This is a big week for our company, Authors A.I. We just launched a crowdfunding campaign on StartEngine, the world’s largest crowdfunding platform, and we’re off to a blazing start — $75k raised in just over four days.
What’s crowdfunding? As my co-founder, author and CEO Alessandra Torre, explained in the announcement about our plans, crowdfunding is simply a catchy term for a public stock offering. Instead of shares in a company being restricted to venture capitalists, angels and accredited investors, crowdfunding allows regular folks like you to own shares of a promising startup.
OWN A PIECE OF AUTHORS A.I.
When we founded the company, we looked at the landscape and saw two gaps in the marketplace: a need for a set of AI tools geared specifically to meet authors’ needs, and a consumer books site that served readers’ needs.
Now in year four of our journey, we’ve succeeded on a number of fronts — but we’re just getting going. We launched BingeBooks.com and developed the BingeBooks app, which both stand out as the best way to find your next great read. And we launched the authors.ai website and its fiction-loving artificial intelligence, Marlowe.
Marlowe provides a 32-page full-color report in under five minutes, offering an unvarnished critique of your novel to strengthen your book’s pacing, story beats, characters, writing and more. Nobody else comes close to providing the full breadth of manuscript analysis, including the new set of AI tools like ChatGPT-4 and Claude. (Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the top book editing tools for authors.)
It wasn’t easy to get this crowdfunding campaign off the ground: StartEngine accepts only 5% of applicants. We had to undergo a financial review, fill out a painstakingly detailed Form C under SEC regulations, map out a set of rewards (see the Rewards tab), hire a securities attorney, hold meetings with our existing shareholders, etc. But we believe this is the best approach to staff up and take us to the next level.
Next up: Partnerships and collaboration
We’re already a well-known quantity and trusted brand in the books and authors space — our partners include the Alliance for Independent Authors, BookFunnel, the Independent Book Publishers Association, IngramSpark, Reedsy and the National Association of Independent Writers and Editors, among others. And now we’re expanding our collaborations to other AI-related companies and individuals.
This week we heard from author-entrepreneur Jason Hamilton, who runs the Nerdy Novelist YouTube channel and recently left his position at Kindlepreneur. Jason requested a meeting with us because he likes to be kept up to speed on all the tools and services available to help authors with their writing, editing and business goals — and he came away impressed after we gave him a demo of Marlowe.
If you’re just getting familiar with how AI is reshaping the author business, that’s understandable — we’re still in the very early days. You’ll want to follow Jason, who is one of the most knowledgeable experts on the topic, sign up for his course and check out his books “From Zero to Published” and “10,000 Words an Hour.” You’ll also likely want to join the AI Writing for Authors Facebook group to get a solid handle on what’s happening in the space. (Note for AI-curious authors: Jason has not reviewed or endorsed our crowdfunding campaign. My point is that you’ll want to get better acquainted with the growing list of options out there; it’s head spinning, but Jason and other influencers can help get you grounded.)
In our Zoom call with Jason this week, we discussed the head-spinning advances in AI-assisted fiction, the misconceptions that many authors have about AI, and what lies ahead. We’re in for a bit of a bumpy ride at takeoff.
“AI is a very polarizing topic in the author community,” Jason points out. “The more entrepreneurial authors tend to be more open-minded about AI,” but “a vocal minority” of detractors are not — and they are bent on shutting down any discourse about AI and fiction in the major authors’ forums, so you need to find the right place to have those discussions.
More and more authors are doing just that, feeling out things and finding their way.
What thousands of authors have already discovered, Jason told us, is that “LLMs (AI large language models like ChatGPT-4) don’t do a good job with line editing and proofreading.” They may get better at those things over time, but for now they don’t understand things like story beat placement, the ebbs and flows of pacing, narrative drive and the other components of a successful novel.
That’s where tools like Marlowe came in. Jason came away impressed and will be running his own manuscripts through Marlowe to get feedback on how to optimize his fiction.
Meantime, we’ll be pointing authors to some of Jason’s foundational how-to videos in the coming weeks.
See, it’s not all about us. It’s about how best to support the author community. We’re a team of authors, data scientists and marketers with a shared vision of helping authors write better books, helping readers find books they love, and helping publishers optimize their editorial and marketing processes.
We hope you’ll join us on this exciting journey! Visit our campaign page at:
https://www.startengine.com/offering/authorsai
A human, not an AI, wrote this blog post.
