Lakeland author Fred Koehler has spent two years building a platform to help individuals get their work published. Now, it’s officially launched.
Koehler, a member of Tampa’s Embarc Collective, started building the platform Ready Chapter 1 in 2021, and it officially launched on Sept. 27. The website connects writers and editors to peer edit and review early writing, and Koehler hopes to establish the platform in the publishing space.
The website works through user engagement. Once a user is registered, they can peer edit chapters and manuscripts. The manuscripts that perform well rise through the scoring system on the platform. Eventually, Koehler or future partnerships will be able to collect them and give publishers pre-approved work. The platform is “tokenized,” meaning scores and peer editing permit users to access further editing or posting stories. This makes the app protected from plagiarism and cheating because the accounts are validated and elevated based on the work.
Koehler has raised $235,000 through a friends and family investment in 2023 and will continue to raise money. He also built the website through research and learning (and employed some expert help) for $11,000, he said. There are about 200 users on the platform now.
He was inspired to create the platform when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and he couldn’t meet with his writing support group. He asked what he could do to help, and a resounding request for peer feedback made him realize digital peer editing was an untapped market.
In Koehler’s view, it’s a way to democratize what has historically been a closed-off world. According to the research organization Words Rated, an established publishing house will receive more than 5,000 unrequested manuscript submissions a year, and the odds of an author getting their work published stands between 1% and 2%.
Koehler knows this difficulty firsthand. He’s had to work for years to promote his work and break into the publishing channels, he said.
“That’s a cool vision to be able to say, look, you don’t have to be great at social media; you don’t have to be popular. All you have to do is write a good story, and you can be successful,” Koehler said.
Rich Bishop, Koehler’s longtime friend and an adviser and investor in the company, said the platform has real potential to minimize the institutional gatekeeping of publishing. It’s why Ready Chapter 1 is a strong idea, he said.
“It’s very rare now to find an industry that hasn’t been truly disrupted,” Bishop said, referring to publishing.
Another offering of the platform is educational. Koehler enlisted Janice Hardy, a published fiction author turned writing educator, to help build the educational side of the platform. She previously created a platform called Fiction University, and Koehler sought this background to polish the curriculum into 270-page programming tailored to the platform.
“It has evolved into so much more than even what he originally had spoken to me about with this peer-to-peer review and the scoring system,” Hardy said.
The curriculum is how the platform plans to make money. If used, the platform can self-fund from those who sign up for the education suite, Koehler said. In 2022, Koehler took an early version of the curriculum and presented it to 60 paying students. One student landed an agent, and another signed a deal for two books.
“So we’re crushing the industry average 99% rejection rate, which is pretty cool,” Koehler said.
The next step for the company is growing the user base, posting content and having the best rise to the top. Then, that work can be shown to a publisher.
“We’ll eventually find a strategic partner who can just open up the floodgates for us,” Koehler said.
