I am the co-founder of AUTHORS.me with 28 years experience as a published cartoonist; television writer; and screenwriter. I am very familiar with the pains and woes, and suspicions of writers. They are much warranted. I wanted to pass along this letter from our CEO to help allay any concerns with AUTHORS.me service and objectives.
Hi all. I’m CEO of AUTHORS. We’re such a new company that you’re the first people to post on us, so I couldn’t help noticing. A lot of your interpretation is right. A CRM like Salesforce.com for publishers is a great analogy. Every other industry has a technology tool to manage important work like this. It’s a helpful management tool for them, better than email, which they use currently. And safer for manuscripts.
You’re right that we’re not from the publishing world. I believe this is one of the reasons we can solve this particular problem: we’re a team of systems and technology experts. Quite simply, we have vast experience building platforms like this which people in the publishing industry don’t have. We just want to make the work easier, smoother, better for agents, publishers and the writers submitting to them.
We totally understand if writers don’t want to join or pay yet. Absolutely no pressure. We’re not even marketing it yet. The benefit to the writers that are there now is that they certainly stand out in the crowd. Not much competition, and as one publisher mentioned, she loves to “go shopping” in what we call Discovery. In the 3 months since our soft launch, 58 writers have had their projects “discovered,” and 11 book deals have been signed.
We are a technical team trying to support an industry we love. Thank you Kayley for saying our intentions are good because we are really passionate about helping. Also, it’s important to know that writers don’t pay to submit directly to a publisher. This is a tool to support the publishers and they pay because it helps them. Writers only pay if they want us to proactively match them to agents and publishers looking for their type of work. So writers can get a lot out of the system without paying! In fact some of the writers got book deals without paying a cent.
Writers are able to see which publishers are reviewing their work and can research and determine their credibility. We only service traditional publishers and only those who are carefully vetted to provide our writers good opportunities. Also, we match and filter on more than 60 pieces of data because no writer wants to be forwarded to an agent or publisher that isn’t interested in their type of work. Likewise, no publisher would want to work with us if we send them a bunch of junk.
When we created accounts for writers to save them time (which we only did once and will never do again!), we had our first batch of writers who wanted their content removed. Not only did we remove it, but we wrote some pretty complex code to pull it out of all the various systems that it’s stored in the platform. It’s not as simple as just deleting a document, and we now have an automated way that cleans everything permanently from the system.
Thank you guys for taking notice. I do understand everyone’s suspicion. Writers have been through a lot! We’re always open to your ideas. Let's keep the conversation going. We are here to help writers and will continue to improve with your input.
Best to you all,
Monica Landers
CEO AUTHORS, Inc.