How I Built Bookmotion

And how it will grow your newsletter and make you money

Section One

Right now there are three workflows at Literary Salon. First, there’s Bookmotion, which is the focus of today’s article. I’ll not only discuss what it is, I’m going to show you how I made it—because you can make products, too. Once implemented, the product will likely require some ongoing work, but if we can keep that to a minimum, then this becomes a way you can bring in extra income through our Substack networks. More on that shortly.

Second, there’s Radically Independent Author, the ongoing work to organize and revise the material written for Literary Salon into something easier to use and apply to your own situation. I’ll keep you updated.

Third, there have been questions lately about publishing, and I believe it’s time I explore self-publishing wide. I’ll update you on the discovery process once that project begins. Expect to see many posts on the subject.

I repeat: I will be writing about the publishing process soon. I promise.

Now, technically, I could say there’s a fourth workflow, but it really ties back into the first point of creating your own products as exemplified by Bookmotion. You have your newsletter audience, and they’ll be interested to hear about your new venture—but our combined reach creates a greater network. My fourth workflow will be creating a marketplace, a way of cross-promoting our creations. To understand the need for the marketplace, however, you need to understand how the platforms that are currently available to us can help create a meaningful product that will improve the lives of those who use it and provide an income for radically independent authors such as yourself.

Section Two

Until now, I’ve not charged for anything but my books, and since Bookmotion is a paid service, I’m going to talk about money first and get that out of the way.

Bookmotion uses reader magnets to capture subscribers for your newsletter. Existing services which do something similar are Bookfunnel ($100 a year) and Story Origin ($10 a month).

How Bookmotion acts on that premise is entirely different.

Between September 25th and October 10th, I ask that the initial users of Bookmotion feature the promotion page in your newsletters the same as you normally would. It’s not our business model, but it will help us get going.

Our business model uses Facebook ads to drive readers to browse for a free book and subscribe to your newsletter. This has a variety of benefits.

First, promotions that rely on being shared in participating newsletters sustain interest for only so long. Soon, you’ll have to join another promotion. Facebook will always have more people to show our promotion to. It’ll keep running like an Energizer Bunny.

Second, when you’re sharing those other promotions, you’re trusting that other participants will do the same. In my current Bookfunnel promotion, seven authors have not driven a single reader to the page in the 17 days its been running. Their books have earned a combined 103 subscriptions from our audiences without offering anything in return. With Bookmotion, that’s no longer a concern. You’ll promote the page in the beginning, to give the effort a push, but the Facebook ads will promote our books continuously to an ever-new readership.

Now, some authors will contribute more money to the ad fund. Top-tier memberships at Bookmotion will cost more than those other services, but that contribution will be rewarded. More on that another time.

Don’t worry about joining too soon and taking advantage of the low cost afforded to early adopters. You can always upgrade later.

Third, with the other promotions, you’re marketing to the audience of another newsletter. We’re happy to have each subscriber, but we also know we’ll be competing for attention. Facebook ads pull in readers from the general public. When they subscribe, you might be the only newsletter to come to their inbox.

It’s a better way to grow, and for the next 5 spots…
the subscription only costs $5 $6 every three months.
That’s $20 $24 a year.

NOTE: The $5 spots filled up. But I’ve opened $6 Spots.

Bookfunnel has a $20 option but it won’t collect emails for you. They just want you to give your book a way and hope for the best.

Bookmotion: $6 every 3 months for the next 5 subscribers.

If those 5 spots are taken, the next available price-point is $15 every 6 months. That’s $30 a year, and there are 10 spots available.

Section Three

Before I get into how it was made, there’s one other major factor about Bookmotion. Once I open the program to the Whop marketplace, my affiliate program will kick in. If you have a Whop account, you can participate, and I pay 50% for the life of the subscription. That can do more than cover the cost of your participation. You can make money off the program.

But you need a Whop account to participate. Click on the link and sign up.

Section Four

You can see some of what’s possible when you build your own product on Whop. It’s not about coding. I didn’t build any of the parts involved, and I very nearly managed to do it all without spending any money. That would have required a major compromise is my business plan, however, and to remove that compromise, I spent $49. Until I start paying for Facebook ads, I’m not spending another dollar—and that money will come from the advertisement fund.

My vision is the radically independent author, but we can make money in more ways than just our books. We’ve earned an audience, and if we provide them value, they’ll gladly pay for it.

It’s simply up to us to demonstrate the value we provide.

And you can do what I’m about to show you. Each component I put together was no more complicated than signing up for Substack and designing our first publication. You’ve done that; I know you can do this.

You’re creative. I know you can imagine products. You’ve just never had the means to put them together before.

Now you do.

Section Five

This is no longer about how Bookmotion can grow your newsletter and make you money. Instead, I’m using Bookmotion to make the process transparent so you can bring your own ideas to life.

Open Whop. Sign up. It’s free. Like Substack, they take a percentage—3% plus payment processing fees.

