Why Buy in the Book Shop?

Support female-owned small businesses you believe in. The book retailers have been decent business partners for me over the years. But my books are lumped with lots of other books that might not have the content you want. With Feel-Good Fiction Book, EVERY book on our site is the sweet, uplifting, inspiring experience you’re looking for. And we don’t have to compete with books that don’t have the same content.

Before, I didn’t know any other way to sell my books – but there is a way now. I have my brand-new beautiful Feel-Good Fiction Books website, and I can sell them on my own.

It’s easy to read anywhere. You can still have your books sent to your Nook, iBooks, Kobo, or Kindle app when you buy from me. It’s an EASY, 3-step process.

1. Buy your book from the online Book Shop here on the website.
2. Get an email from BookFunnel. You can also login to BookFunnel and see what books you have at ANY time! Do that here: https://bookfunnel.com/help
3. Send your book to your preferred reading device, but honestly, reading in their app is just as beautiful and seamless as reading on a Kindle app. That’s where I read all my BookFunnel books. In fact, my BookFunnel library gets used MORE than my Kindle library!

And if you’re worried you’ve already bought a book? You can easily search your BookFunnel library before purchasing, just like you would your Kindle library.

Get the BookFunnel app for free here: https://bookfunnel.com/help/app

Own your books! Your books belong to you for life inside BookFunnel. On Amazon, they don’t. They can remove them – even though you paid for them – any time they want.

Scary things happen to authors outside of our control. My story from July 18, 2023. About midday on an ordinary Tuesday, I got an email from the Kindle Content Review team. They told me I had been manipulating and incentivizing reviews on two books from 4 and 5 years ago respectively, and that I needed to go into my dashboard and remove the reviews.

But authors can’t do that inside their publishing dashboards. And I absolutely do not manipulate or incentivize reviews. So I emailed them back and told them as much.

Meanwhile, both books have been removed from Amazon. They are just gone, and I’m out of luck. I can’t do anything. I’m completely at their mercy, waiting for someone to read my email and decide that everything is okay.

The following day, I’m checking my email in bed, and I have a response from Amazon. It says that they’ve reviewed my account, and nope, I’m wrong, and they stand by their decision to terminate my account.

TERMINATE it.

Gone. Completely. And when Amazon does that, EVERY book in the account gets removed from their platform. You may not know this, but authors are only allowed to have one account, which means all of my pen names are in one account. And Amazon does NOT allow you to set up another account after you’ve had one terminated.

Basically, if you get your account terminated for some reason, they remove all your books, refuse to pay you for previous months’ royalties, and you can never publish on Amazon again.

THAT was the email I got.

So, as anyone would be, I was a little panicked, a lot upset, and mostly angry. I had NOT done what they said I had, and they’d given me zero chance to fix it even if I had.

Thankfully, I was able to still login to my author dashboard, and I reached out to a special team of customer service reps, who quickly escalated the case to try to figure out what was happening.

By Wednesday evening, they got back to me and said my account would NOT be terminated; it was an error; they were sorry.

My two books? They’re were not back on Amazon. It had been 3 days.

3 days of lost income for an author is a lot. It’s 10% of the month. They told me they were working to get those books back up for sale, and I should see them in the next 72 hours. They were indeed back on Amazon on Thursday morning when I checked.

But THIS THING that happened to me personally is why I’m selling from this website. And you can support me by buying and reading right here!

It’s safe and seamless. My bookshop is built on Shopify, which many big businesses use to sell things from coffee to prints. I’m selling books! My payment system is powered by Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Shop Pay Payments, which are all leaders in safe, secure payment processing and have been around for dozens years now! All the ways you already know how to pay? They’re right here too!

I can bundle products and offer STEEP, exclusive discounts for readers like you. This is hard to do on retailers, because they have limitations on how many times I can use a specific product, and what I can price those bundles or boxed sets at. On my own Shop, I have NO limitations!

I can offer you the biggest discounts on the best bundles – whole series, BOGO offers, and even cross-series storyworlds! All at HUGE discounts over retailers. That means you save money and still get the same books you’d get somewhere else.

Get personalized recommendations for your next feel-good read! When you purchase from me, I know what book you’ve bought. NO retailer out there gives me this information. Once I know, I can send Y-O-U personalized recommendations for what to read next, based on what you’ve already bought! It’s a match made in heaven!

Some retailers are unreliable. Amazon usually pays like clockwork – though their Kindle Unlimited payment for July 2023 was the lowest it’s been in almost 6 years – and I only see that going lower.

That’s why none of my women’s fiction books under Jessie Newton or any of my Elana Johnson beach romances are in Kindle Unlimited. They ARE on all retailers, in libraries, and on Kobo Plus and Scribd – so those of you who like subscriptions or reading for free have options OUTSIDE of Kindle Unlimited.

If you buy from me, I get my money instantly, just like a regular storefront would. You get your amazing book, and I get paid for it in a timely fashion.

This is not an either/or situation. My books will continue to be on retailers. You might have to wait longer for them, and you might have to pay more for them. But they WILL be there. I’m not removing them. I’m not “going away” on Amazon, Apple, Nook, Google, or Kobo. They’re just now HERE too – and there are a ton of benefits for me and for you when you buy directly from me!

I want to be clear – I love Amazon. Without them, I wouldn’t have the career I do.

I’m just ready to take more control away from them (and other retailers) and manage my business without an expensive business partner who could go down at any time – and take me with them.

That’s what the Feel-Good Fiction Book Shop is. And YOU get books earlier, for cheaper, and you’ll still be able to read on a Kindle app, on your computer or phone, or right inside the BookFunnel app.

xoxo

Elana