Catalogue, Migration & Selling Channels

You point us at your catalogue — ONIX feed, storefront export, or spreadsheet plus files — and ingestion, format validation and library setup happen during onboarding as part of the Launch & Onboarding Package. EPUB files are validated on the way in (broken files diagnosed and flagged back to you, not silently shipped), metadata is mapped from your existing records, and the "weeks, not quarters" launch timeline on our How It Works page includes catalogue load for typical mid-size lists. Day one, your app opens with your full catalogue — the "never starts empty" principle — because an app that launches thin trains its first users to never return.

Standard ONIX is the happy path: title, contributors, descriptions, pricing, rights territories, subjects and assets map from your existing feed, and ongoing changes flow through on the same feed rather than a second data-entry burden. If you don't run ONIX, structured exports work. The design principle: your existing metadata operation should feed the direct channel automatically — a channel that demands parallel data entry gets abandoned by month three, and we'd rather engineer against that than exhort against it.

Purchases made through your connected storefront — including historical orders — sync into the reader's app library on day one: a customer who bought ebooks from your website over the past five years signs in and finds them waiting. That's the "never starts empty" mechanism at the individual reader level, and it converts your existing customer file into your app's founding population. Purchases made at other retailers (Amazon, Kobo) can't be verified or imported — no platform can honestly promise that — but the QR-in-print mechanism (see 6.3) exists precisely to give those anonymous trade buyers a reason to appear in your channel with their next action.

Your website connects during onboarding: orders flow to the reader's app library automatically, catalogue and pricing stay in sync, and your checkout remains exactly where your customers already trust it. Common platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce use pre-built connectors; custom and legacy sites connect via API — common and custom integrations are all within reach. The point of integrating rather than replacing: you've already paid — in money and SEO and customer habit — for a working website; a platform that demands you abandon it is charging you twice.

Yes — that's the design. Checkout on your terms means the four routes (your web checkout, in-app purchase, offline/point-of-sale, and gift vouchers/access codes) are a mix you choose and can rebalance, not a decision you make once at gunpoint. Typical pattern: web checkout carries the volume (0% platform fee), in-app purchase serves impulse and convenience where its margin cost is justified, vouchers and codes serve gifting, events and B2B, and offline/POS turns festival stands and launch events into app-acquisition moments. All four routes land content in the same reader library and the same ledger — one customer, one library, however they paid.

Yes: gift vouchers for consumer gifting, access codes for review copies, influencer campaigns, prize fulfilment and corporate gifting, and bulk code batches for institutional and B2B sales. Codes are more strategically interesting than they look: every redeemed code converts an anonymous recipient into a named reader in your data, which makes vouchers simultaneously a revenue product and an acquisition channel. Review-copy distribution through codes also replaces emailing unprotected PDFs to strangers — your publicity team's most cherished piracy tradition.

Pre-orders through your storefront flow through like any order, with content unlocking on publication day — and unlike retail pre-orders, you keep the customer relationship from the moment of the order, not the moment of delivery. Serialised release — chapters or episodes unlocking over time — is native territory for a platform with courses and structured content, and it pairs naturally with subscriptions (a serial is a retention engine). If serialisation matters to your list, raise it at the demo and we'll show the current state honestly.

No per-gigabyte surprises: hosting, streaming and download delivery are included in the platform fee. This is worth asking every vendor in this market, because audio delivery costs real money and some pricing models pass it through as usage fees that only appear when your audiobook programme succeeds. Flat and predictable is the design principle of our fee generally; audio is where that principle earns its keep.