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Hannah Jacobson founded Book Award Pro with a spreadsheet, strong research skills, and a lifelong obsession with the gold coin on the front of library books. It now runs the world's largest database of legitimate awards and reviews. Alexa brought her on to open a summer of business training, because the questions coming into Write Publish Sell stopped being about book funnels and started being about money, pricing, contracts, and taxes. The two of them talk business owner to business owner: how to fund a book or a publishing business without wrecking your credit, why your price should reflect a skilled person's hours instead of your learning curve, what investor money actually costs you, and why owning your domain matters more than whichever website builder is trending this year. If the business side is the part you keep avoiding, Marketing Bootcamp 2026 picks up exactly where this conversation stops.

Key Takeaways from This Episode

Bootstrapping keeps your rights and your freedom. Hannah funded Book Award Pro out of her own savings, then fed every dollar that came in back into the company. It is slower and it stings when revenue is uneven, but you owe nobody a report and nobody owns a piece of your decisions.

Investor money in publishing comes with strings. "When you take money from an investor, you also owe them results," Hannah says. Book publishing barely registers with formal angel investors, so your investors end up being family and friends, which turns a slow quarter into a relationship problem.

Price for a skilled person's hours, not your own. Alexa charged $100 for a journal that took her roughly 900 hours, because she was teaching herself design as she went. Charge what a professional would charge to do the job well, and treat your learning curve as a separate cost you absorb.

Crowdfunding is a market test before it is a bank. A campaign tells you whether anyone actually wants the thing before you spend money building it. Alexa raised about $1,200 on Kickstarter for her first book and covered editing and cover design with it, and she is candid that big Kickstarter numbers go to authors who already built the audience.

Own your domain and your hosting. Free site builders that live on somebody else's platform can disappear and take your traffic with them. "Don't build your house on a sand foundation," Alexa says. Buy your author name first, then book titles, and point them where you want.

The authors who sell are the ones running the show. Across years of coaching, the ones who succeed keep a deep backlist, stay involved in their own marketing even after they hire help, or already run a business the book feeds. Hiring everything out and touching none of it does not produce sales.

Automate the yucky parts, then keep learning anyway. By the 25th time you type the same answer into an email, it should be a template. Alexa refreshed the Amazon sales descriptions for an entire children's book catalog in one day using AI, work that would have taken months by hand.

Hannah Jacobson is the founder of Book Award Pro, a platform that matches authors with legitimate book awards and editorial reviews and handles the submission process for them. She fell for book awards before she could read, asking her mom at the library for the books with the gold coin on the front, and got her first working look at the industry at a university press in college, back when award submissions went out by fax. Book Award Pro started as Hannah alone with a spreadsheet and strong research skills, and now runs what she calls the world's largest database of legitimate reviews and awards, more than 11,000 accolades and counting. She is the Awards and Story Marketing Advisor for the Alliance of Independent Authors, and she is a Texan by origin. Find her at bookawardpro.com.

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