self-publishing
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Yehuda Niv wants your book out of the drawer
A stalled manuscript sent an electronics engineer into publishing. Now the Spines co-founder is trying to help a million authors reach the shelf, with a few lessons about money, mentors and making time to think.
Spines wants your book out of the drawer
A finished manuscript can spend years going nowhere. Spines sells authors a way through the production maze - but getting a book into shops and getting people to read it are different jobs.
Mohammad Al-Ubaydli’s unfinished syllabus
A book about chaos changed his plans. A book about publishing helped him start a business. The founder of Patients Know Best has kept giving himself new subjects to learn.
Bob Young and the business of leaving the hood open
He helped turn freely available software into Red Hat, then gave authors a way around the publishing gatekeepers. From a sewing closet to a football sideline, Bob Young keeps returning to the same question: who gets control?
Build a business. Keep your life.
The Bootstrapped Founder turns Arvid Kahl’s experience of building and selling a SaaS into a practical education business. Its most useful lesson is how much success can cost the person doing the succeeding.
Vikrant Shaurya and the Book That Changed His Job Description
A library book sent Vikrant Shaurya out of engineering college. A publishing business followed - and, eventually, a bigger question about how expertise earns an audience.
The Book Was the Easy Part
Kinga Jentetics could write a thesis. Publishing it across borders was the difficult part. The company she built now sells authors a simpler route to stores - and a fixed bill for taking it.
Book Cover Design thinks small. The dragon can stay.
Chathuranga Dissanayake’s design practice turns sprawling stories into compact visual promises. The revealing detail is what survives when the cover shrinks.
Forge
Forge is a San Francisco gaming platform that gives game developers no-code tools to playtest, market, and sell their titles - turning static Steam landing pages into interactive hubs powered by quests, loyalty rewards, and verified-gamer audiences. Spun out of GGWP in late 2023 with $11M in seed funding, Forge has crossed one million users and partnered with 75+ studios.
Inkitt
Inkitt is a San Francisco-based AI-powered publishing and entertainment company that uses reader data and machine learning to identify breakout stories before they become hits. Writers upload fiction to Inkitt's community platform; the platform's algorithm tracks reader engagement to surface manuscripts with bestseller potential. Top stories move to Galatea, a premium immersive reading app offering ebooks, audiobooks, and chat-style fiction, and then to CandyJar, a short-drama streaming app. The result: a story-to-screen pipeline with 33 million users, a new million-dollar novel produced every four weeks, and 40x the hit-rate of traditional publishers.
Ali Albazaz
Ali Albazaz is the founder and CEO of Inkitt, a San Francisco-based AI-powered publishing platform that uses reader engagement data and algorithms to identify and publish bestselling fiction. Born in Baghdad and raised in Germany, he bootstrapped Inkitt from a Berlin startup after 140 investor rejections into a $400M+ valued company with 33 million users across three platforms: Inkitt (writer community), Galatea (immersive reading app), and CandyJar (video entertainment). Inkitt has raised $116.8M in total funding, including a $37M Series C led by Khosla Ventures in February 2024.
Chris Cockreham
Chris Cockreham is the founder of beewise Media LLC, a Fort Lauderdale-based digital and creative consulting firm. Drawing on years of hands-on experience as a content producer, editorial associate, and designer at companies like Ecomii and DermApproved, Cockreham built beewise Media around the idea that the best creative work, like a beehive, emerges from collaboration and collective intelligence. The firm delivers web design, branding, marketing, and content services, positioning itself as an embedded creative partner for clients seeking to grow their digital presence.
David Gaughran
David Gaughran is an Irish author, self-publishing strategist, and indie author advocate who turned 18 months of rejection letters into a career dismantling the gatekeeping machinery of traditional publishing. Through his 'Let's Get Publishing' series of books, a free 27-lesson course, a weekly newsletter, and relentless watchdog journalism exposing predatory vanity presses, he has helped tens of thousands of writers navigate the digital publishing revolution. A nomad by habit — Dublin, Prague, London, Lisbon, southern France — and a storyteller at heart, he writes historical adventure fiction under David M. Gaughran and was awarded the 2020 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award by SFWA for distinguished contributions to the science fiction and fantasy community.
Joanna Penn
Joanna Penn is a British author, podcaster, and entrepreneur who turned a miserable IT consulting career into a multi-six-figure independent publishing empire. Writing thrillers as J.F. Penn and teaching the business of writing as Joanna Penn, she has sold over a million books across 176 countries, runs one of the world's top 1% podcasts (10.6M+ downloads), and is among the most prominent voices on ethical AI adoption in the creative community. Based in Bath, England, she competes in powerlifting, pursues a Masters in Death, Religion and Culture, and embodies her own mantra: measure your life by what you create.
Stephanie Chandler
Stephanie Chandler is an American author, entrepreneur, and community builder who traded a Silicon Valley software career for a bookstore, stumbled into publishing, and ended up founding the Nonfiction Authors Association — a membership community helping writers publish, market, and monetize nonfiction books. Author of ten books and founder of Authority Publishing, she runs the annual Nonfiction Writers Conference (since 2010) and advocates openly for suicide loss survivors.
David Kadavy
David Kadavy is a bestselling author, designer, and creative productivity expert who reverse-engineered design principles for developers, advised a startup that Google acquired, and built a location-independent career from a Nebraska cubicle. His books - including Design for Hackers, Mind Management Not Time Management, and Digital Zettelkasten - have sold 100,000+ copies in 13 languages. He lives in a cabin outside Medellín, Colombia, publishes his income reports publicly, and argues that creativity is about managing your mind, not your calendar.