WordHustler Aims to Build Digital Marketplace for Book Publishing

Since the beginning of time, or at least since Gutenberg, writers have had to hustle to get their work published. Talk to any writer and you'll hear horror stories of rejection letters, unanswered queries, lost manuscripts, and a very deep sense of frustration.

But now a pair of enterprising writers based in L.A. have decided to try and do something about it. Anne Walls and John Singleton have launched WordHustler, the first website that offers to manage the entire process of writing, submitting, and managing your work.
They come to the problem from different angles. Walls has Hollywood experience -- CAA, Paramount and Fox TV. Singleton has a background in computers and has written a book about technology. But, both are also aspiring novelists, which is where they encountered the maddening web of frustrations mentioned above.

"The simple inertia of the process is enough to defer someone from even trying to get their work published," says Walls. "Writers lose their self-confidence," adds Singleton.

In order to facilitate the process of connecting writers with publishers, then, these two Millennials are building what you might call a digital social marketplace for books. Not eBooks, primarily, though WordHustler is optimized for Amazon's Kindle and iPhones, but physical books. "We didn't set out to reinvent the wheel, just to make the wheel turn better," Walls explains.

Accordingly, they have developed a free database of over 4,000 agents, publishers, contests, and publications, plus a set of tools that allows writers to streamline and automate what historically has been a cumbersome, paper-consuming process.

Singleton wrote all of the software himself. "I realized I had to break the process of submitting and managing a writer's work down into a series of simple steps," he explains. "And that it had to be intuitive, because writers tend to be almost proud of not knowing how to use technology."

Here is how the site works:

* You log in, and upload your manuscript in any form -- Word doc., rtf, even old WordPerfect -- and WordHustler converts it into a Pdf.

* Next, you navigate to a "letter composer" that helps you compose and format a cover letter. There are hints as to how to write an effective letter, and a simple to use mailmerge function so that you can send it to multiple agents, publishers, contests or publications at the same time. (This is a frequent practice for fiction writers seeking to place their work in small literary magazines.)

* The typesetting technology, Latex, yields an impressive result. (Remember, these are physical letters and manuscripts.)

* Then you are directed to the site's Crown Jewel -- the largest free directory of markets on the web, accessible by category, keyword search, or tag cloud. (I searched on a number of terms and got surprisingly impressive results.) You can search agents by their author clients in order to help identify the right person for your particular genre of writing.

* Also, an "advance submission wizard" allows you to keep track of what you've sent where, to whom, as well as which tags are attached to your work, and what the reactions from agents, etc., are to date.

* As for social media tools, WordHustler offers commenting and rating functions, and is building its community (still modest -- 3,000 registered users) so that writers can compare notes on the response time of agents and the other intermediaries in an industry that has too long been virtually unaccountable to writers.

One significant bit of code is an excellent "preview" function, which I consider essential for any editorial production system. This one is based on the same technology that powers Amazon's Reader.

You are probably thinking by now that all of this is fine and good, but what is the business model here?

So, I've saved the best part for last. While the WordHustler database is free, the service is not. Writers pay for the printing and shipping of their submissions and cover letters on a sliding scale starting at $0.99 for a short story of under four printed pages, up to $8.95 for a 50-page manuscript. For screenplay or book-length submissions, there is flat fee of ten cents per paper page of product.

(For anyone who still visits Kinko's and the post office to do this for themselves, these do not represent new expenses but simply replacement costs. Which may explain why fully 30 percent of the site's users are overseas, where international postal rates are beyond prohibitive for writers hoping to publish in the U.S.)

Then, there is the other side of that digital marketplace, and that is where WordHustler aims to make its real money. They are in the process of launching a "market affiliates program" with tiered pricing for agencies and other middlemen that typically are inundated with print submissions. These affiliates will pay $9.99-$29.99 a month to funnel submissions through WordHustler, which can guarantee a standardization of formatting as well as the same suite of IT management tools described above.

Finally, this ambitious young company, only eight months old, yet already the custodian of eight million words submitted by hopeful writers, is preparing a "digital reading room" where publishers (for a fee) can peruse manuscripts and manage the process of getting in touch with the writer and her representative in a much more efficient manner than has ever before been possible.

Sort of like a Match.com for the publishing industry.

Will it work? Walls told me today that she just found out that she has succeeded in placing a short story with a literary magazine through WordHustler.

My friends, that is what's known as a happy ending.