It's one thing to sell a book. It's another to build passionate communities around the content, providing lucrative channels for new sales and marketing opportunities.

Today bookshout! announced $6M in Series B funding to expand its digital book distribution and engagement platform, giving authors control of their audiences and publishers a new and powerful sales channel.

Ambassador Enterprises led the Series B round, increasing its investment in bookshout!. The firm sees significant opportunity for innovation where new tools for social sharing and engagement give authors and publishers better data to connect readers with books they want to read, and identify opportunities for additional merchandising and promotion.

"bookshout! is reinventing how digital books are sold, shared and consumed," said Daryle Doden, CEO of Ambassador Enterprises. "Traditional publishing is like baseball before Moneyball. The industry is guessing what people want. By serving authors and publishers in a process-oriented, measurable way, bookshout! is eliminating the guesswork and building tools that let content creators take control of their audience."

bookshout! recently released support for digital bulk sales, special sales and promotions that enable publishers and authors to sell digital books in bulk at events, conferences, book tours and other group activities. With a promo code or a gift card, readers simply visit a private-labeled landing page and redeem the coupon to get a book, automatically becoming part of its "reading circle."

As a result, authors gain a powerful platform to engage fans, share ideas, answer questions and promote bonus content, while publishers gain a valuable channel to capture analytics and target sales and promotions. Early adopters include: CareerBuilder.com, which sponsored Nolan Bushnell's book tour for "Finding the Next Steve Jobs," and the Kauffman Foundation, among others.

"Publishers need to participate in new distribution channels, including direct-to-consumer," said Joe Wikert, General Manager, Publisher, & Chair of Tools of Change (TOC) Conference at O'Reilly Media, Inc. "bookshout! offers publishers many of the data and analytics benefits of having a direct channel, but without all the upfront costs associated with creating one."

"Publishing is on the verge of a major shift from creation to distribution and consumption, but the big players like Amazon and Barnes & Noble have shut out the authors and publishers, preventing them from engaging with their readers," said Jason Illian, CEO of bookshout!. "This new investment enables us to expand our platform to create new opportunities for authors, publishers and readers to connect in more meaningful ways around the books they love."

For more information on digital bulk sales, special sales and promotions, contact: sales@bookshout.com.

About bookshout!

bookshout! empowers readers, authors and publishers to make the e-book experience more collaborative and enjoyable than ever. Based in Dallas, Texas, bookshout! features more than 250 publishers and 100,000 books accessible via iPad, iPhone, Android, Kindle Fire HD or the web. For more information, please visit www.bookshout.com.

About Ambassador Enterprises

Established in 2008, Ambassador Enterprises is a for-profit, philanthropic, equity firm investing in leaders and the organizations they lead. Believing that an investment in people and teams will pay returns in the form of healthy relationships and communities, Ambassador recently acquired a former university campus in Fort Wayne (IN), establishing The Summit, a cooperative learning community. To learn more, visit www.ambassador-enterprises.com.