AuthorChecklist.com isn't an editor. It won't help you write your book, design your cover, run your PR campaign, place ads, or sell copies. There are excellent editors, designers, publicists, marketers, distributors, and other publishing professionals for those jobs. We're not trying to replace them.
What AuthorChecklist.com does is help you understand, organize, and manage everything that happens around publishing a book.
That starts with the things that are surprisingly easy to miss: ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers), metadata, copyright, retailer listings, library records, author profiles, trade reviews, awards, competitions, journal submissions, distribution, deadlines, and dozens of other details that can affect whether your book is accurately represented, discoverable, and available where readers look for it.
For each step, we explain what it is, why it matters in the real world, when it should happen, who normally handles it, what questions to ask, and how to tell whether it actually got done.
But AuthorChecklist.com is more than a checklist.
It's also a central hub for the publishing side of your work. You can keep track of awards and competitions you're considering or have entered, journal and review submissions, important dates, publishing contacts, collaborators, results, and other book-related information that otherwise ends up scattered across spreadsheets, inboxes, notes, and bookmarks.
You can also create an author page, individual book pages, and a media kit, giving you a home for the information people regularly need about you and your books.
All of the checklists, explanations, directories, and reference information on the site are free to read.
Creating your Author Profile is free. Your author page, your calendar, and the templates come with it and cost nothing. Adding a book is $40, once, and that book brings its own page, media kit, checklist progress, records, and submissions with it. As your publishing career grows, you can add more books and collaborators. Publishers, editors, publicists, and other industry professionals set up an account for free, which comes with a book of their own and a book for an author they work with, and can buy more for the other authors they work with. Either way they collaborate with those authors on milestones, deadlines, submissions, and the other work surrounding a book.
The goal is simple: give you one place to understand what needs to happen, see what has happened, keep the important information together, and make sure the details don't fall through the cracks.
