Private alpha
Your book already contains its own marketing.
BookNav reads your manuscript and your own illustrations, writes the posts and the short vertical video, checks every piece against what your book can actually support — then publishes the ones you approve.
For authors of illustrated middle-grade, YA and adult-crossover fiction. We will write when there is a place for you — no newsletter.
The problem
You wrote the book. Now you are a social media manager.
Asked what the hardest part of publishing is, more than 80% of indie authors say marketing — ahead of the writing. The same research puts it at around eight hours a week: more than ten working weeks a year, spent away from the next book.
The tools exist, and that is the problem. You are the integration layer between them: re-explaining your book to each one, checking what it wrote, keeping the schedule, and deciding for yourself what the numbers meant.
Written Word Media indie author surveys, 2024 and 2025 (n = 1,346).
How it works
Four steps, and you only make the decisions.
-
Give it the book
PDF, DOCX, TXT or Markdown, up to 25 MB. It is split into chapter-aligned passages, so a post can be written from a particular scene rather than from a blurb. Add your illustrations and cover.
-
It writes from your words
Copy and video scripts are built from the passages it retrieves and from what your illustrations actually depict — not from a summary of your book. Each piece names the passage it drew on, so you can check it.
-
Every piece is checked before you see it
Platform limits, missing media, hashtags a network will ignore, quotations that do not match your text, and claims your book does not support. A debut with no reviews never gets to say “bestselling”.
-
You approve; it publishes
To Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest, at the times you chose. Nothing goes out without you unless you explicitly turn that on — and then only for pieces that passed every check.
Being straight with you
What it does today, and what it does not.
BookNav stops authors making claims their book cannot support. It would be a strange product to sell with claims of its own, so here is the honest split.
Working now
- Manuscript ingestion and chapter-aligned retrieval
- Posts and captions written from your own text
- Short vertical video from your illustrations, with narration, editable scene by scene
- Validation before you see a draft, and again at the moment you publish
- Publishing to Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest
- Real per-post figures read back from the channels
Not yet — designed, being built
- Performance trends over time
- Audience and channel recommendations
- Guidance on what to continue, reduce or test next
- Reviewer and media outreach
- Sales and attribution data from retailers
Price
One book, nineteen pounds a month.
£19 / month per active book
- Up to two two-week campaigns a month
- Up to 24 pieces, including six short videos
- Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest
- Validation on every piece, before and at publication
- A 14-day trial when we open
Launch price, per book rather than per seat. Nothing to pay while BookNav is in private alpha.
Who is building this
Built by an author who needed it.
I have spent twelve years building and governing production AI systems, latterly as a director of data science and AI, with a PhD in computer science. I am also a self-published author: I wrote an illustrated middle-grade adventure drawing on Persian mythology, and then found that marketing it was a second job nobody had warned me about.
BookNav is the tool I wanted for my own book. It starts from the manuscript and the artwork rather than from a prompt, and it will not let me call a debut with no reviews a bestseller. I am running it on my own book while a small number of other authors run it on theirs.