What we’re building for authors (and readers)
For authors: We help the right readers discover your book. Then, for readers who rate it highly, we identify them as fans and give you an easy way to let them know when your next book is out. Each book builds on the last, making every launch easier and helping word-of-mouth grow without adding more work on your side.
For readers: A private, personal way to track your reading and get deeply personalized recommendations. Think Goodreads, rebuilt as a calm private space to track what you read, keep notes, and get truly personalized book recommendations, like Pandora or Spotify for books.
We’re in beta. This won’t be easy, but we’re building this alongside you. Thanks for supporting us as we build the app and our community of readers 😀.
This month:
🔔 How important is your book cover, and what makes a winning book cover?
👉 Quick video showing everything we added to the reader app and what is coming this Fall.
App updates: What’s coming next? When will we publicly launch?
Plus, our progress this month and what I’m reading 📚.
Massive thanks to our 750+ author members! 🥳
Because of their membership, we are able to build this platform that helps authors sell their book, easily collect fans, and easily notify them when your new book is out.
Here’s what members receive:
♥️ You keep us independent and fighting for authors!
📚 Book Boost Perk: We introduce you to 100 to 200 of the most likely readers for your book every month as a thank you for your support! Plus, we send out stats on those ads on the 1st and 15th of every month.
🔔 New book launch perk: Our Spotlight ad perk features your new book (published in last 3 years) in every new book section of the website that matches its genre, topic, or age group on our 3,000+ bookshelves. Plus, we send out stats on those ads on the 1st and 15th of every month.
🗓️ Open hours every Thursday: I hold 4+ hours of open Zoom slots for any book marketing questions you have. I don’t have all the answers, but I can help with what I know and tell you when I don’t.
Fun Size! 🦥
Check out: The Novel Kit is a final pre-publication check for authors, helping catch errors before readers do, producing useful outputs such as glossaries and style sheets, and benchmarking key aspects of manuscripts against thousands of published novels.
Got a new book coming out? Here is how Book DNA can help.
Got a book series? Email us, and we will add it to our system.
Want to meet more readers? Share your 3 favorite reads of 2025.
Questions? Ask me anonymously, and I’ll answer next month.
How important is your book cover?
I wanted to share this fantastic article on Kindlepreneur about why book covers matter. They took a practical approach and tried to answer what makes a winning book cover.
I do a lot of 1v1 marketing calls with authors, and my advice on book covers has been to:
Copy the vibe/style of the best-selling books in your genre. Unless you are very established with a big fan base, you can’t afford to be different. Some authors hate when I tell them that 🙃.
It has to look professional so a reader can’t tell the difference in quality between your book and the top 100 in that genre. That isn’t hard to do, but many authors still try to do clip-art covers.
8-minute video showing everything we added to the reader app and what is coming this Fall.
The app is coming along nicely, and ~100 early users are giving us feedback as they use it to track what they read (if you want to help us test, join here).
I show off some new features we’ve built in the last month:
User folders
Optional feature to record the format of the book you read.
A way to see your history with that book series or author for books in your TBR.
Smart TBR to find books from authors you have not read before (or have read before).
And then updates on what we are building now:
Improved book and cover databases.
Goodreads and StoryGraph imports are almost ready.
Simple mobile webpage to start.
Individual book pages.
App updates:
What are we building now?
50% done.
85% done.
40% done.
0% done (not started yet).
When will we publicly launch?
We are aiming for a soft launch in late Fall / early Winter. The big items we need to finish are the book database improvement, along with imports from Goodreads and StoryGraph.
Our detailed roadmap is here if you want to see screenshots of upcoming features.
Our progress this month
Our app:
~100 beta testers are actively using the app and giving us feedback. We are aiming to launch publicly toward late fall/early winter. Exciting 😎!
Our website:
135,000+ readers visited the site to discover a new book. We tracked 5,200+ clicks to bookstores, including 2,100+ clicks to promoted books (the actual number is higher due to tracking limitations).
Last year, we had 2.2 million visitors (stats on our traffic, clicks, sales, and demographics here).
What else is going on?
I had a fantastic cycling holiday. I’m physically exhausted but mentally refreshed. Over 3 weeks, I biked 1,149km and 21,789m of elevation gain through the French and Italian Alps. It was glorious 🤩.
What am I reading?
I finished…
The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay: What a beautiful historical fantasy book. It wasn’t heavy fantasy, no big magic system, just an imaginary kingdom based on some elements of our history. I do wish it was a series; I wanted to go deep into the story but Guy loves standalone books.
I am reading...
God of War by Christian Cameron: One of my favorite authors, and this is his book about Alexander the Great. I love it so far, and I love the story Ptolemy is telling.
Thanks, Ben
P.S. From my alpine cycling trip in September 😃
P. S. Don’t forget…
☎️ Need book marketing help? Let’s talk!
Recently, I’ve talked with authors about the following…
Reviewed their Amazon listing for what could be improved
Reviewed their book cover and how that fits in with their genre
Talked about possible outside-the-box book marketing they could be doing
Reviewed book marketing options and what is/isn’t working
Talk about pay-per-click ads on Amazon and Facebook, and what to try.
Give them a space to bounce ideas off someone who talks to hundreds of authors a year and has a marketing background.
I walked them through the full-reader app we are building and how it will help authors long-term. Or, explained how aspects of Book DNA work and answered questions they have about the different formats.
This is one of many perks for members: membership costs only the price of one fancy coffee drink a year, and everything we raise goes toward our mission to help authors and readers (I work for free).
Once you sign up for a membership, you can schedule a time to meet 😀.