"I run marketing…" — your 24 questions, answered.

Yes — it's your checkout and your price file. Publishers use direct pricing three ways: matching retail (simplest, no channel-conflict questions), premium bundles (ebook + audiobook + bonus content at a price no retailer can assemble), and direct-first editions or early windows at full price. What we'd caution against is systematic undercutting of retail on identical products: it invites trade friction (see 7.1) and trains readers to see your channel as the discount bin. The stronger play — and the one the whole platform is designed around — is to make the direct edition worth more (exclusive content, formats bundled, early access) rather than cost less. Note that if you sell any titles under agency terms, your agreements may constrain retail price relationships (see 7.3).

Three, honestly. Marketing time: the channel succeeds on audience-building — budget a few hours a week of marketing attention for push campaigns, email, QR placement in new print runs, and promotion planning; publishers who treat the app as shelfware get shelfware results. Royalty administration: one-off work to confirm your contracts cover direct and subscription sales (see 2.1), and a small recurring addition to royalty runs. Finance setup: confirming VAT treatment in your main territories (see 3.1–3.2). What you should not budget: developers, hosting, app-store liaison, DRM licensing, or customer-care infrastructure — that's what the platform fee buys. No new headcount is the honest claim; no new hours would not be.

Yes — books and audiobooks download for fully offline reading and listening, and a reader's library syncs across their devices (phone, tablet, web) under one account. Reading position, bookmarks and annotations follow the reader across devices. The design brief is simple: the reading experience must never punish the reader for having bought direct — anything Kindle makes easy, your app must make at least as easy, or the channel leaks trust.

Honestly: not on Kindle e-readers — Amazon's devices are a closed system that only Amazon's store can sell into, which is, of course, the business model this platform exists to counterweight. Your app runs on iOS and Android phones and tablets, and in the browser (see 4.13), which between them cover the overwhelming majority of digital reading. Some open e-ink devices (PocketBook, Boox and others) support Readium LCP, and LCP-protected files can be readable there. For readers who are devoted Kindle-hardware users, the practical pattern is: serve them audiobook, web and phone reading through your channel while continuing to sell them Kindle editions through Amazon — a direct channel doesn't require abandoning any reader where they are; it stops every reader being somewhere you can't see.

Both. The branded apps (iOS, Android) carry the full experience — offline reading, push notifications, the home-screen presence that makes the channel durable — and a browser-based reader covers desktop reading, readers who resist installing anything, and the instant gratification moment after first purchase. The strategic weight sits with the apps: a home-screen icon is a marketing channel; a browser tab is a session.

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.

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.

Not out of loyalty — out of value. Readers adopt a publisher's app when it gives them things the general retailer structurally can't: exclusive content (bonus chapters, author commentary, early access — the Innovation page's access/intimacy/curation/generosity playbook), better bundles (ebook + audiobook together at one sensible price), their existing purchases waiting in the library on day one (see 5.3), and — for the right lists — the relationship itself (children's publishers, niche non-fiction, fandoms and faith communities have audiences that actively want a home that isn't a superstore). The honest version of this answer is that your app doesn't need to beat Kindle for every reader; it needs to be clearly better for your best readers — the repeat buyers who drive a disproportionate share of revenue and who are precisely the people Amazon won't let you know.

From assets you already own, in roughly this order. Your customer file: everyone who ever bought from your website gets an email that their library is waiting in the app (see 5.3) — for most publishers this alone seeds the first cohort. Your email list: subscribers get a reason to install (an exclusive, a bundle, early access — not just an announcement). Your print run: QR codes in every new printing turn bookshop buyers into app users at zero acquisition cost (see 6.3). Your authors: authors with live dashboards (see 2.7) promote the channel that shows them their own numbers. Your events and socials: vouchers and codes convert audiences you meet into named readers. What's deliberately absent from this list: paid acquisition. The flywheel is designed to run on owned assets first; ads are an accelerant for later, not the ignition.

Each print title carries a QR code (cover verso, endmatter, or belly-band — placement is yours) linking to that title's landing experience: bonus content, the app install, and an offer against the reader's next action. A bookshop customer — anonymous to you at the till — scans for the bonus content and becomes a named reader in your data. On rates: treat our calculator's defaults (10% scan, 20% scan-to-action) as sliders, not promises — real-world QR engagement varies enormously with the offer's strength and the placement's prominence, and single-digit scan rates on modest offers are common. Two design truths: the QR code is only as strong as what it unlocks (a naked "download our app" earns nothing), and even low single-digit rates are meaningful because these are readers acquired at zero marginal cost from sales you'd already made.

Push notifications (the channel Amazon will never let you touch its customers with), in-app merchandising (curated shelves, featured titles, seasonal storefronts), reader segmentation built on real behaviour (completions, genres, formats, recency), AI-supported marketing email, promotional pricing and campaign tooling. The strategic point isn't any single tool — it's that they all aim at readers you can identify, which is the difference between marketing and shouting. A push notification to 5,000 named readers who finished an author's last book, on the morning her new one drops, outperforms any ad budget you've ever approved.

Reader and event data flows to your existing email/CRM stack, because the app should feed the marketing operation you already run, not compete with it. Minimum viable answer even without native connectors: full data export means your list lives wherever you work. The non-negotiable design principle: reader emails gathered by your app belong in your ESP, under your consent records — see 6.6.

