's your newsletter? Where are the readers you've kept on a mailing list?
So I think it will be a great opportunity to look at the bookstore and say: within my genre, who is there? I know they're all indie authors — who could I reach out to for group promotions? That's a really nice thing to be able to do.
How to Get Your Books in the Bookstore
Orna Ross: Fantastic. So we're available for questions about the bookstore. Tell people where to find out more, and how to get in touch with you if they have questions, comments, or feedback.
Melissa Addey: Absolutely. It's bookstore.allianceindependentauthors.org. Go in there, have a browse, and have a look around. If you're a member, please make sure you're adding all of your books and updating any entries that are a little out of date — if you've changed a cover, for example, make sure it's looking its best.
To do that, log into the main ALLi page — your login is on the top right — and then look at the top left for your profile. All the instructions are there, and there's a video of me walking you through every step. If anyone gets stuck or has any questions, please drop me a line at [email protected]. I'm always very happy to work through whatever you need help with and get all your books up there.
Orna Ross: Huge, huge, huge thank you to you, Melissa, for the idea and for your enthusiasm and passion for this project. It really is fabulous.
Melissa Addey: Well, thank you to ALLi for picking it up and making it a real thing.
Orna Ross: It really is good. We look forward to lots of exciting things happening for our members from this project. Off you go and enjoy the big Indie Author Bookstore. Until next time — happy writing and happy publishing. Bye-bye.
