Like almost every business, this one started because someone was annoyed.

Our founder was going to publish some books as an addition to her existing business. However, she found that in going with a traditional publisher, she was going to receive almost nothing for her books. ISBNs were expensive, and the offers she got from e-book and print-on-demand companies were outrageously expensive, and like most of us, she didn’t have the closet space to store already-printed copies. When she started looking at e-books, the instructions she found were confusing and often out-of-date. She received hundreds of sales calls. She got invited to seminars where she was supposed to write one chapter of a collaborative book, pay a substantial sum of money to have that published, and she would be allowed to buy copies of the book featuring her chapter “at a discount.” Upstart Publishing was born.

The idea for our a la carte service menu came from the complaints of hundreds of other authors, who were either forced into buying expensive packages, or of taking a chance on an unknown contractor on a huge website for the tasks they couldn’t complete themselves. And above all, the complaint we heard was, “I don’t want to spend my time on these tasks; I want to write!”

We heard them.