For newsletter writers
You already write to an audience every week. The hard part isn’t the writing — it’s that a year of good letters ends up as an archive page nobody scrolls, or a PDF nobody opens twice.
Foliant makes that archive into a book: a link that opens in the browser and turns pages, with your cover, your typeface, your paper. Nothing to download, nothing to install, no app for your reader to learn. And it can live inside your own site, so people don’t leave for someone else’s page to read your work.
It’s free — every feature, no card, no cap on how many people read you. That holds while we’re building Foliant, and if paid plans ever arrive we’ll say so well in advance.
Foliant and BookFunnel are not the same tool
If you write a newsletter and you’ve looked into giving readers a book, you’ve met BookFunnel. It’s the standard answer, it’s good, and for a lot of what authors need it is simply the right tool — and Foliant isn’t. Here is where the line actually falls, so you can stop reading now if this isn’t your problem.
Use BookFunnel
- You need to put an actual file on a reader’s device — an EPUB in Apple Books, a book sideloaded onto a Kindle, an MP3 audiobook.
- You want the delivery wired into your mailing list, so a new subscriber automatically gets the reader magnet.
- You send ARCs to reviewers and need controlled, per-reader delivery.
- You join group promos with other authors.
- You sell direct and need the order fulfilled — the file delivered to the buyer after checkout, including to crowdfunding backers.
- You want someone else’s support team to answer “it won’t open on my Kindle”. This is the thing BookFunnel is famous for, and it’s worth paying for.
Use Foliant
- You want the book to open where you sent it — one link, in the browser, no download and no library to sign into.
- You want it embedded in your own page, turning pages inside your site or newsletter archive, so the reader stays with you.
- You care what it looks like: your cover, your fonts, your paper texture, an optional page-turn sound — not a reading app’s default UI.
- You want to see whether anyone read it — how many opened it, how far they got, where they came from.
- You want to try it before paying anything, because it may turn out not to be your tool.
Two differences worth naming plainly. BookFunnel is a paid annual subscription with tiers by download volume; Foliant is free while we build it. And BookFunnel does have a browser reader, so “no download” isn’t the distinction — the distinction is whose page the book opens on, and what it looks like when it does.
What you actually get
- Bring the archive in as
.txt,.docx,.epubor.fb2, or paste issues straight into the editor. A book holds up to 200 sections. - A public address of your own —
/your-name/your-book— plus an unlisted mode for a draft you only want to share by link. - An embed snippet, and a plain link that platforms like Ghost, Medium and Notion expand into the book itself. How that works →
- Readers can thank you, write you a letter, and subscribe to hear about the next book — from inside the book, on the last page.
- Reading stats per book: opens, how far people got, and which channel they arrived from.
- It installs as an app and keeps working offline, if your reader wants that.
What it won’t do
- Sell the book. There is no checkout here. Foliant handles the reading; the sale stays wherever you already sell.
- Deliver a file. No EPUB export, no Kindle sideloading, no device support desk. That is exactly the BookFunnel column above.
- Rebuild a designed PDF as text. A PDF comes in as pictures of its pages — right for a zine or a catalog, wrong for a manuscript.
Better you find that out now than after an evening of work.
The editor opens straight away — no account until you want to keep it.