Why Authors Trust Inkitt

Editor’s Note: The following content is provided to Writer’s Digest by a writing community partner. This content is sponsored by Inkitt.

Today Inkitt has over 40,000 authors with over 150,000 stories on the platform and in the past nine months the company has published 22 Amazon best sellers. Little do most people know however, that not long ago, Inkitt was just a dream shared by its founder, Ali, and a handful of talented authors.

In 2013, when Ali started programming the website, he joined a Facebook group where authors were providing each other with constructive criticism. He wanted to create a beautiful platform where authors could easily upload their manuscripts and get feedback from each other and readers to improve their skills.

Inkitt started as a community project where he would brainstorm ideas and features with hundreds of writers on these Facebook groups. Even the name Inkitt was chosen by the community (see below).

Once Inkitt was getting traction, and hundreds of authors and readers were joining the platform, Ali came across a website which was listing famous rejected authors. He saw that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter was rejected by 13 editors, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight was rejected by 14 editors, and even Stephen King’s first book Carrie was rejected by 30 editors. If these great talents were nearly passed by, what other amazing stories were currently sitting in someone's notebook or computer unread? How many talented authors had been rejected, causing the writer to give up simply because an editor said “No” and crushed the dream of the next J. K. Rowling?

With that in mind, Ali started to think that there might be a solution for that issue. At that point, Inkitt already had a lot of readers reading the books, so he figured that there had to be a way to track their reading behavior, and see if they liked a story or not, on a large scale. And along with the Facebook demographic data, it would even be possible to see which demographics were falling in love with which books.

Boom – the idea was born. To incorporate a publishing house into the existing platform and base publishing decisions on behavioral feedback of the readers, instead of the gut feeling of acquisition editors.

What sets Inkitt apart from other publishers is that the team makes unbiased and objective publication decisions based on reader’s reactions to the novels, thus eliminating the risk of a talented author not finding the spotlight they deserve. The security in making decisions based on actual reader data gives Inkitt a huge advantage by providing a level of certainty that consumers will purchase and love the books, allowing Inkitt to invest more money and resources in undiscovered authors than other publishers would. Inkitt guarantees to spend at least $6,000 on the marketing of every book and spend a minimum of eight marketing man-weeks leading up to the launch of every single book to assure its success.

At the moment, the company’s capacity allows for the publication of four books per month and as Inkitt grows it’s planning to launch five, six, hundreds and thousands of new books each month.

Inkitt has always been firmly rooted among the authors’ community. From the early days when Inkitt’s name was picked by the community, all the way to today where the entire Inkitt team works hard to give all talented writers a fair chance to succeed. That’s why authors trust Inkitt.

If you believe in a better and fairer publishing world – publish with Inkitt.