Empowering authors everywhere to self-publish visual books

But first, let’s set the scene and introduce you to our characters.

Our founder and CEO, Karen, spent nearly two decades as a pediatric Speech-Language Pathologist, using children’s books as a key element in sessions with clients and falling in love with the genre. Jesse, our founder and CTO, was that kid who always had his nose buried in a book. He started coding “for fun” when he was just twelve years old – and he never stopped. He’s been a career technologist and software engineer for over twenty years. 

Despite both enjoying successful careers, they both grew restless and began dreaming of writing a series of children’s picture books together. With heads full of ideas and no shortage of enthusiasm, they got to work. They knew publishing would be challenging, so as they wrote, they researched – and quickly discovered just how much there was to learn. Bringing a book to life, it turned out, involved much, much more than writing.

The process was long and arduous. They knew they would have to find a way to publish easily, often, and much faster if they were going to make it in the highly competitive publishing world. The hunt for solutions began. 

They were defeated to learn only about 1% of aspiring authors ever make it in the world of traditional publishing, and the royalty rates are less than exciting.

They looked at self-publishing but found a confusing array of disjointed tools and services, expensive and predatory vanity publishers, and a steep learning curve at every turn. Yet, they found no innovations created specifically for authors like them, with end-to-end solutions to help them bring their book to life in an accessible and straightforward way.