How to Create Book Funnels in WordPress – 7 Steps to Increase Sales [2025]

Planning sales funnels can be exciting, but not all tactics work for every business. If you’re an author or a freelance marketing trainer, building trust takes more effort.

That’s why book funnels are a great option—they help you guide potential buyers using a well-written book.

Did you know that 79% of marketing leads never turn into sales because they aren’t nurtured properly?

A book funnel solves this by building trust and providing value from the start. In this article, you’ll discover how to create a book funnel that nurtures leads and gets results.

Let’s get started,

What is a Book Funnels

A book funnel is a marketing strategy that uses a book to guide potential customers through your sales process.

By offering a free or low-cost book, you attract leads and then nurture them with follow-up offers, such as additional resources, exclusive content, or purchase links.

After readers provide their email addresses, you can continue building a relationship with them through email marketing.

Planning Highly Converting Book Funnels

In a book funnel, you start by offering a well-written book for free, a book that will either help the reader in some way or hook the reader’s interest to read more of your books. (It can be a hardcover book, a paperback, or an eBook).

The catch here is that it cannot be just an ordinary small book with minimal data. It has to be a complete book that people would probably pay $20-$30 to buy from the library. So, you are giving away a complete product here.

However, the book must be prepared in such a way that you leave hooks to your other products that you plan on promoting to these readers at a later stage.

For example, if you are an author, you can leave a quick advertising section after a certain chapter, referring to one of your other books in the same genre.

Plus, at the end of the book, leave a promotional page where you can ask the reader to buy your other books. Make sure to leave the website links where they can visit to get your other books.

Or, if you sell software that helps to run sales campaigns on an eCommerce site, you can write a book to teach various strategies to implement such sales campaigns.

In that book, find suitable areas to refer to the activities that can be executed using your tool. You can even include a whole chapter near the end to show how your tool can be used to implement all these strategies on the reader’s website.

The same strategy can be used in many other niches.

Why This Approach Works

If the book provides real value, the reader will be able to trust you. And keeping references to your products in the book means, they will remember it when you reach back to them with your core offer.

Hence, it’s a powerful tactic to increase conversion of your sales funnel.

Let’s consider another example.

Suppose you are a business consultant. Then you can write a book on business leadership.

And within the book, from time to time, include stats that you have achieved with other businesses to highlight your expertise.

Now, while reading the book, the buyer will certainly love the successful stats. But more importantly, he will love the book even more if the strategies you write about make sense.

However, what your readers don’t realize is that now they are more confident about anything you suggest. When you reach them later, they will remember you, and can even consider the possibility of taking your service.

This extra trust in you will almost double the chances of converting prospects who really need your service. The same goes when you promote books, software, or any other service.

The book will pave the way for you to easily get into the buyers’ trusted side and make your sales campaign more successful.

Steps Of A Complete Book Funnel

Steps of a Complete Book Funnel

Now before you write the book, or prepare for your funnel, make sure to first plan what products or services you want to eventually sell with your funnel. Your hooks in the book should be planned accordingly.

Also, map out the complete funnel. Get a complete idea of what steps you want your buyers to go through to eventually purchase your main offer.

The steps of your book funnels will vary depending on what your end goal is.

Here’s a quick blueprint to plan your own book funnel. This will be the journey your prospects will go through.

**Make sure to initiate re-targeting Ads for the one who doesn’t end up taking your core offer.

As you can see, this approach takes at least a month of effort to execute all the funnel steps, and you will probably be running re-targeting Ads for another month to squeeze out as many buyers as possible.

Now, as good as this sounds, it actually helps you achieve even more. Since the book helped to gain trust, many will remember you for a long time, and you can run sales campaigns to the same people over and over again, maybe with new products/services, in the upcoming years.

Plus, word of mouth will help to reach more potential buyers out there, that you probably have not targeted initially.

**You can even take it a step further by creating a social community with all your fans, maybe a Facebook Group. This will make it much easier to promote any future offers you may have.

Guide to Craft Book Funnels in WordPress

Now that you understand what a book funnel is and how you can plan one yourself, let us go ahead and look at how you can devise one in WordPress.

For this guide, I will create a funnel for an Author.

Suppose you are an author who focuses on writing books on Personal Growth. And some of your notable books are:

• Enhance Your Work-life Balance
• Productive Psychology
• The Growth Mindset
• Performance Anxiety? Let’s Tackle It Together

Now let’s plan a Book Funnel that will help you sell these books in the eBook format. For this funnel, you intend to sell a bundle of eBooks to potential readers.

Let’s plan the whole book funnel step-by-step.

Step 1 – Prepare the Free Book

1. First, choose one of the books to give away for free or write a new book that is in the same genre. In this example, I will consider giving away the book “Enhance Your Work-life Balance.”

2. Now, update your publication with areas where you can include short preview Ads of your other books distributed after the completion of a few chapters, let’s say every 3 chapters.

3. Near the end of the book, include the 1st chapter of one of your other books as a special feature. This will give them a glimpse of the next book. Let’s say, I will highlight the first chapter of “The Growth Mindset.”

