I published on KDP. One day the account was gone — no explanation I could do anything with, nobody to call. The readers went with it. I never had their email addresses in the first place; Amazon doesn’t give you those.
Back when they were paying me, they took too much. Amazon pays 40% on an AI-narrated audiobook, and only if they invite you into the beta at all. Audible won’t accept an AI narration you made yourself — a human narrator runs about $4,000. Books.by wants $299 a year. Everyone in this business charges too much and hands back too little.
So I built the one I wanted. $49 once per book — ebook and audiobook together. You keep 80%, paid every Friday. No subscription, no exclusivity, and your files and your reader list download any time you like, including the day you decide to leave.
— Roger Grubb, Number One Son Software Development. Every number above is sourced on this page. Check me.
Books.by charges $299 a year, every year, and sells no audiobooks at all. We charge once, for the ebook and the audiobook together, then never again for that book.
We show an author the exact chapter readers put the book down at. No storefront can — they never see the reading happen, only the receipt.
Reader names and emails are yours, exportable as a CSV any time, with no exclusivity and nothing to cancel. Sell here and on Amazon the same day.
New release · Out now
A radical summer of reinvention, redemption, and really good wine.
“He told me he loved me while he was still inside someone else. That’s not poetic. That’s Silicon Valley on a Tuesday.”Chapter one, first line
37 chapters4:29 audiobook36,905 words DRM-free
Read chapter one freeListen to chapter oneBuy the book — $4.99
Every claim below is one you can check on this site in the next five minutes — open a book, press play, read the terms. We would rather you verified than believed us.
Send a manuscript and get a narrated edition back — 50+ voices, a different voice per character, or your own cloned voice. Amazon KDP and Books.by make none. ACX won’t accept an AI narration you made yourself.
We went and counted: 56 Books.by stores, 889 books, zero audiobooks. One of those stores is a publisher with the word “Audio” in its name, selling paperback only.
Not "the book underperformed" — the page that lost them. No storefront can show you this, because none of them host the reading. They see the receipt; we see the room.
Example curve — we have four authors and no sales yet, and we will not draw you a dashboard we cannot fill.
Those are Books.by’s own published figures. Their headline says 100% royalties; their FAQ says the average author receives 38%, because printing eats the rest. We take 15% of a sale and nothing at all when there is no sale.
Figures quoted from books.by on 28 July 2026.
Books.by has no shelf of its own — no browse, no search, no page anywhere that lists books across authors. Their FAQ tells authors to "send all your personal traffic" to their store. Discovery is rented from Google, one author at a time. Here, every book sits on a public shelf where strangers already are.
Checked 29 July 2026: books.by/authors returns 404 and no catalogue page exists. They do rank well in search — that is real, and it is rented.
Names, emails, and what each of them actually read — exportable as a CSV whenever you like, with nobody’s permission. No exclusivity. Sell here and on Amazon the same day.
No signup, no email wall, no app to install. Read it or hear it, then decide. It is how books have always sold, and it is the only honest way to ask a stranger for money.
Not 60 days. Not 90. Weekly, through Stripe, to your own bank account — with the ledger open so you can see exactly what a sale earned and what it cost.
| Book Factory | Amazon KDP | Audible/ACX | Curios | Books.by | Narratory | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Makes your audiobook for you (AI, 50+ voices, casting) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Ebook + audiobook from one upload | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 80%+ royalty to the author | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Paid weekly | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ◐ | ◐ | ✗ |
| Author gets reader names & emails | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ◐ | ✗ |
| Promo kit, referral rewards, cross-promo | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
Plenty of us do both — read on the couch, write at the desk. So there aren't two kinds of accounts here. Sign in once; whenever you're ready to publish, the Author's Desk is already yours. Nothing to upgrade, no second signup.
Here's the truth no platform tells authors: nobody knows if a book is any good until strangers pay for it. Our whole job is making strangers hyper-available to your first chapter — free, no signup, one tap from anywhere on earth. If your prose is good, they'll buy, and you'll keep 80%. If it reads like slop, nothing on earth sells it — not ads, not algorithms, not us. We don't promise sales. We promise readers within arm's reach, and a fair split the moment your writing earns them.
Book Factory Café is not an Amazon storefront, not an app in Apple's store, and not distributed through ACX. That is a decision, not a limitation — and it is the reason everything below is possible.
It runs in your browser, on any phone. Add it to your home screen and it behaves like an app — without an app store taking a cut of every book, or deciding what is allowed on the shelf.
The whole first chapter of every book is free, and we do not ask who you are first. No ads. No trackers following you around the web. No reader data sold to anyone, because that is not how we make money.
DRM-free, always. What you buy is a file you keep, readable anywhere, on any device, for as long as you like. Nothing here stops working because a company changed its mind.
No exclusivity, ever. Your readers are yours and export with you. Publish here and anywhere else on the same day — we will never ask you to delist.
ACX will not distribute AI-narrated audiobooks. We will. Every book here can have a narrated edition, labelled honestly so listeners know exactly what they are getting.
Public, versioned terms with a changelog. Thirty days notice before anything changes, and changes apply only to new signups. A person reviews before anything is ever taken down.
Every platform between a writer and a reader takes a cut, sets the rules, and keeps the customer. We built the one that does none of those things.
No annual fee. No exclusivity. $49 once per book for a finished ebook and a fully narrated audiobook — then never again for that book.
Books.by charges $299 a year, forever — and sells no audiobooks at all. Hiring a narrator yourself? Upwork and ACX rates run $200–$400 per finished hour — $1,000–$4,000 for one book, after weeks of auditions, contracts, and retake emails. Three complete books with us — audiobooks included — costs $297, once.
