Startup Bindery wants to help creators become publishers with their own imprints. Here’s its pitch to authors and influencers — and the financial terms.

• Startup Bindery, which has raised $1.3 million, lets creators start their own publishing imprints.
• The company wants to provide authors with a “third way” beyond traditional publishing and self-publishing.
• Here’s what the company is pitching to authors and creators, and what it will look like.

A new startup, Bindery, wants to leverage the power of BookTok to let creators become publishers. BookTok, TikTok‘s book-loving community, has helped bring book sales in the US to an all-time high, and reignited a love for reading among some young people.

Bindery will rely on the success of this phenomenon in hopes of becoming a “Patreon for the publishing industry,” cofounder Matt Kaye told Insider. The platform has partnered with a book-production company and a distributor to publish books, primarily fiction, under nine imprints.

Heading the imprints will be nine creators, or “tastemakers.” Among them are BookTok influencer Jaysen Headley, book YouTuber Ali Goodwin, and book Instagram creator Kathryn Budig, who all have hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.

The “tastemakers” will acquire titles from literary agents, and curate paywalled content on their Bindery profiles offering exclusive peeks into the publishing process. Other creators will also be able to join the platform and start their own subscriber-only communities. Users will have three membership options, priced at $5, $12, and $25, and be guaranteed a copy of each book when published. Like Patreon, each tier has different perks that can be set by the creator.

The startup has raised $1.3 million from VC fund Baukunst and several angel investors, including Patreon cofounder Jack Conte. Kaye and his cofounder Meg Harvey both have decades of experience in the publishing and tech industries. Kaye, the company’s CEO, was most recently head of product, design, and research at Patreon.

With Bindery, Kaye wants to cater to authors who don’t often get recognized in traditional publishing, and who don’t have the social-media audience or the time to consider self-publishing.

“There are all these authors that have been left behind by the industry, and these influencers that have massive audiences that are focusing on these niches that are often overlooked,” he said. “If you put them together, you have a new kind of publishing model.”

What’s in it for creators

The company plans to onboard new creators to start their own imprints for the first couple months after launch, in addition to the pilot nine. Imprints will be invite-only, and will publish at minimum one to two books a year, with more titles possible for larger membership communities.

“We will invite tastemakers based on our confidence in their ability to run a successful imprint through our platform, with indicators being size of following, depth of audience engagement, demonstrated success with a Bindery membership, desire to support overlooked authors, and our ability to support the kinds of books they’re interested in publishing,” Kaye said.

These creators will earn 50% revenue from subscriptions on the platform, diverting 25% of what they would earn from the subscriptions toward the publication of new books, and then earning 25% royalties on book sales. On top of that, they’ll be able to create a showcase of their favorite reads and earn affiliate income when users purchase those books.

Creators who are not invited to start an imprint will be able to sign up for a Patreon-style membership community later this fall. They will earn 100% of affiliate revenue on book sales and 75% subscription revenue for their exclusive content.

What’s in it for authors

Bindery promises to give authors a standard $10,000 advance and half of net royalties from book sales.

The startup also offers editing, production, distribution in stores, and a marketing push from the “tastemakers.” The majority of the imprints will look to acquire titles from underrepresented communities, like LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and neurodivergent authors.

In early August, when Bindery was first announced, several authors raised concerns on TikTok, saying this proposal sounded too good to be true. Rebecca Thorne was one of them.

“BookTok authors expect to being preyed on,” Thorne said. “The popularity of the app, and the way its users cause unknown books to fly off shelves, makes it a natural target for greedy capitalists.” As an example, she cited the terms of deals ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, offered authors as part of its recent effort to start a publishing arm — which she called “laughably bad.”

Thorne spoke with Kaye, and asked him the questions she and other authors had about rights protections for authors. After hearing the answers, she said she’s “incredibly excited.”

“I think we’ll see some incredible books pushed through this publisher,” she added.