Hey readers!
Today’s hot topic is on Books.by (or also known as BookSpace), an author platform that helps you create a personal bookstore and sell direct to your readers.
Is it a scam? Or is it true? Today we are going to dig into that and see what facts we can gather and other thoughts from authors and users.
Let’s jump in!
What’s Books.by?
Just in case you aren’t familiar with Books.by (also known as BookSpace) I wanted to give you a quick overview of what you should know.
Books.by is a service that allows authors to create their own bookstore and sell directly to their readers. An awesome idea to help authors bypass the hierarchy of publishing companies and ensure they get all the funds from their sales.
The service has been around for over a year at this point; early 2025, I believe, is when they first came out. And I recall seeing it pop up on social media a ton when they first made themselves known.
Back then, it seemed too new, and I wanted to give it some time to establish and build its own platform before diving in.
However, based on what I’ve been seeing, things don’t really appear to have changed much.
Beyond an extensive site redo!
But where Books.by got their ‘popularity’ I guess one could say was due to their background and shady reputation. The founder, Ash Davis, is also the founder of the publishing company Tablo Publishing. I mean, just by checking out their Trustpilot you can see how well that did.
The didn’t start off with much of a good repertoire around what Ash has done in the past. So, they’ve definitely been on the hot seat and people have been tracking their progress over the years.
And being a company based out of Australia, there’s definitely been some controversies on their tactics that mislead users from within the US.
With all that being said, there wasn’t much hope that much had changed. But I kept my opinions open for this review here and want to give you all the good, bad and ugly so that you can make a decision if it’s something worth trying.
Let’s jump into what I’ve found and what customers are saying about Books.by today.
What’s the Cost?
As is everything these days, there is indeed a cost.
I was able to gather this quickly by going to their pricing page and found that they offer two platforms. Their Core platform comes out to be $99 per year. While Pro is $299 per year.
Core is just for someone looking for the basics and wanting to their paperback live and out to the world on their own site.
While Pro gives authors, the ability to have ebooks and print available and more for sale analytics. So, if you’re one that likes to get into the nitty gritty – that’s likely the platform for you.
They also advertise a 100-day money back guarantee if a user isn’t satisfied. However, based. on what I’ve seen around the web, there appears to be countless authors that have had poor experiences and in result get the silent treatment from Books.by’s team.
There’s also been a few customer reports of getting double charged or having their subscription renew without their consent and being told they can’t get a refund now.
So, definitely tread at your own risk here.
What’s The Royalty Rate Promised to Authors?
This is where their service really seems too good to be true.
On the front end, it’s a no-brainer! As an author, of course I want to make as much back in royalties as I can. Cutting out the middle man is the dream!
And that is what they offer – they offer a 100% royalty payout to the author. The only thing subtracted would be the printing costs, which seem reasonable based on their calculators. The shipping fees, but only if you choose to pay those yourself rather than the buyer. And of course, a card processing fee which is minimal.
All that to say, for a book being sold at $15.99 and the customer pays shipping, you as the author would be coming back with about $13.50 each book.
A pretty good ratio.
Where Books.by says they get their cut is from their subscription-based system.
Leaving you the funds that you’ve earned on your writings.
However, what I’ve also been seeing is their printing and shipping prices vary. I’ve seen authors comment they’ll make less than a dollar because of the conversion rate between AUS and USD as well as shipping costs being more depending on where their book got printed.
When reading through different comments and threads I’ve seen it go both ways. So, that’s likely not an every time occurance but the fact it seems unknown can make some authors a bit uneasy.
What’s The Catch Here?
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure here.
There’s plenty that I could dwell on that seems suspicious, but there’s also plenty of decent changes I’ve seen made over the past few months.
Up front, their service and program seem legitimate. They run ads and get plenty of interactions through the comments. However, it’s unknown about the legitimacy of the comments due to only a few actually sounding like customers. The rest are with questions from potential customers but never a follow up with their thoughts.
They offer authors a fast, effective, and easy way to sell direct. Even if you have zero web-building experience!
With a good-looking website now, thousands of (supposed) happy users, and a fairly reasonable pricing model – it’s an easy sell that all one has to do is upload their book to get started.
And yet, something still seemed off.
This seemed “too good to be true”, but I can’t quite say why yet.
So, here’s something that I encountered that seemed…off..
I started to have a conversation with the chatbot.
Right away, I checked with the bot if I could talk to a human to see how effective their support was.
While waiting for the response I was slightly off put by seeing that the bot’s name was Ash and had an oddly close profile photo of the Founder himself, Ash Davies…even though this was just a bot.
And if you don’t believe me, just look at his Forbes photo:
After waiting a few seconds for the answer, I was immediately told they’d pass along my details, but what details?
I’m not a customer and hadn’t never given them any details to send, so what did this bot supposedly pass along here?
Although being a chat bot, you’d expect that a company like this would have measures to collect that information to actually send over to a team and get assistance.
With that, I did do some digging on the human support team itself and wasn’t impressed.
You can find a ton of complaints online from customers who have been running into a lack of support for years. So, even though the team does exist, it appears they are not as helpful as they claim to be on their site.
Do They Really Support Ebooks?
Before I had mentioned that with their Pro tier you’d get additional features and functions. One of those highlighted indicated that eBook Publishing would be supported.
A neat feature to help authors sell from within one platform!
However, after digging deeper into the site I found in their Q&A that this would be a coming soon feature.
So which is it?
Are authors really paying an extra $100 just for more site visuals? Or are they getting to unlock an entirely separate publishing format platform?
The attention to detail seems to be laking a bit here, and it’s hard to trust the AI chatbot at this point.
I had also seen a few Facebook comments (within the past week) of customers asking about this too. Their response always came out to be something to the lines of, ‘not yet but early 2026 we will!’. So, whether or not that is an actual feature today – will unfortunately need to be discovered by a paying customer.
Are The Site Templates Worth It?
The short answer, no – they aren’t anything crazy or super creative.
Books.by offers pre-generated templates to help you with the site-building process. However, from the ones that I see online or in their ‘reviews’ section, they are very blaze.
An author gets one page with the information they want to present. You can choose to preview from a select few authors who have reviews published with their site link. However, the only ones that seem good are honestly the ones with a single book.
Having a series gets a bit crazy in the design features.
Even with that, having only a single book gets repetitive and from what they offer in templates I feel like a one-time cost to a reliable Fiverr creator could build you something much more exciting and you’d only pay for your domain moving forward.
Who Do They Use to Print?
Now this one seems to be a bit of a newer addition. As of late 2025 (according to a Facebook post) Books.by appeared to partner up with Lulu’s printing services.
If you aren’t familiar with Lulu’s Printing Services they are a well backed service that offers global printing for a very good price.
The thing is, there wasn’t much commotion from Lulu’s end, considering they had that one post for social media and nothing further. You can find on their site they also offer their own form of Author Website Direct Sales through their integrations or free API connections.
So, was it really a partnership or did Books.by just integrate Lulu’s free API directly and are now claim the two being connected?
Either way, the “partnership” might have been the saving grace for Books.by’s upgrades in printing quality.
Again, it’s a bit unknown from the outside whether or not this ‘partnership’ is truly real. However, if it is and the print quality did get better with it I’d definitely take that as a win for them!
What’s Next?
So what are the options?
Well, between the poor online reviews, unhappy customer feedback and inconsistencies on their site, I’ll be staying away.
I’ll be keeping my eyes out for other alternatives that might pop up and keep you, loyal readers, aware.
In the meantime, using something like Wix is likely to be a safer option for now.
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