NOTE: for the ladies and others concerned with privacy, create an email address just for Whop. You can also provide a pen name. (Stripe will need your legal name.) I’ll get into why I recommend this soon.

They’ll ask you a series of questions, but it’s nothing you can’t change later.

The “What would you like to sell?” menu looks like this:

Community Access: if you have a Telegram or a Discord server, you can use Whop to charge for access and assign roles.

I think the other categories are self explanatory.

Note: you can link to your Substack, but that’s all. Substack does not play well with others.

You can then choose a template or create from scratch. Clicking on “Social Media,” for example, provides a template that assumes you’re teaching people how to use TikTok.

I’m pretty sure that clicking on Podcast will not give you what you need to start a Podcast, but if you have one, already, Whop gives you the means to charge for it.

I chose to create from scratch.

This is what you see when you begin. Ignore the big purple counter. If you can make $500 in your first week, they’ll fly you out to meet them in NYC. Below that, it invites you to add your apps. There seem to be more apps than are immediately available, and I think that’s to keep you from 1) feeling overwhelmed and 2) assuming paying for third-party apps is necessary. My suspicion is that once you’ve submitted the project to the marketplace, then the other apps are made available to you.

You set up payments through Stripe, although there’s a bit more to it than when we signed up with through Substack.

The last button is the Edit Store button which allows you to make limited changes. If you’re used to Substack, you’re no stranger to limited customization.

The small banner in the next column is my temporary banner. That and the name can be changed in the Edit Store page. Below that, they invite you to seek customer service. I’ve reached out to them at least twice, and they are fantastic.

Below that is a menu of pages. You’re on the “Getting Started” page now. Below that is the “Dashboard.”

You’ll be tempted to think the dashboard is useless right now because most of the real estate is devoted to metrics you don’t have. However. the menu on the left is very important. Click on Settings.

You can see that “Show User Directory” is toggled on by default. When your users have signed up and are on your page, they will see a list of all the other users of your Whop, both names and email addresses. I don’t like that, and I imagine it’s only a matter of time before the company realizes that’s a mistake.

I toggled mine off.

If you end up joining other Whops, however, your name and email address may be on display. This is why I recommended a dedicated email address and pen name. The creators behind Whop are all young men—as far as I can tell. One woman on the team could have told them why this is problematic.

Section Six

There’s more to explore, but that exploration will help you acquaint you with the basics. It’s time to get back to Bookmotion.

One difference here is that I have the day view toggled on. Also, I’ve uploaded my image, you see it in the bottom corner. Halfway up, you see it again, and that’s because my face in the logo for Radically Independent Author—which may be egotistical, now that I think about it. Below it is the Bookmotion logo, and those are above the Whop logo because those are whops I own. The Whop logo takes you to their page, and below that are the whops you’ve joined. Previously, the Bookmotion logo was there because I’d used that account to test what Whop looks like. You don’t have to do that. Above the big “How to use Bookmotion” banner, you’ll see some options, and the center one is preview as user.

There is also now a part of the menu labeled “User Area.” These are the apps you’ve chosen to be available to your users. You place the app in a product and give the product a price. In the User Area you can rename the apps and give them new images based on emojis. You can also change the order.

If you have more than one product, the user will have access to the apps in that product, but you can also set certain apps to be universal so that all your users have access to them.

Some of these apps actually do something, and some of them are just shells containing access to sites away from Whop. The last two you see are just shells, and this is where the real process of building Bookmotion begins. Everything else is about payment or general instruction or a chat function.

“View the Promotion” has PayHip.com/bookmotion embedded. As far as the customer is concerned, PayHip is the totality of Bookmotion. This is where they’ll go when they click on a Facebook ad. PayHip has the option of collecting emails when a book is purchased (or downloaded for free.) This part of Bookmotion is basically a communal bookstore where we specialize in free books.

To collect the email addresses, however, you have to integrate PayHip with an email service. Not Substack. Substack doesn’t play well with others.

I chose SendFox because I could set up plenty of accounts, and as long as I kept emptying the subscriber lists and sending them to my members, I wouldn’t run out of space. I ended up paying a one-time fee of $49, however, which expanded those limits anyway because I needed to set up an email workflow.

I signed on with Box.com because its free system is more generous than DropBox. When I download your subscriber list, I’ll place them here and share the link with you.

Back at Bookmotion, the next shell contains a form I built for free at JotForm. That form creates a file for your materials at Box.com. I then use those materials to set your book up at PayHip.

I can talk about specifics in the comments if you’re interested, but I’m already running long. The key point here is how the product is partially automated and partially manual and uses several different providers to put it all together: Whop, PayHip, Jotform, SendFox, and Box.

I’ll stop there, but remember:

Bookmotion: $6 every 3 months for the next 5 subscribers.

If those 5 spots are taken, the next available price-point is $15 every 6 months. That’s $30 a year, and there are 10 spots available.

— Thaddeus Thomas