Lately I’ve been trying to think of ways to help the indie book community. We have a twofold problem: readers struggle to find books they’ll like, and writers struggle to get found. The marketplaces whose job it is to connect readers and writers—Amazon, Goodreads, Kobo, and so on—are flooded with so many books that it’s hard to weed through it all. Their algorithms and search engines aren’t always very useful.

I’ve seen some exciting developments lately with book bundles on itch.io. When you sell on itch, you can group together with other authors to sell a big bundle on sale. Those have done really well, and I think the reason why is that it does some of the curation for readers. Readers who want specific things are able to find them through these bundles. However, there are two main downsides: first, not everybody’s on itch; and second, the price of a whole bundle may end up being pretty high even though each book is discounted a lot.

So I was thinking, wouldn’t it be neat to have themed sales? Instead of a broad sale like Stuff Your Kindle or Smashwords End of Year Sale—where thousands of books are on sale and it’s no easier to find things—we could have very narrow sales with just a few books, but those books would be curated to match a specific theme. Robot books, or dragon books, or disability representation, or what-have-you.

That’s what I’m proposing to start doing, in place of other group promos I’ve tried to do. I’ll set a theme, and authors can submit their books which they’ll be discounting for the event. I’ll make a sale page here on this site listing everybody’s books, providing a curated list each month for the topic in question.

Limitations and provisos

Of course, to make this work as a curation mechanism, there have to be limits on what qualifies. Two main rules:

• No AI, either on the cover or in the text. Naturally, being just one person, I can’t guarantee I will always know, so this is mainly on the honor system. Don’t submit AI books to this thing, or it’ll quickly be taken over by slop and nobody will want to trust the curation.
• Stay on theme. Don’t submit books that don’t match the theme. I’ll try to define the theme really clearly so that you can tell if your book qualifies or not. Since the themes will rotate, you can be sure that sooner or later there will be one that does fit.

I also reserve the right to reject anything that I don’t want to present to my readers: books that are hateful in some way—e.g. homophobic, ableist, racist—or authors who are loud on social media about hateful beliefs. Again, I can’t realistically police this, but if I’m informed of a problem, I can simply remove the book. I don’t owe anybody visibility on my own blog.

Likewise, I’ll reject some books if the sale gets too large: specifically, books that are less on theme, or multiple books from the same author. I’m aiming for a manageable number of books so that readers can see them all in a few minutes. For that reason, I’m asking people not to submit more than three books. That number may change depending on how popular this idea is.

Authors have just two jobs:

• Make sure your book is on sale during the sale period—this can sometimes be scheduled, but otherwise you’ll have to remember to do it manually.
• Promote the sale wherever you promote your books: on social media, to your newsletter, or directly to your friends. I think these will be sales you’ll feel good about promoting, because readers who like your book will be likely to enjoy other books on the same theme.

Upcoming schedule

Here are my plans for the first few sales. Click on the titles to enter a book.

March: Cozy

We will have this sale the last week of March (March 24-31). All cozy books are welcome: cozy fantasy, cozy sci-fi, cozy mysteries, even cozy poetry. I’m asking for books with little to no violence and peril, with comforting vibes. These can include romance.

April: Non-human characters

April 23-30. Non-human characters can be a great way to talk about neurodivergence, civil rights, and other struggles, or simply a fun worldbuilding detail. Submit your books about aliens, robots, monsters, and supernatural creatures!

May: Revolution

May 24-31. Any book which is anti-establishment or focuses on pushing back against an evil government qualifies. Historical fiction would be great for this sale, or consider fantasy like The Traitor Baru Cormorant or science fiction like Star Wars.

June: Queer heroes

June 23-30. This sale will focus on queer heroes just living their lives, not romance. There are a lot of queer romance sales around this time, but I’d like to focus on other genres. There can be a queer romance subplot, but this sale is limited to books where there is a main plotline based on other things: saving the world, solving a crime, overthrowing the government, or whatever.

Watch this space

These first four sales are an experiment: can I get enough submissions to make this worth everybody’s time; will people find it useful for sales; will arranging it stress me out unduly; etc. We’ll see how these go, and if they seem like a success, I’ll be announcing the next few months of sales sometime before June.

Please share this post around among your writer friends, and when a sale is out, you can share the sale page among your reader friends. This will only work if people actually participate—if it’s a flop, I’ll discontinue the project.

If you have ideas for themes I could do, or if you’d like to volunteer to make promotional graphics, let me know! I am hoping this can be a team project. It’s just that standing around going “BOY I WISH SOMEBODY (who is not me) WOULD ORGANIZE THIS” was not getting me very far.

Feel free to email if you have questions, if the forms don’t work, to share your ideas, etc. My email is sheilajenne2112@gmail.com.