Publishing is broken.
More than 80 percent of Americans feel they have a book in them. Only about 1 percent ever publish it. The journey demands time, money, and flexibility most people don’t have. Advances are rare — and usually inadequate.
For those who’re able to pull it off, the chances of their book being discovered are abysmal: 9 out of 10 titles published by major publishers fail to be profitable. Only a small percentage of traditionally-published books have a marketing budget, and those are reserved for authors and ideas which have already been "discovered." What about self-publishing? It only gets worse. Self-publishing platforms like Amazon KDP don’t show authors where sales come from. Without attribution, marketing becomes guesswork.
The solution is simple: let anyone publish and let anyone discover and easily share with their social graph, who trust them to make authentic recommendations. And that's what we're doing. We're building an AI publishing platform and leveraging social, direct-to-customer commerce. The job of the author has always been curation – curating the right information, words, and imagery to communicate an idea worthy of an audience. AI enhances this ability. Our vision is to resolve the systemic inaccessibility in publishing, enabling a literary revolution, where the best ideas reach the masses.
We're executing in four phases:
PHASE 1: ACTIVATE POINTS OF SOCIAL, DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER COMMERCE
Since COVID, BookTok, BookTube, and Bookstagram have transformed bestseller lists, liberating ideas "too risky" or "too new" for traditional publishers. Launched in the fall of 2023, TikTok Shop empowered creators to become the modern bookseller, providing recommendations tailored to the unique tastes and interests of their audience and receiving compensation for doing so. YouTube Shopping's affiliate program similarly followed suit in the summer of 2024, further shifting the social commerce landscape. While this was happening, struggling independent authors became millionaires with Shopify websites, marketing directly to their customers on Meta.
During Phase 1, we'll launch and activate our storefront across all social platforms and, here, on flowerburst.co. We'll carry an expansive selection of titles spanning all genres and feature works by independent authors who are part of our growing community. AI agents will analyze social signals to identify high-potential, undiscovered books and match them with the right creators to drive exponential reach. We'll amplify the voice of the people, disrupting the gatekeeping and editorial bias which has plagued publishing for centuries.
PHASE 2: RELEASE OUR OWN TITLES
We have our own bold ideas that we want to get to the masses. We'll publish them and leverage social, direct-to-consumer commerce to bring them to the world.
When it comes time to expand our catalog, the same AI agents which identify undiscovered, high-potential titles will find underserved subjects and emerging topics and vet buyer demand with test ad spends. Major traditional publishers release thousands of books per year, but 90 percent miss the mark with customers, failing to be profitable. We’ll give the people what they want, when they want it. Our AI assistants will support our human authors with research, fact-checking, and content organization, dramatically reducing the time from concept to publication while maintaining an authentic human voice. We'll publish at the speed of movements, not months or years later.
PHASE 3: RELEASE TITLES IN PARTNERSHIP WITH INDEPENDENTLY-MINDED AUTHORS
A book that sells at retail for $20, costs a publisher around $2.50 to print. Despite the big margin, an author will probably take home only $1.50. Everything in between goes to the publisher, the distributor, and the bookstore. And just a sliver of that, if anything, will go to marketing. That's a lot of deadweight. With our direct-to-consumer model, we'll reclaim the margin and direct it fully to spreading the good news about our authors' work. And we'll leverage AI agents to allocate it to the right catalysts at the right time.
Self-published writers need a minimum of $10,000 to pay for the essential costs to get a book to market (e.g. editing and formatting). And depending on the genre, it can take months, if not years of research. Enter Flowerburst's AI agents. Virtually all costs are eliminated, and what took a couple of years can be done in a weekend. Our authors are better-paid and more prolific.
PHASE 4: PROVIDE ANYONE, ANYWHERE THE OPPORTUNITY TO GET THEIR IDEA OUT
Imagine an army of AI muses which help you bring your idea to reality, using your voice, step-by-step. You stand center-stage as the conductor of a grand orchestra breathing life into your symphony.
Current self-publishing platforms severely impair authors in three critical ways: i. they don't allow access to customer data (authors can’t build relationships with their fans and miss out on powerful marketing opportunities like retargeting) ii. they don't integrate natively with social channels (this is where book discovery happens) iii. they don't allow for book bundling (this increases average order size, making book marketing economics work in even the most competitive environments). In order to get the word out about their book, authors are left buying mostly unprofitable ads exclusively on the platforms' websites. Why not buy ads from elsewhere? There is no way to attribute sales. The end result: ideas self-published on major platforms are locked up and rarely see the light of day.
Flowerburst changes this by providing authors who self-publish on our platform everything they usually expect -- distribution to all major e-commerce websites (like Amazon) and access to all domestic bookstores and libraries -- in addition to their own customizable storefront which is integrated natively into social commerce channels, allows bundling opportunities with other authors' titles, and connects authors directly with their customers. We provide ideas with a platform to take flight.
THE SACRED AND THE TECHNICAL: OUR AI PHILOSOPHY
There's a kind of miracle that occurs when a writer pulls down an idea from the ether, shapes it with words, and whispers it into a reader's soul. It's sacred. And what might seem initially like a paradox is not: AI can be harnessed to empower and assist human creation and expression, making book publishing available to everyone, everywhere.
Nearly every facet of the publishing ecosystem can and will be advanced with AI -- whether it's content creation, the editorial process, production, or marketing. In fact, some works, like encyclopedias, education textbooks, and reference manuals will be best written nearly exclusively by AI. Of course, the most resonant fiction, poetry, and personal narratives, though, will almost always come from the surgical curation of a human mind. At least that's the way we think it should be.
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We're a scrappy and ambitious team of hackers, writers, and creators. My name is Jonathan Manzi, and I'm the founder. I'm a serial entrepreneur and have always been passionate about writing. I started my first "official" business in high school, an adtech company, which I grew to $3.2 million in revenue before I graduated. I received some fanfare for it making me a millionaire at 16. I studied at Stanford and went on to co-found and serve as CEO of Ink, a "modern" version of Fedex Office, and Beyond Protocol, a blockchain protocol for inter-device communication and value transfer. I scaled the companies to $200m+ combined value by 30. At 32, I was sentenced to prison for misdemeanor, self-defensive computer hacking, temporarily sidelining me. While writing a book about nontraditional life experiences and insights gathered, I discovered the extreme odds stacked against the best ideas getting out to the masses. I also witnessed the liberating force at the intersection of social commerce and emerging technology. I'm back and building Flowerburst.
If you're interested in what we're up to, we'd love to hear from you. Feel free to drop us a line at hello@flowerburst.co