For years, indie authors have been told that success is just a matter of keywords, categories, and clever blurbs.

And sure—metadata matters. But if you’ve ever watched your book vanish into the void the moment your ad budget runs dry, you’ve already run into the real problem: discovery.

More specifically, how broken it is.

We’ve built a system where visibility often depends more on platform trickery than storytelling. Where your book’s fate is decided less by what readers want and more by what an algorithm has been trained to push.

But what if readers could find your book based on the story itself?

That’s the idea behind flexible discovery—and it’s one of the foundational principles behind Direct2Readers.

Discovery That Actually Works Like Readers Think

At Direct2Readers, we built the platform around a simple truth: readers don’t care where your book is sold—they care how it makes them feel.

That’s why discovery on D2R works differently.

It’s not tied to sales rank, exclusivity, or whether you’ve paid to promote. You can list a book that’s enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, being crowdfunded on Kickstarter, sold as an audiobook, or only available in paperback—and our system will still help readers find it.

We believe all formats should be discoverable. Period.

But we didn’t stop there.

Meet the Recommendation Engine Built for Story

Behind the scenes, Direct2Readers uses a custom-built recommendation engine that pulls from multiple data points about your book—not just what you submit.

Here’s how it works:

• We scan your cover art to analyze color, contrast, and design elements that signal genre and mood (yes, your neon-sigil dark academia romance has a look)
• We review your tropes and themes from your metadata, keywords, and comparable titles
• We analyze also-boughts, reviews, and descriptions from available sources
• We map all this data into a vector database—a technology that allows us to find hidden connections between books, even if they don’t share obvious categories

The result? A reader searching for “quietly devastating sapphic road trip novels with found family” can be shown your book even if your blurb never used those words.

That’s not marketing magic. That’s tech built to understand story—not just surface-level keywords.

This Isn’t Just About Sales. It’s About Visibility.

Let’s be real: the average indie author has more ways to publish than ever before—but fewer ways to be found.

D2R doesn’t replace your existing platforms. It amplifies them. It gives you a chance to be discovered based on what matters to your ideal reader, regardless of where—or how—you’re selling your work.

No one should have to hack metadata, drop three grand on ads, or abandon their preferred formats just to be seen.

Flexible discovery is the difference between shouting into the void… and being found by the reader who says, “This is exactly what I didn’t know I was looking for.”

Flexible Discovery Isn’t a Feature. It’s a Philosophy.

It’s the belief that books shouldn’t have to compete in a popularity contest to be visible.

That readers deserve more than surface-level filters and samey recommendations.
That authors shouldn’t have to contort their stories to fit narrow genre labels, or silo themselves into exclusive ecosystems to get noticed.

At Direct2Readers, we’re not just rethinking how books are sold.
We’re rethinking how books are seen.

That means building a system that doesn’t care how many reviews you have, or whether your book was published last week or five years ago.
It means giving every story—every format, every genre, every author—a fair shot at being discovered by the right reader.

Because sometimes the best stories are the ones hidden between categories.
And those stories deserve a spotlight, too.