Human creatives, Grassroots marketing

The HANDS Digital Publishing project is a collaborative network of authors and narrators to promote and sell ebooks and audiobooks directly from author websites. Authors benefit from linking their sites to HANDS landing pages and from book listings on a shared online storefront showing all participating books and authors, providing a unified platform for discovery and purchase. The goal of the project is to enable authors to retain up to 80% of net retail book revenues as their sales and fan base grow, ensuring a sustainable and profitable model for long-term success.

There is no doubt Amazon, Audible, and other large publishers and retailers have held income opportunities for authors and narrators at bay for many years. The retail giants are eagerly looking forward to utilizing AI to reduce their acquisition costs.

Increasingly, human creatives are discovering the power of partnering and grassroots marketing made possible by social media. The greatest motivation for book purchases is word-of-mouth. Next important, in this age of AI writing and narration, is knowledge of the author and narrator’s dedication to human creative art. These are the core principles upon which HANDS is based.

HANDS subscription

Please Subscribe to our newsletter

Welcome to our Newsletter Subscription Center. Sign up in the newsletter form below to receive the latest news and updates from our community.

“Hiring narrators is too expensive!”

They say hiring a narrator is too expensive. Use AI narration. It’s like telling authors “writing a book is too expensive. Use AI to write the book”. Authors are creatives. Narrators are creatives. They work together on creative projects. There are risks to creative projects. There are rewards. All should be shared. The industry is not set up this way, but it should be.

The publishing industry is dominated by a few companies. You know who they are. But it shouldn’t be that way. There are thousands of talented authors who should be selling from their own websites. But how? Especially in the age of AI, how can they compete? What does it take? How much does it cost? How can you start?

You’re a talented author, but AI can write marketing materials much better than you can. Everybody knows it. Especially the people who are using AI to actually write books. So how do you compete? You compete by revealing your humanity. You cultivate a following of readers who know where your writing is coming from. They learn what’s in your heart.

What we do

For Authors

Plan 60

This plan calls for close collaboration in almost every aspect of a book’s marketing, promotion, and sales, including weekly video-conference meetings to plan and update activities. You retain 60% of all net book revenues (gross sales minus merchant card fees and audiobook distribution expenses).

You gain all the benefits mentioned in the 80% plan below in addition to the program attributes listed on the right.

Let’s Collaborate

We create landing pages on your web site that coordinate with our shopping cart product pages. These can be ebooks, audiobooks, bundles, or specialized products. These pages integrate with our email list manager, FluentCRM.

We assist with the creation of your newsletter. We decide on articles, who is best to write them. We may engage in interviews that give a podcast air to the newsletter. The goal is to get your readers to know you, your writing style, your heroes, your values, why you write, and why you’re worth their attention.

We provide an email manager (FluentCRM) to manage all your email distribution and automationneeds. Email is the primary way of communicating with your readers.

We partner with BookFunnel to provide opportunities for Group Promotions, and Author Email List Swaps.

We provide a shopping cart and product landing pages for all direct sales of ebooks and audiobooks. We utilize FluentCart, coupled with Fluent Affiliate and link to Stripe merchant card services.

We provide audition services of vetted narrators willing to work on a Royalty Payoff basis. Payoff parameters are negotiated between the author and narrator.

HANDS is involved in creating automation systems that allow AI-created social media campaigns that provide automatic messaging that emphasizes the human attributes of partnerships that are designed to create “superfans”. We want to market author/narrator teams whose fans know and love them. Think of it as using AI to combat AI.

Word-of-mouth is perhaps the strongest form of marketing. Through an affiliate program enlisting the efforts of social media influencers, we provide grassroots marketing that instantly creates substantial visibility and opportunity for sales.

For Authors

Plan 80

You do not need to manage credit card services, shopping cart, sales tax, mailing list, distribution of ebooks and/or audiobooks. Purchaser contact and detailed sales information are provided to you. Transparent sales reports are provided. You have access to vetted narrator pool and audition services. We assist with potential narrator Royalty Payoff contracts or Per Finished Hour contracts.

You retain 80% of all net book revenues (gross sales minus merchant card fees and audiobook distribution expenses).. We coordinate with your promotion efforts.

Let’s Collaborate

We provide links to include on your web pages to HANDS product pages.

We provide a shopping cart and product landing pages for all direct sales of ebooks and audiobooks. We utilize FluentCart as our shopping cart.

We provide audition services of vetted narrators willing to work on a Royalty Payoff basis. Payoff parameters are negotiated between the author and narrator.

Word-of-mouth is perhaps the strongest form of marketing. Through an affiliate program enlisting the efforts of social media influencers, we provide grassroots marketing that instantly creates substantial visibility and opportunity for sales.

For narrators

Narrator Partnering

Narrators can expect:

  • Small roster, application by invitation only.
  • Vetted authors
  • Confidence that Royalty Payoff contracts will be accompanied by active promotion/marketing effort
  • Audition opportunities
  • Rates and Royalty Payoff terms negotiated with author
  • Must provide high quality, production-ready audio files
Let’s Collaborate

When a narrator works on a Per Finished Hour (PFH) basis, the narration service is billed at the narrator’s hourly rate times the audiobook’s total hour length.  This amount constitutes the basis that is paid off by splitting the net book revenues at a split agreed upon by author and narrator until the PFH amount is paid off. Gross or net (according to the plan) revenues from that point on go to the author exclusively. See this HANDS payment  spreadsheet for examples of potential negotiated contract arrangements.

While we encourage author/narrator partner teams, it’s important to have a pool of narrators that can be called on to voice books that can’t or shouldn’t be voiced by the narrator partner. Hence, we maintain a roster of vetted narrators who are willing to work on a Royalty Payoff basis and can respond to audition calls.

Narrators are hesitant to work on a Royalty Share basis through ACX because, quite often, they’re not confident of the author’s intention to market and promote their books. An author’s participation in a HANDS agreement is evidence they are interested and willing to market and promote their books.

© 2025 HANDS Digital Publishing