Most Important Things To Know About AuthorsEngine?
One, authors must promote it. Two, it's easy to promote.
Why AuthorsEngine?
The used book market has exploded from a cottage industry pre-Internet, to a tech-charged juggernaut. By some estimates, it now accounts for 15%-18% of the total book market by revenue and 37.5%-45% of paper units sold. We’ve all seen its increasing prevalence on digital platforms like Amazon and Google and elsewhere.
Moreover, people regularly share and swap used books with each other and borrow from each other and libraries. That’s all good and well — for everyone except authors. Authors ideally receive a royalty when a book is purchased new at retail, but when books are shared and loaned, they receive nothing. Likewise, when used books are purchased at retail, either in a used book shop or online through Amazon, the author receives nothing.
Now with AuthorsEngine (AE), when someone reads a book that they didn’t pay for, or purchased in the used book market, they have the ability to compensate the author if they feel moved to do so. Some people won’t be interested. But we think many book-lovers will want to reward authors for the hard work of creating a work of art and for the joy great books deliver.
We created AE because we feel this way. We have friends and family members who have labored on works of fiction and non-fiction and we have lived the life-changing experience of reading a great book. Think of it as tipping or payment, or whatever suits you, but at the end of the day it’s about fairness — compensating authors for their work and for enriching our lives.
AE is currently an LLC. If enough authors promote it, AE will be converted into a public benefit corporation, dedicated to benefitting society through the fair compensation of authors.
Self-Sustaining Fee Model
Total fees begin at a high 25%.
Credit card (~6%) and PayPal (~3% for US payments) and (6% or more for international payments) fees are deducted from gifts to authors. Why, ~6% for credit card fees? It's an estimate that includes a minimum 30¢ charge per transaction that Stripe charges, which is punishingly high for payments of $3 and under. Additionally, to ensure AE improves for authors, 15% of gifts will go, initially, to fund software development. Absent a large donor coming forward, authors must support development.
It is a payment for goods and services platform, built for authors and their readers. It needs to be built out.
AE will be working to reduce all transaction fees. One consolation for authors is that 75% of something is better than 100% of nothing. The money generated for authors via AE is found money.
Patent Pending
A US utility patent application, Method and System for Paying Authors Via Titles, has been filed.
General Manager
Michael Rossides designed this site. He is an expert in probabilistic payment, an example of which can be seen in this paper by Rivest.
Advisory Board
Tom MacIsaac. Tom is a veteran media executive, technology entrepreneur and lawyer. He was most recently President and CEO of RBMedia, the largest publisher of audiobooks in the world. Prior to RBMedia, over a long career leading disruptive technology companies, Tom was CEO of mobile media company Verve Group, video software company Extend Media (acquired by Cisco Systems), and video ad serving company Lightningcast (acquired by AOL). Prior to his career in media and technology, Tom was a corporate lawyer at global law firm Dechert.
Charles D. Kupfer, Ph.D. Charles is Associate Professor of American Studies at Penn State. A graduate of Johns Hopkins and Oxford, Charles began his career as a reporter and editor. He is the author of three books, We Felt the Flames: Hitler's Blitzkrieg, America's Story (2004, Sgt. Kirkland's Press); Indomitable Will: Turning Defeat into Victory from Pearl Harbor to Midway (2012, Bloomsbury); Something Magic: The Baltimore Orioles, 1979-1983 (McFarland, 2016), and a contributor to several anthologies.
Campbell McGrath. Campbell is the Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing and a professor of English at Florida International University. He is the author of 15 works of poetry including Road Atlas; Florida Poems; Pax Atomica; Seven Notebooks; Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition; XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century, and, most recently, Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems (a Pulitzer Prize Finalist). He has received numerous prestigious awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the Kinglsley Tufts Poetry Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. McGrath has been published in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Poetry, and Ploughshares, among other prominent publications, and his poetry is represented in dozens of anthologies.
David S. Barnes, Ph. D. David is professor of History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts & Sciences. He's a graduate of Yale and UC Berkeley. He teaches the history of medicine and public health and is the author of two books, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (University of California Press, 1995) and The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). He is hard at work on a third.
Sushil da Silva, Ph.D. Sushil is Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at The City University of New York. A graduate of Columbia University and founder of multiple startups, he is a versatile computer scientist, engineer, technologist and educator specifically interested in enabling early-stage technology startups to gain flight. He has deep expertise working at multiple levels: technology strategy, marketing and sales, design, project management and implementation. He has worked extensively on implementing credit card payment systems on mobile devices. His technical expertise includes Computer Networks, Network Protocol Design/Implementation, Software-defined Networks (SDN/NFV), Programming Language Design and Implementation, Hardware Design (FPGA/ASIC), Operating Systems, Embedded System Design, Networked Storage Architectures, Distributed Databases, Full-Stack Architectures, Scalable Enterprise Cloud Systems, Data Science, and Machine Learning.
Justin Fuhrer. Justin is Director of Engineering at Lunar Solar Group. He built most of AuthorsEngine. He is proficient in a variety of web and mobile technologies, including SASS, JavaScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and FIGMA.