Sergiy Grushko is the co-owner and chief executive officer of booknet.com, an international literary platform and social media network. Almost all Booknet content is self-published e-books. Though there are many similar projects, Booknet has been persistently promoting its own book-selling model called Bookscription. In this interview Sergiy talks us through Bookscription and its features, as well as the success of Booknet in Eastern Europe and Latin America, and plans for the UK market.

In a nutshell, what is the aim of Booknet? 

Booknet is, first of all, a number of personal pages where authors publish their stories, blogs, and gather their readers/subscribers. At the same time, we have to understand that, unlike a website, on Booknet the author’s books are recommended to the audience via commercial widgets and book recommendations. Essentially, Booknet is a literary YouTube. If the author is popular, has a lot of subscribers and publishes books on a regular basis, they can sell their creative works right on Booknet and develop a revenue stream from their writing.

One more peculiarity that should be mentioned is that Booknet offers a unique book-selling model, which we named ‘Bookscription’. What exactly is this sales concept? Well, everyone who has ever come across self-publishing knows that myriad platforms (Wattpad, for instance) offer the opportunity to publish books part-by-part building up more and more episodes and chapters.

We have decided to monetise such book publications. Even seven years ago, when we launched the first language version of our platform, we decided to forego the so-called pay-for-every-new-chapter model, as it was not designed to provide readers with interesting and captivating literature, but rather to provide an author with an opportunity to create as long a story as possible, as they are financially incentivised to write (and therefore sell) as many chapters as they can.

We have created a model where readers pay for a story just once in order to become a follower with the opportunity to read each new episode as soon as it is published by the author. That means that the author sells their book (of a standard amount of pages) at a standard book price, and they receive money even before the book is complete. On the other hand, the readers get an opportunity to be among those who are the first to read the book.

Our model proved to be highly efficient. For instance, in our Spanish-language version, the author makes the same amount of money by selling their ebook via the Bookscription model for two to three months, as they would by selling the same ebook in its complete form for one to two years afterwards.

What was your inspiration for setting up this platform, and what are some of the challenges you’ve faced along the way?

We have seen the popularity of platforms where authors publish their books chapter by chapter. We have witnessed a keen interest from the readers in reading ebooks in that way. Once complete, such books did not set the selling records on Amazon and other Internet bookstores, because the readers have already read the book as it was being published online. 

Bookscription also protects books against piracy to a great extent, as pirates tend to publish only complete ebooks, and in our case the book is already being sold via the Bookscription model (chapter by chapter) while being not yet available on the Internet as a whole. 

Can you describe the processes a book goes through before it goes live on the platform?

The process is simple. An author registers as a user, then publish the first chapter of their book, and that is the first step done! Their book has already got a couple of readers: think YouTube. Their first readers are likely to be the subscribers they have invited from their social media: for instance, by announcing that they have started writing a book on Twitter or Facebook and linking straight to their Booknet page. New readers, who find this book by searching by genres, bestseller lists, etc. are likely to come and follow as well, with followers growing as the momentum and author brand grows.

Some authors become famous on Booknet once they have published two to three books. Others can publish dozens of books but remain unable to capture readers’ attentions for longer than it takes them to read through the first chapter. It all depends on the author’s ability to write a captivating, engaging and page-turning story.

Which genres have proved most successful on Booknet, and what trends do you foresee over the next year or so? 

As far as we know, the most active readers are women, aged 25+, and as such the leading genres are usually those typically most favoured by such a readership depending on the territory. For example, in Latin America, erotic and romantic fiction is hugely popular; in Eastern Europe fantasy fiction is the leading genre.

Do you feel that the traditional publishing industry is missing out on key genres or audiences that Booknet serves?

The traditional publishing industry is not able to move quickly to react to trends and audience habits. The typical users of Booknet (and other self-publishing platforms) are avid readers who usually read five or more books a month. Let’s suppose you are a ‘vampire’ books buff – it’s likely you have already read all the relevant books released by the traditional publishing houses in the past year.

So, as a reader, you’re led to search for new vampire fiction outside the traditional publishing industry. Such readers come to self-publishing websites, where the quality of most books is often poor, but where, nevertheless, one can sometimes discover a random masterpiece. It’s also worth considering that authors of genre fiction such as vampire stories for example, who have tried and succeeded in building an audience and steady income through self-publishing, are unlikely to be convinced to go the traditional publishing route for good.

Publishers, on the other hand, frequently collaborate with Booknet to hold literary competitions on one niche topic or another (e.g. vampire, werewolf novels, rom-com etc.) to discover new authors. We have created specific functional features to hold such competitions and to enable a publisher not only to measure the number of readers per book (to gauge an author’s popularity), but also readers’ engagement (to assess if that book captures and holds readers’ attentions from the first published chapter). We have developed tools to provide data that can help publishers identify emerging, popular authors.