It took Fred Koehler nearly half his life to get a book published.
The then-16-year-old, who writes and illustrates books, sought to get published and figured it would take a few years of attending conferences and networking before ultimately landing a deal.
Flash forward to Koehler at 32, when he finally sold that book and eventually seven others.
“I designed this program for 16-year-old me,” he said. “Because there are a lot of writers that have the fire in the belly and want to work in the industry but have no idea how to break into it.”
The idea began to form in 2020, when Koehler’s group of writing friends could not meet in person and switched to meeting over Zoom.
“I’m emotionally invested in the writer community, and when Covid happened, I left a lot of writers hanging,” he said. “Everyone started meeting on Zoom, but then it became, ‘You don’t just want to hear me; you can get diversity in there.’ Then all of a sudden, I brought my writing and publishing friends on.”
That eventually morphed into Ready Chapter 1, an online community where burgeoning authors have access to a curriculum covering everything from forming an idea to selling the concept to publishing the actual book.
“Everyone has a book inside of them, and no one knows how to get it out,” he said. “This is pooling the industry gatekeepers and genius writers together; I’m pulling my highest celebrity friends to teach these classes. I can’t get Stephen King, but I can get his buddy, who is just as talented.”
It kicked off in February with a trial cohort of 60 students, which is set to finish next week. Those classes from the cohort will then be available to purchase for access online, which can be done by individual sessions or as an entire pack.
“We wanted to give a MasterClass feel, but this goes deeper than a MasterClass,” he said, referencing the global giant that offers educational classes on various topics. “With MasterClass, you can get takes from someone who tells you how to write a novel. But you can’t get something to take you along every step of the novel, up to how to sell it.”
In addition to offering the classes themselves, Koehler is also working on a technology component to Ready Player 1. It would use artificial intelligence to identify whether or not someone’s novel was ready for publishing or needed to revert to more editing. He also wants to build in real-world critique to give quantitative and qualitative data for the review.
The Lakeland-based company is entirely bootstrapped, with Koehler as its sole employee. Koehler, a born and raised Floridian, is a member of Catapult, an innovation hub in Lakeland. He has been there since “day one,” he said and designed Catapult’s logo on a paper napkin.
“The vision is here for an entrepreneurial startup community,” he said about Catapult. “We’re building the experience and pulling in really great companies. So, I now have a network of fellow founders who dedicated themselves to Lakeland — and I’ve learned everything I know from the other founders in this building.”
