BetaBooks Turns One!

Paul and I launched BetaBooks officially on September 1, 2018. Wow, what a year it's been!

Since we went live a year ago we've introduced a few major new features, including bulk invitations, image uploading, questionnaires, a drag and drop table of contents editor, book clubs, reader roles, collaborators, automatic reading reminders, the Reader Directory, and of course, inline feedback! I've also been able to make a hundred or so little tweaks to fix bugs and spiff up parts of the software that weren’t so great.

Whew, it makes me tired just to remember!

BetaBooks started as a simple personal project for my own book which I shared with a few writer friends. From there on out it’s all been you folks, our amazing author community, that have grown this thing by telling your friends. And boy have we grown!

This year we had about a thousand authors invite about five thousand readers to beta for them using BetaBooks. Wow!

More important than that, we’ve been able to make progress toward our real goal, which is to help authors make a living selling books. Nothing captured that better than our podcast with BetaBooks Author KT Strange, who told us how she used her beta process to grow from 30 to 30,000 sales.

As the year has gone on we’ve learned a lot about the challenges authors face, and we’ve got a lot of ideas for how we can continue to improve BetaBooks as a platform to help you all build your audiences and make a living as authors. You’ll be hearing a lot more from us about that over the next few months :)

But for today I just wanted to pause for a minute to say thank you to all of you for your support and encouragement. You’re the fuel that keeps us going, and we really appreciate you!

Cheers to a great first year, hopefully just the first of many!

— Andrew