You do — entirely, exportably, and under your own consent records. Readers who opt in to marketing did so under your privacy notice, to hear from you; we never email your readers for our purposes, never share them with other publishers, and never charge you to access your own list. This deserves a blunt answer because the market's default is the opposite: retailer channels give you no reader identities at all, and some platforms in this space treat your reader list as their asset with usage-based pricing for reaching it. The email list your channel builds may end up the single most valuable marketing asset your house owns; check any vendor's answer to this question against their data-export terms before believing it — including ours, which is why export is contractual (see 3.9).

Sales and revenue in real time; reading behaviour per title (starts, progress, completion rates); funnel data (QR scans → installs → registrations → purchases); cohort and retention views; subscription metrics (conversion, churn, consumption by tier). The Data Insight page's framing is the right way to think about it: not dashboards for their own sake, but four decisions per season — what to acquire, what to reissue, what to bundle, whom to email — made with evidence instead of folklore. Completion-rate data alone changes editorial conversations: it's the difference between "it sold" and "it was read."

Yes — promotional pricing and campaigns on your checkout (your prices, your calendar, no retailer approval process), coupon and voucher mechanics (see 5.6), and free sampling (opening chapters free in-app; a free-sample funnel is the cheapest reader-acquisition instrument in publishing). Direct-channel promotion has one structural advantage worth internalising: a retail promotion buys a spike that vanishes into someone else's customer file; a direct promotion buys the same spike plus the named readers it brought, who can be re-marketed for free, forever.

By launch day the app is live in both stores, your catalogue is loaded, and your historical customers' libraries are waiting for them. The launch sequence we run with you: announcement email to your customer file ("your library is ready"), an install incentive for your email list (exclusive or bundle), QR assets into the next print runs, author briefing (and dashboard access — see 2.7), and social/PR assets. First-week success metric is not revenue; it's installs and registrations from owned channels — revenue follows the population. Weeks two to twelve are a rhythm of one meaningful reader-facing reason per week to open the app: a push, a promotion, an exclusive, a serial instalment.

Launch period (first 6–8 weeks): a few hours a week from marketing (campaign assets, email copy, QR placement decisions) plus pockets of time from ops (catalogue checks) and finance (setup — see 1.14). Steady state: the honest range is 2–5 hours a week of marketing attention — the channel runs on the same campaign calendar your marketing team already keeps, with the app as an additional (and unusually measurable) channel for each campaign rather than a separate workstream. What takes zero hours: development, hosting, store compliance, DRM, reader tech support. The honest failure mode isn't overwork — it's neglect: a channel nobody feeds for a quarter stalls, which is why "no new headcount" is true and "no new hours" would be a lie. We'd rather you budget five hours a week and be pleasantly surprised.

Honest answer: adoption varies with the drivers you'd expect — the size of your email list, your print volumes, the strength of the launch offer and how visibly the QR codes are placed. The calculator on this site uses inspectable assumptions rather than guarantees, and at the demo we model the crossover point on your own numbers. What we won't do is dress projections up as track record: we show you the live evidence we have, on the record, and let the inspectable calculator speak for itself — your titles, your assumptions, your numbers.

Match the model to the reading pattern. All-access suits deep, genre-coherent backlists with voracious readers (romance, crime, category fiction). Per-author clubs suit houses with marquee names whose fans want everything, early. Books-plus-exclusive-content suits literary lists and fandoms where intimacy is the product. Focus-area subscriptions suit specialist non-fiction (a subject shelf as a service). Audio-only suits commuter-heavy audiences and keeps the tier's delivery costs legible. Library-style (any N titles at a time) suits broad general lists — it caps consumption economics while feeling generous. Two rules from the Innovation page's logic: subscription must offer readers something ownership doesn't (breadth, earliness, or intimacy — not just a different payment schedule), and check rights before enrolling titles (see 2.2). Start with one model, priced simply; a confused subscription page converts nobody.

The platform's answer is structural, not motivational: the app never starts empty because your full catalogue loads before launch (see 5.1) and your existing customers' purchases are waiting in their libraries on day one (see 5.3). The reader-side empty-app problem — installed, opened once, forgotten — is beaten by the launch rhythm (see 6.9): one real reason per week to return, of which push notifications are the enabling channel and exclusive content is the enduring one. The doom loop the Flywheel page warns about (thin app → disappointed readers → no word of mouth → thinner app) is real, and it's why we tell publishers who lack the marketing bandwidth to feed the channel that the timing isn't right yet (see 1.3) — an honest "not yet" beats a dead app in both our interests.

Generally yes — exclusivity and windowing are standard publishing practice (retailer-exclusive editions, signed indie editions, format windowing have decades of precedent), and offering your own channel an exclusive edition or early window is the same instrument pointed at yourself. Check two things first: any agency or account terms that create price/availability obligations for specific retailers, and proportionality — an early window of days-to-weeks on select titles builds your channel without giving trade accounts a grievance narrative; withholding lead titles from retail for months would. The strongest direct exclusives don't withhold the book at all: they add what retail can't carry (bonus chapters, author commentary, bundles), which gives your channel superiority with zero trade friction.

Far less than it competes with the superstore, and the QR mechanism actually helps the physical trade case: every QR-carrying print copy an indie sells becomes more valuable to you than the same sale without it, because it can convert an anonymous buyer into your named reader — which quietly makes indie handselling one of your best acquisition channels, worth supporting more, not less. Your digital direct sales overlap mainly with online digital retail (dominated by one player), not with browsing a shop on a Saturday. Publishers extending goodwill further run bookshop-partner codes and event vouchers through the same code machinery (see 5.6) — turning shops into channel partners rather than bystanders.