Posts Tagged ‘publishing platform’

mbStartups is pleased to announce the Startup of the Week: a weekly post dedicated to the newest faces in new media.

This week marketing guru Seth Godin released his new book, Poke the Box through his own publishing venture, The Domino Project, which is powered by Amazon. Godin is not the first bestseller to break away from traditional publishing. A startup called FastPencil has similarly lured established authors away from their publishers with FastPencil Premiere, a platform that promises a full buffet of services, coffee-table quality and a greater cut of the profits. We recently spoke with co-founder and CEO Steve Wilson about how published and indie authors can create a domino effect of their own.

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If spreadsheets and long e-mail chains are getting you down, here’s a startup that might help. Kapost is a newsroom platform that works with any CMS to help publishers manage a large team of contributors. We recently met up with with CEO Toby Murdock, a former staffer at AOL, to find out how Kapost plans to be the Salesforce of the publishing industry.

“You don’t have to use Salesforce, but everyone does,” Murdock told mbStartups. “We looked at the publishing industry and saw that it was under a lot of stress and pressure. Publishers, in order to succeed, were using larger groups of content contributors than they had in the past.”

He and co-founders Mike Lewis and Nader Aknoukh created a platform where editors can use concepts submitted by contributors and readers to create assignments, manage an editorial calendar, revise drafts and publish articles to simplify the administrative process across multiple sites. The system works with WordPress, Movable Type, Joomla and other popular content management systems.   “If you’re an editor, your focus should be on the content and the editorial vision for your site,” Murdock said.

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Just in time for New Year’s resolutions, U.K.-based publishing platform SubHub has released SubHub Lite, a content management system built on Drupal 7 for publishers who want to turn their websites into a business. Â  While the platform is in Beta testing, the first 2,000 users will get the service free for life. mbStartups asked co-founder Evan Rudowski how indie publishers can benefit from the new publishing platform and got some great tips for monetizing content.

Founded in 2005, SubHub gives non-technical customers the tools for building websites and publishing content online. “WordPress is fantastic,” Rudowski said, “but if you don’t have any tech skills, the plug-ins are a little much for ordinary people.” Â  SubHub’s interface is mostly click and drag and the new solution, SubHub Lite, in addition to greater design flexibility, will also have applications for social media, advertising, subscription payments, e-commerce and community forums.

Rudowski, originally a New Yorker, moved to the UK from Silicon Valley, where he worked at Excite.com during the “Internet 1.0 era,” he said, until he got an offer to work at a new branch in London. “They never sent me a return ticket,” he joked, so Rudowski stayed in Europe even after he left the company and started SubHub. But Rudowski said that 70% of his customers are based in the U.S. “Americans are culturally more entrepreneurial,” he explained, and affordable self-publishing tools seem to jibe well with “the American dream that anybody can start their own business.” Here’s how to make it happen:

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