Step 2 – Get the Right Tools to Craft Your Sales Funnel

To create a book funnel in WordPress, you will need the following tools:

• A Funnel Builder: I will use WPFunnels Pro as the funnel builder. It has the visual planner and everything you need to craft a well-planned book funnel.

• A way to host products/services: In this case, you can use WooCommerce to offer the books.

• An autoresponder or Email Client: FluentCRM is a great tool for email automation in WordPress and we will be using it here.

Make sure to configure WooCommerce and your book products before you start building your funnel.

Step 3 – Setup a Landing Page to Claim Your Free Book

1. Create a landing page where you will highlight the free book. Make sure to include the benefits of reading this book.

You can create a single Landing page using WPFunnels for this step.

2. Include an opt-in form where prospects can input their names and emails to claim the free book.

Step 4 – Create the Sales Funnel for Your Core Offer

1. Prepare a bundle that includes the three eBooks I intend to offer the prospects.

2. Devise a 3-step funnel with a Landing page, a Checkout page, and a Thank you page.

Use WPFunnels to create a 3-step funnel.

3. On the Landing page, make sure to write a compelling copy on why they should get this bundle, the savings they will make, and what great stuff they will learn from these books.

4. Create a distraction-free Checkout page using a multi-step checkout form.

5. Design a Thank you page with the purchase summary, and a CTA to join your Facebook group, like your Facebook page, or follow you on Twitter.

6. Once you have these pages ready, go to the first funnel, and in the opt-in set up a redirection after submission into this funnel.
   So, once a prospect opts in, he will get a message to check his email, and then he will be redirected to this funnel, the main offer on your product bundles.

Step 5 – Prepare the Downsell Funnel for Less Interested Buyers

1. Prepare a funnel with the core offer but with a 20% discount on its initial offer price. In this funnel, design a landing page with a short sales pitch to take the offer at this special discount.
   
   You can take the one-time offer approach to make it more attractive.
   
   
2. Leave the Checkout page and the Thank You page designs the same.

Step 6 – Setup Automation to Reach the Opted In Prospects

1. In your opt-in form, set up an integration whoever submits the opt-in form, will be added to your automation tool in a specific list,
   
   let’s say, List: Book funnel.
   
   Then in your core offer funnel, set up an integration where whoever takes the core offer, will be added to your automation tool in the same list with a tag.
   
   Let’s say, List: Book funnel, Tag: offer_taken.

2. Set up a series of 5 emails at 36-hour intervals to be sent to the ones who don’t have the tag ‘offer_taken’.
   
   This means they haven’t taken the bundle offer yet. This is a nurturing campaign.

3. On the same email sequence, include a 6th email which will be a sales pitch for your book bundle. And there, include a CTA to bring them to your main funnel where you made the core offer. (Refer to Step 4)

4. Set up another automation email campaign to be launched in the 4th week, to leads that do not have the tag, ‘offer_taken’.
   
   This means people who did not take your core offer even after the first email sequence, will be part of this email campaign.
   
   In this email, include a CTA to bring them to your downsell funnel where you made the core offer at a discount.

Step 7 – Start Promoting Your Free Book

1. Not that you have the whole funnel set up, start promoting it to your target audience, maybe via paid Ads, or social media.

2. Set up retargeting Ads for the ones who visit your funnel but do not take the free book or purchase the core offer. This campaign should be continued for at least two months to convert as many of them as possible.

That’s it. Your book funnel is ready. Now it will start getting more buyers to purchase the eBook bundle of the 3 books thanks to the initial free book, and a well-planned funnel journey.

Conclusion

In conclusion, creating book funnels is an effective way to turn readers into loyal customers. By offering a valuable book, you can build trust and collect email addresses for long-term engagement.

This strategy works well for self-publishing authors and businesses in niches like real estate investing or coaching. It also helps you grow your email list and generate great leads.

A well-planned funnel will guide your audience to the next step, increasing your chances of achieving your ultimate goal & more sales.

To simplify the process, try using WPFunnels to set up your book funnels easily and efficiently.

** FAQs **

How does a book funnel help my business?

• A book funnel helps you build trust with potential customers by providing valuable content upfront. It’s one of the best ways to capture leads and grow your email list, ultimately moving people toward purchasing over time.

Do I need to give away my book for free?

• You don’t have to, but offering a free or discounted book can increase interest and lead generation. It creates an easy entry point for potential customers to engage with you and your business. Especially when you’re looking to reach the right readers for your ebook sales funnel.

What kind of follow-up should I send after someone downloads my book?

• You should send a series of value-based emails that nurture the relationship. Over time, introduce them to your products, services, or additional resources, such as affiliate links. This will keep them engaged and moving through the user funnel. It helps convert leads into sales.

How long does it take to set up a book funnel?

• It depends on your setup, but you can typically get a book funnel up and running in a few days. Using tools like WPFunnels can help simplify the process and make it faster to implement. You can create effective funnels tailored to your audience and goals.