Who runs this
Book Factory Café is built and operated by Roger Daniel Grubb through Number One Son Software Development, in California. One person, publicly named — which is more than most platforms in this space will tell you.
Why it exists
Authors have two bad options. Sell through a marketplace that takes most of the money, hides who your readers are, and can change the rules on a Tuesday. Or pay a platform hundreds of dollars a year up front, before you have sold a single copy.
Neither is necessary. Storage is cheap, conversion can be automated, and payment processing is a solved problem. The costs that justified the old arrangement have largely gone; the terms have not caught up.
How we make money
Two ways, both published. Authors pay $99 once per book for ebook and audiobook conversion — never a subscription. And we keep 20% of each sale, or 15% for the Founding 50.
That is the whole model. We do not sell ads, we do not sell data, and we do not charge for the privilege of existing on the shelf. If you never sell a copy, you owe us nothing beyond that one conversion fee.
What we will not do
We will not ask for exclusivity. We will not make leaving difficult. We will not raise the rate on authors who already joined. We will not let a machine take someone’s book down without a person looking at it first.
These are written into the terms, not just stated here, and any change to them is announced 30 days ahead with a public changelog.
The audiobook part
Every book here can have a narrated edition, produced with synthetic narration and always labelled as such. ACX will not distribute AI-narrated audiobooks; we will. For an author priced out of a $1,600 human narration, that is the difference between having an audiobook and not.