Links & Resources
Here is a mixture of links that I find myself referring people to all of the time — one of my biggest passions and goals is to help people find reading material that they can afford and access, without hurting booksellers, authors, and publishers. If you have any questions or need help finding places to access books according to your circumstances, feel free to shoot me an email or send me a message and I would love to try and help you out, because it can be a little murky. If you have suggestions for this list, please send those my way, too — I’m always looking for more resources and companies to support.
The Authors Guild Foundation
The Authors Guild Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to providing support and protection for authors. They do incredible work, and are where I get most of my knowledge on the publishing industry. If you want to support authors with a donation, here is the best link to do so.
libro.fm
Libro.fm is the hill I will die on. This audiobook company has done amazing things in the past few years, and grown incredibly fast. Deservedly so, as they offer an audiobook subscription alternative to Audible that actually donates a portion of the proceeds to the independent bookstore of your choice. And you aren’t sacrificing anything — their app has one of the most user-friendly and gorgeous interfaces I’ve seen, and their team is small and personable. If you’d like to try them out, you can get one free audiobook through the link below!
bookshop.org
Bookshop is like the physical equivalent of libro.fm — they donate a portion of online sales to independent bookstores. You can get all the same books that you do on Amazon, but without harming bookstores and authors! I’ve also been told that they are working on making their wishlist feature anonymous, meaning there will be a safe alternative to Amazon wishlists.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a collection of free ebooks and resources, the majority of which are in the public domain and therefore completely legal to read, download, and use. They saved my life in college as an English literature major — a lot of the books I was required to read were available for free in PDF or kindle form. You can find pretty much all of the classics here. Project Gutenberg is largely maintained and developed by volunteers — if you’d like to help, they have a number of ways you can get involved on their site.
Kindlepreneur
Kindlepreneur is an amazing resource for those of you looking for advice on self-publishing. I’m always happy to chat and/or answer questions, but I would really recommend giving their blog a look first as self-publishing marketing is their specialty! I’m also including a link to a page with other book sites that are open to reviews.