An Easy Way to Gift Books to Your Community

Nir Eyal‘s next book is called Beyond Belief. It comes out in March. He sent me an early copy. I read it. It’s very good. I ordered 50 copies to gift to my community.

I do this often.

In 2025, I’ve bought and given away over 1,000 copies of books to my community. The structure is simple: Buy in bulk, gather addresses, have a book shop fulfill the orders.

Nir read an early copy of my next book, Unhinged Habits. He blurbed it. A few days ago he sent me this text:

The authors I support show up for me. This isn’t transactional—it’s relational. When you genuinely support someone’s good work, they remember. They reciprocate. Not because they have to, but because that’s how real relationships work.

OK, atop my soap box I go:

The way authors are taught to market is wrong.

They’re told to build social media platforms. To create content that gets engagement. Which is backwards.

Here’s a stat that matters:

There are fewer people who buy books than ever. But there are also more books bought than ever before.

Said another way: People who buy books buy a lot of books. And people who don’t buy books don’t buy any.

Therefore, if you want to sell books, you need an audience of readers and not an online following of people who love watching 13-second videos.

The fastest way to build an audience of readers is by building better relationships with other authors.

Create content, sure, but view its success as a lagging indicator of great work and solid relationships built elsewhere.

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So many people I speak to want to support their friends. But like Nir (and me), it’s less a money thing and more a capacity thing. They don’t know how to do it at scale.

In this post I’ll share my exact system for buying and gifting books—including all costs—so you can do the same.

Make a gifting budget

The first step is to establish a gifting budget. Consider this a marketing expense.

Before I had this budget, I would spend thousands on Meta ads but felt an odd resistance to buying a colleague’s book.

The relationships I’ve built by being the guy who shows up and supports have been a far better investment than paid ads. Authors I’ve supported have blurbed my book, invited me to share essays in their newsletters, and become genuine friends.

Meanwhile, my own community gets tighter. When I gift books to my list, they see me curating valuable resources for them. It builds trust.

How to buy and gift books

Step 1: Email the author saying you want to buy 50 copies of their book to gift to your community. Ask if they have a contact at a bookshop who can fulfill one-off shipments to individual addresses.

They probably won’t. They might connect you with their publisher. Most publishers can’t handle this easily.

Step 2: Offer to go through the Porchlight Book Company. This is the simplest and cheapest path forward.

Step 3: Email help@porchlightbooks.com and say: “I want to buy 50 copies of [Book Title] and have them shipped individually to addresses I’ll provide. All recipients are in the USA.”

A sales rep will respond within a day. That person becomes your point of contact. They’ll send you a .csv template with the proper formatting for addresses.

Pricing breakdown:

• 38% bulk discount off list price (for 50 copies)

• $6 shipping per book (USA only)

• $0.35 per personalized note card (optional but recommended)

Total cost ranges from $1,100-$1,300 for 50 copies, depending on the book’s list price.

Porchlight invoices you via email. You pay by credit card.

Timeline: Once you send the addresses, they ship immediately if the book is already released. If it’s a pre-order, they hold your order and ship books to arrive on release day. Nothing else required on your end.

You don’t need to be friend’s with the author in order to do this.

An example: I’ve been a fan of David Epstein’s work for over a decade. He announced his next book. We’ve never spoken. I cold messaged telling him I want to preorder 50 copies.

David and I email back and forth now. Yes, it’s money spent. But, for me, this is a way to become friends with my heroes. To surround myself with impressive people. And to help my work spread faster to the right kinds of people.

Here’s the breakdown of costs for that order.

How to gather addresses

Create a web form that:

• Locks entries to USA only (international shipping gets expensive)

• Limits submissions to 50 entries per book

• Exports address data to CSV format matching Porchlight’s template

Full transparency: I needed my web developer to build this for me. If you don’t have that resource, tools like Typeform or Jotform can work with some manual formatting.

Then promote it simply:

• Write a quick blog post or email announcing the giveaway and embed the form (here’s an example from my last one)

• Send a short email to your USA subscribers (here’s an example)

That’s it.

Why this works

The best way to support an author is to both buy and distribute their books.

You can do this whether the book’s been released or as a preorder. If you preorder, the books arrive at your recipients’ doors on or around release date.

If you’ve ever released a book, you know all too well that people you hoped would support you tend to disappear.

I don’t think it’s because they don’t want to support you. I think it’s because they’re busy and figuring out how to buy and distribute lots of books feels like a big job.

It’s not.

I wrote this for two reasons:

1. So you’ll actually use it to buy and gift books. It’s a phenomenal way to build your network with other authors and deepen relationships with your own community.

2. So you can share it with others who want to support your work but don’t know how.

The authors who show up for each other rise together. Be that person.

-Jon

P.S. Before you go, two things:

First: Please preorder my next book, Unhinged Habits. Or better yet, order 50 copies and gift them to your audience. It’s really easy—I just showed you how.

Second: Join 74,000 subscribers to my 5 Reps Friday newsletter where I share simple ideas for ambitious humans at www.5repsfriday.com. That’s the community I gift books to, so be on the lookout for those emails.