On this episode of Self-Publishing with ALLi, Dan Holloway covers a week dominated by new tools for authors and readers alike. He reports on BookFunnel's new WooCommerce plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites, Substack's rollout of paid sponsorships for writers with 100 or more paid subscribers, and the launch of the Book Carbon Calculator, which lets print-focused authors generate a certified carbon footprint for their titles. He closes with the long-awaited launch of Kindle's Story So Far feature, an AI-generated recap tool that raises familiar questions about training data and copyright.
Listen to the Podcast: BookFunnel Launches WooCommerce Plugin
Show Notes
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
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Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to another week's Self-Publishing News, and apologies if I'm even more scattered than usual. You'll have seen in the news that we're in the midst of a glorious heatwave here in the UK — and by glorious, I of course mean the opposite, because irony is still something we humans do better than AI. I am boiling, with sweat dripping down my brow. It's rather appropriate, then, that the news this week is all about helpful tools.
One of the interesting things about following the news is that it almost always follows a theme. We've talked a lot recently about how platforms for authors, for readers, and for both have been trying to make the experience more seamless, more effortless, and richer for their audiences — to build loyalty to the platform and, if you want to be more skeptical, to create a disincentive for people to click away. This week we have no fewer than four or five such tools. I'll go through them briefly; they're covered in more depth in my column.
The one most likely to interest most people is BookFunnel's announcement that it is introducing a WooCommerce plugin. WooCommerce is the native shopping cart for WordPress, and people who run WordPress sites and sell directly to readers often use BookFunnel as their fulfillment platform for direct-to-reader ebooks. Rather than relying on clunky third-party WordPress plugins to connect BookFunnel to WooCommerce, BookFunnel is now introducing its own direct plugin.
A couple of caveats: this isn't for all WordPress users — only for those running a self-hosted WordPress.org site — and it's only available to BookFunnel customers on the Midlist plan or higher. What does it offer? Automatic delivery of ebooks and audiobooks once a reader has paid, support for free orders as well as paid ones, help with refunds and cancellations, a delivery log, and automatic retries if a delivery notification fails. So for those of you running self-hosted WordPress sites and using BookFunnel, there's now a free plugin connecting the two directly.
Substack Opens Up Paid Sponsorships
Let's move from BookFunnel to Substack, and the announcement that they're making sponsorships available — a list of companies looking to sponsor bestselling Substack writers. Some of the names are interesting: a few you might expect, like T-Mobile and Uber, but I found it notable that Balenciaga is also among the brands wanting to sponsor highly successful Substacks.
By ‘bestseller,' what Substack actually means here is writers with 100 or more paid subscribers. If you have 100 paid subscribers, the new Substack Creator Kit will connect you to paid sponsorship opportunities, should you want them. One thing people seem genuinely excited about: you can use a sponsorship deal to unlock paywalled content for all your free subscribers. You'll typically have far more free subscribers than paid ones, and a sponsor can now pay to have a piece of premium content unlocked for that wider free audience. An interesting development for anyone putting their material out to readers through Substack.
The Book Carbon Calculator: A New Tool for Print-Conscious Authors
A final tool for authors, publishers, and author-publishers: something called the Book Carbon Calculator. This serves a particular niche — readers who really love print. We know younger readers, Gen Z especially, love print, but we also know they're very conscious of environmental and sustainability issues, and print has historically had a reputation for sustainability problems that are hard to skirt around: returns, for instance, which indies tend to handle better than traditional publishers because we lean more heavily on print on demand, as well as paper production, shipping, and the returns process generally.
The Book Carbon Calculator lets you calculate the carbon footprint of each of your titles. I've gone through it myself — it's intuitive and easy to use. You enter the size of the book, the paper quality, and crucially, whether your book is print-on-demand or has a print run, and if so, what size. At the end it produces a number and a certificate you can use to show that your printed books carry a low carbon footprint — adding to the already significant appeal of print for readers who want to hold a physical book but worry about its environmental cost.
It accounts for hidden production costs too, like the electricity used in your home office — and again, indie authors tend to come out well here, since we don't typically run large offices. It also asks what's outsourced versus done in-house. Interestingly, one thing it doesn't currently account for, which I'd imagine future versions might, is AI use. Indie authors who want to make a strong ‘we don't use AI' statement might also want to pair that with the lower carbon footprint of not using AI — though I'll note that the carbon footprint of AI itself is not straightforward to calculate, isn't one-size-fits-all, and isn't uncontroversial, so I won't get into that here. But I'd imagine it features in future versions of this tool.
If you're interested, there's a webinar walking through how to use the calculator on June 30th — you can still sign up. I'll make sure Howard has the links for that.
Kindle's Story So Far Feature Finally Launches
That's tools for authors this week — a wide variety. On the reader side, Kindle's Story So Far feature is finally launching, having been announced more than six months ago. Story So Far is the book equivalent of the ‘previously on' recap you get at the start of a TV episode. Readers click on their ebook, and it asks whether they'd like a recap of what's happened so far, then gives them a quick summary to make picking the book back up more immersive, without having to flip back through previous chapters.
This is, predictably, controversial, since it's an AI-based tool, and there have been many discussions about what happens with the underlying training data — because it's using your copyrighted material as the basis for generating that summary. We had assurances when it was first announced that Amazon doesn't use your data for any other purpose: nothing is stored, nothing is sold, it happens in the moment and is then erased — which would be nice for this heat to do as well.
And with that, I'm going to go erase as much of this heat as I can by dunking my head in some cold water. I look forward very much to seeing you all again next week, when I'll hopefully stop moaning about the weather. Thank you all, and speak to you again soon.
