BookFunnel alternatives
BookFunnel is ebook delivery for indie authors. Here is everything worth moving to if it is not working for you, what each one takes, and — first, since it is the part most of these lists skip — when the answer is to stay put.
When BookFunnel is still the right answer
- ARCs, review teams and group promos. A large share of what BookFunnel moves was never sold: advance copies, newsletter magnets, cross-author promo swaps. Their tooling for handing a file to a list of people who did not pay is better than ours, and it is most of the reason authors keep them.
- The reader helpdesk is staffed. BookFunnel will talk your least technical reader through getting a file onto their device, on the phone if it comes to that. That is a real operation with real people in it, and it is a genuine reason to pay them.
- It is cheap if delivery is all you need. Their entry tier is around $30 a year. If you sell nowhere but Amazon and just need somewhere to park a newsletter magnet, nothing here is cheaper for that job.
We make this page and we sell one of the options on it. If the three paragraphs above describe you, none of the rest is an upgrade.
The alternatives
1. Inkwharf — a shop you own, at 0% of every sale
$0–19/mo, no cutStorefront, checkout and EPUB delivery in one subscription, on your own domain. Cards are charged on your own Stripe account and the funds land in your balance, so nothing takes a percentage — there is no percentage, because the money never passes through here. Readers buy with an email address and no account, and every book comes with a real chapter sample, an in-browser reader and send-to-Kindle.
The catch: ebooks only, no writing toolchain, and no marketplace sending you traffic. You bring the readers; it does everything after that.
2. Payhip — a storefront for digital products
5% cutPayhip sells anything digital and charges a percentage until you pay enough to stop it — 5% free, 2% at $29 a month, 0% at $99. Inkwharf sells ebooks only, takes nothing at any tier, and knows what an EPUB is. Below roughly $380 a month in sales their free plan is genuinely the cheaper deal, and we say so.
Pick it for: Under about $380 a month in sales, their percentage costs less than $19 — the arithmetic is on this page rather than left for you to discover. Our free tier answers most of it by covering you to $500 a month at 0% with no subscription, but if your catalogue is broader than books, that window is real.
3. Gumroad — a marketplace for digital products
15% cutGumroad is the fastest way to put a file behind a payment link and the most expensive way to leave it there. The headline is 10%, but it is 10% + 50¢ — 15% of a $9.99 book — and 30% if the buyer arrived through their marketplace. The crossover against $19 a month arrives at about $127 in monthly sales.
Pick it for: Upload, price, share a link. No Stripe onboarding, no domain, no decisions. If the question is whether anyone will pay for the thing at all, that is a genuine advantage and 10% of a small experiment is a rounding error.
4. Leanpub — a publishing marketplace for technical books
20% cutLeanpub is a writing toolchain with a bookstore attached. Inkwharf is a bookstore you own, with no toolchain. If you write in Markdown and want the book built for you, stay on Leanpub. If you already have an EPUB and an audience, there is no reason to hand over a fifth of every sale — and, if you want the toolchain unthrottled, a membership on top of it.
Pick it for: Leanpub turns a folder of Markdown into a formatted PDF and EPUB on every change. That is real engineering, and it is why people put up with the rest. Inkwharf takes an EPUB you have already made — by Vellum, Sigil, pandoc, Atticus, or Leanpub itself — and does nothing whatever to produce one. If writing-to-artefact is the problem you need solved, we do not solve it.