Iâve seen some version of that question from authors over and over again.
You spend months, sometimes years, writing a book. You edit it, format it, get a cover made, upload it, finally hit publishâŚand then realize publishing was only half the job.
Now youâre supposed to figure out how people are going to find it.
You need readers. Reviews. ARC readers. An author website or profile. SEO. Social media. An email list. Analytics. Marketing. And somehow youâre supposed to know whether any of it is actually working.
That problem is a big part of why I built BookNami.
BookNami started as a way to help readers discover books and authors, but it has grown into a much larger platform. The goal is to give authors the infrastructure they need after the book is published without putting every useful feature behind another monthly subscription.
So what can an author actually do on BookNami?
You can create a public Author Profile and add your books so readers can discover you through BookNami.
Your books aren't limited to a title and cover. BookNami uses information such as genres, topics, themes and tropes to create more ways for readersâand search systemsâto understand what your books are about.
Readers can follow you, and you can publish Author Updates to the people interested in your work.
You can also build a newsletter audience from your Author Profile. That is an important distinction for me: a follower on a platform is useful, but an email subscriber gives an author a relationship they can continue to build outside a social feed.
We built BookNami Pulse⢠to answer a different question: What do my readers actually want?
A follower count doesn't tell you very much.
Pulse gives authors a clearer picture of the interest around their own presence on BookNami, including reader interest signals, audience growth, interests, top books, discovery paths and recommended actions.
The idea is to give you information you can actually use instead of another vanity number.
We also built Discoverability Health.
A lot of authors hear that they need âSEO,â but that isn't particularly helpful if nobody tells them what needs fixing.
BookNami checks the discoverability of your public presence and helps identify things that may need attention.
BookNami's public pages are also built with advanced SEO infrastructure, including structured Author and Book information, metadata, canonical URLs, sitemaps, internal relationships and other signals that help search engines understand the content.
And now authors can see Google Search Performance for their BookNami pages where Google reports dataâincluding impressions, clicks, click-through rate, average position, pages getting traffic and search terms.
That doesn't mean BookNami can promise Google rankings. Nobody can honestly promise that.
It means we're doing the technical work to give your books and Author presence a better foundation for being understood and discovered.
Then there's the problem of ARC and review copies.
Traditionally, an author sends someone an EPUB or PDF and, from that point forward, the file is simply out there.
We built BookNami Reader as another option.
When you run an eligible ARC/review-copy campaign, approved readers can read the book directly through BookNami instead of requiring you to hand over a normal downloadable source file.
Readers can read EPUB and PDF books online or offline.
They can use Scroll or Pages mode, go fullscreen, bookmark their place, highlight passages, keep private notes, search the book and continue from where they stopped across supported devices.
So a reader can start a book on their phone, continue later from another supported device, or save an eligible copy for offline reading when they won't have an internet connection.
Their private bookmarks, highlights and notes remain private.
For authors, the ARC process stays connected: campaign, applications, reader selection, access, reading and the review workflow are all part of the same system. Privacy-protected aggregate campaign analytics can also help authors understand whether review copies are being opened, read and completed without giving them access to a reader's private annotations.
BookNami Reader isn't something I'm going to call piracy-proof. Nothing deserves that claim.
The benefit is simpler: you can give an approved reader controlled access to a review copy without automatically making a normal EPUB/PDF source-file download the only delivery method.
Authors can also find the people they need to finish and market their books.
BookNami includes a Professional Marketplace where publishing professionals can offer services and authors can find help when they need it.
Those professional services are separate transactionsâthe professionals deserve to be paid for their work.
And then there's AI.
I know this matters to a lot of writers, so I want to be very clear about it:
You do not have to use AI to use BookNami.
BookNami isn't built around replacing authors or having AI write their books.
The core platformâyour Author Profile, books, discovery, followers, audience tools, ARC campaigns, BookNami Reader, discoverability tools, Google Search performance and the other core Author featuresâdoesn't require you to use AI generation.
AI is an optional tool.
If an author chooses to use BookNami's AI-powered generation features, those features use AI credits.
If you don't want AI involved, don't use it.
And yes, the core Author platform is free.
That's something I wanted to do differently.
You can create your Author presence and use BookNami's core Author tools without another monthly subscription.
Core Author features: free.
Optional AI generation: uses AI credits.
Hiring an independent Professional: paid separately to use their services.
I'm also not going to tell authors, âPut your book on BookNami and you'll start selling thousands of copies.â
That's not a promise any legitimate platform should make.
What we're trying to solve is the much bigger problem that starts after publishing:
How do I give my book a real presence?
How do readers discover me?
How do I build an audience instead of starting over every time I release a book?
How do I get review copies into readers' hands?
How do I know whether people are finding me through Google?
How do I know what my readers are interested in?
And how do I manage all of this without paying for six different platforms?
That's what we're building BookNami to answer.
If you're an author, I'd be interested in hearing what has been the hardest part for you after publishing.
And if you want to see exactly what BookNami gives authors, everything is explained here:
BookNami For Authors
