The history of PubShare

Back in March 2015, Chuck Heintzelman (the creator and manager of PubShare) was talking with a group of writers at an anthology workshop put on by Kristine Kathryn Rush and Dean Wesley Smith. The subject of book bundles came up. At the time there were two main book bundling sites, Humble Bundle and StoryBundle. Humble Bundle was primarily a game bundling site, but they did do ebook bundles. StoryBundle was an ebook bundling site.

The concept of ebook bundles was amazing. For readers, ebook bundles are a chance to discover new authors by picking up a group of ebooks in a genre they like. For authors, there's a cross pollination effect. Each author promotes the ebook bundle to their readers. When a reader purchases the bundle, that reader could have come from the author's promotion efforts but more likely came from one of the other authors in the bundle doing the same thing.

Since there was no DIY bundling options available, in 2016 BundleRabbit was created. It allowed authors to upload their books for curators to bundle. Authors could now do it themselves, and not wait to be invited to one of the larger bundling sites. The bundles were sold directly from BundleRabbit's web site.

By 2017 BundleRabbit had expanded to actually create a boxed set of the bundles, this allowed the ebook bundles to be sold on other sites such as Amazon, Kobo, and Apple Books. Eventually, selling direct from the BundleRabbit site went away, and the bundles were only sold on external sites in boxed sets.

Joanna Penn was discussing a concept around the same time she called the "collaboration engine" that would automatically divvy up book royalties across two or more authors. This was the same thing BundleRabbit was doing, albeit only for ebook bundles. So by the end of 2018, BundleRabbit added a collaborative project feature which allowed a group of authors to get together and publish a book with BundleRabbit splitting the royalties.

Since BundleRabbit now did more that just dealing with ebook bundles, a name change was planned. The software was redesigned, redeveloped, and other features were added.

Finally, in 2021, PubShare was released to the world.