Quilltips Fall 2026 Update: New Feature Releases and Roadmap

Over the past two months, Quilltips has been busy hammering the inboxes of our authors with product updates and new platform features. The risk of overwhelming our users is starting to give me agita, so I’d like to take some time to review what we’ve built recently and shed light on our roadmap.

First, the mission. Quilltips exists to help authors more deeply engage with readers and grow their audience. I have personally felt the anxiety of finishing a book and realizing that the writing was easy compared to the marketing. I was continually frustrated by the products out there and the lack of real, authentic connection with my readers. Seeing that I had sold another book on KDP was both exciting and deflating, as I realized that I’d never know who bought my book or why. There were so many more things I wanted to share with my readers! I’ve felt this from the other side as well, as a reader looking to learn more about the person who wrote my new favorite book. Quilltips was established to be that meeting place.

Version 1.0 was about creating ways for readers to dive deeper. We built Fan Mail, which lets readers write directly to authors and lets authors like and comment back. We built Bonus Content, which allows authors to write a letter to their readers and embed videos, character art, and music in their pages. Support lets readers send actual monetary tips directly to authors to voice their appreciation. Signup Forms makes accepting reader signups easy, including for ARC and beta programs, and QR codes and links drive shareability. We also launched an interview series (3 Questions For Authors) to help authors tell their stories.

But then we hit a wall.

Our goal was to drive better engagement with readers, but there were core elements missing. Authors still had to send their readers somewhere else to actually buy their books, and although they could accept signups, they couldn’t proactively communicate with their readers.

Scaling that wall meant adapting the platform to allow authors to sell their books directly from their pages, which culminated in Quilltips Shop. Many authors have had to choose between paying high commissions to sell their books on third-party storefronts (in the neighborhood of 40%), or paying high monthly subscription prices to sell directly. More often than not, these storefronts provide very limited visibility into the readers actually buying the books, and general e-commerce platforms aren’t built with the unique needs of authors in mind.

With Quilltips Shop, authors can now sell print books, ebooks, and signed copies directly from their pages without a subscription, for a platform fee of 15%. Or, they can upgrade to Quilltips Plus for $4.99 per month and pay just a 10% platform fee per sale. In the future, we’d like to offer a fully commission-free option. Adding a print-on-demand partnership with Lulu enabled hands-free book sales, taking logistics out of the equation while maintaining visibility into that author’s audience.

Quilltips Shop will continue to evolve. I’d like to add new product categories like audiobooks, merchandise, or experiences (a video shoutout from the author, or a speaking engagement).

After we launched Quilltips Shop, it became clear that the next bottleneck we needed to solve was book formatting. Many authors experience friction and cost when trying to convert their book from a Word file to a print-ready PDF that can be published through a print-on-demand platform. Their manuscript is finally complete after fifteen revisions, a few existential journaling sessions, and a rewrite of Act 3, but it’s sitting in a Word file that doesn’t have the right dimensions, font embedding, aesthetic features, or consistency. Hiring a book formatter can cost a significant amount, and DIY-ing it comes with a steep learning curve.

This put authors in a bind and stood in the way of Quilltips’ vision of an all-in-one growth platform for indie authors. So, we launched an Automated Book Formatting tool and made it available to authors on the Free tier, to Quilltips Plus authors, and even to non-Quilltips authors.

Authors can upload their manuscript, choose a design template, configure their size, and receive a print-ready PDF and ebook in minutes. The process comes with built-in proofreading and editing tools to make last-minute changes without having to go back into Word and re-upload the book. Driving down the cost of a professionally typeset book was a primary objective, and so we priced the automated book formatter at $34.99 per book, or $14.99 for authors on Quilltips Plus. Authors with a Quilltips account will see the formatted book land right in their dashboard, from which they can launch a book page in just a few clicks.

With the release of the book formatting tool, authors now have a soup-to-nuts system for launching book pages and selling books directly to readers. The next puzzle piece was to give authors a more powerful way to build demand and manage communication with their audience.

Since the early days, authors have been able to accept reader signups for newsletters and ARC/beta campaigns, and see all of that data in one consolidated view, but there wasn’t much they could do with that data. In October, we released Newsletter Sending for Quilltips Plus authors, allowing them to craft and send emails directly to their audience right from their Quilltips account. They can upload their existing email list to augment their audience, and the email editor supports embedding buttons and links that route right to Quilltips. Authors who have added a short story to their profile can import this into their newsletter with one click.

In the future, we hope to make newsletter sending available to authors on the Free tier as well.

After the release of newsletter sending, the natural question is: what’s next on the roadmap? I have a few thoughts.

First, this next phase of growth for Quilltips will involve helping readers explore multiple authors. Given the growth in the number of books on the platform and the great bonus content that authors are adding, I think there’s a path to creating a more browsable “front page” for readers to learn more about authors they may not have come across otherwise. As each author builds audiences for their books, those audiences should have the ability to discover other authors on Quilltips, creating a mutually beneficial marketing flywheel that results in more readers organically discovering authors. Having rich bonus content across books on the platform means we should be able to make Quilltips the most fun place for readers to browse for indie books.

Second, we want to go deeper on helping spread the remarkable stories of the authors behind the books on Quilltips. The 3 Questions interview series was the first step here, and we want to use it as a launchpad for sharing author stories with readers, including on a new reader-facing newsletter.

Third, we want to build an ecosystem for other service providers, like book marketing experts, cover and book art designers, editors, and indie bookstores to start plugging into Quilltips. This could take the form of a marketplace, where Quilltips acts as the central intermediary vetting a roster of high-quality service providers that authors can trust. This is doubly important given that authors have sometimes struggled to distinguish the many amazing book partners from the bad actors that exist.

Finally, we want to build greater community among the authors on Quilltips. As the user base grows, the platform should be working hard to help spark useful connections between authors, such as for peer review, advice, co-marketing, and just plain fun.

Importantly, these are just my thoughts on the roadmap. Quilltips has and always will use a community-driven development model, which means that the collective needs of the authors drive what we build next. I’m excited to see all of the incredible books that Quilltips authors will publish in the coming years, which inspires us to keep building the platform!

Cheers,

Gabriel Nardi

Founder, Quilltips 

P.S. Have thoughts about the roadmap? Submit a suggestion on our roadmap page, or send us an email at hello@quilltips.co.