What are some of the issues you ran into?
What I found most in the process of publishing is that it sounds easy, but it’s very disjointed. There are several people involved. If you’re doing children’s books, you have your illustrator, you have to write it, you have your layout, your typesetting, your cover design, etc. What happens is people email that manuscript back and forth or they’ll stick it in Google Drive and now you have to manage it. Now, you’re emailing to update each other or you’re texting messaging. So, it’s just a lot of communication back and forth.
Did COVID force you to make any changes to your business model?
One of my dear friends and I were working on her project and everything that could have went wrong went wrong. I got COVID, two of my editors got COVID, and I ended up hiring someone else. Her project went south. No matter what I tried to do to fix it, it just went out. That night, I said, “Why isn’t there software to just manage the entire process? There has to be software, publishing has been around forever.” So, I started looking online for a solution.
What I found is there are a lot of tools that will help you write your book, but there was not a tool that would help you write, hire editors, hire designers, hire ghost writers, publish, create your own landing page and distribute it all in one platform. It sounds ambitious, but again, I spent 15 years developing software. So that night, I literally stayed up until eight o’clock the next morning and covered every wall in my office and I [designed] the idea. I shared it in my Facebook group. I have about 260 authors in the Facebook group and shared it with them. And I said, “If I built this, would you guys pay for it?” And they were like, “Hell yeah, we’ll pay for it.” So, that’s where it was born.
