About
Book Lover. Indie Author.
I love books. Reading them. Writing them. I built BookSignal to be the discovery platform I want most, from both perspectives.
I don’t love trying to find good books on Amazon’s useless sales-based lists or trying to get my own books found there by monkeying with keywords and ads. I don’t love the too-broad categories on book marketing newsletters like BookBub or Freebooksy (though I still use both). What I want most is a bookseller who knows my taste and is ready with a perfect option for me when I walk into their shop. But since I can’t have that (there aren’t even book stores in my town that sell books in English), BookSignal is the next best thing.
I hope you’ll agree. But if not, drop me a line to let me know what could be better.
Travis Senzaki, Reader, Indie Author, Founder
The problem I’m solving
Every year, hundreds of thousands of indie books are published. Most are never discovered. Not because they’re bad, but because the tools that connect readers to books were built for publishers, not for indie authors or the readers who might love their work.
Algorithms optimize for sales volume and marketing spend. Recommendation engines surface the same bestsellers everyone already knows. Readers with specific, niche tastes can’t find what they’re looking for, and the authors writing exactly those books never reach them. Meanwhile, a flood of low-quality bookslop is making it harder than ever to find books written by actual humans.
What I built differently
BookSignal uses AI to analyze manuscripts directly, not metadata, not marketing copy, not author reputation. It reads the actual text and builds a 22-dimensional fingerprint of what each book is: pacing, tone, tropes, themes, emotional arc, and more.
On the reader side, it builds taste profiles from real preferences: a short survey, refined over time by what you read and what you skip. Then it matches the two.
The result is discovery that works for books that don’t have a marketing budget, for readers who know what they love but can’t find enough of it.
I built it using AI tools, but the goal is to help readers find books worth their time, and to help authors spend less time on marketing and more time writing.
Where things stand today
BookSignal is in early beta. Authors are joining, the catalog is growing, and the recommendation engine is being refined with real reader data.
If you’re an author, you can list your book during beta free for three months, with full reader matching and discovery included. If you’re a reader, take the taste quiz and start discovering books matched to how you actually read.