Self-publishing platform secures funding for AI-powered publishing
Publishing figures Stefan von Holtzbrinck, the owner of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which owns Macmillan, and former Penguin CEO Michael Lynton are among those investing in Inkitt, a self-described data-driven publishing company which has raised US$37 million (A$56.5m) to fund an expansion into AI-generated books, audiobooks, video, and games, reported Publishers Weekly (PW).
Since launching in Berlin in 2013 as a platform for self-published writers, the company has attracted a total of US$117 million (A$179m) in investments, with the Financial Times this month naming it the eighth fastest-growing company in Europe and the number one fastest-growing company in Germany. In 2022 it opened new headquarters in San Francisco.
Like Wattpad, Inkitt takes in self-published authors and publishes user-generated content, with readers able to access free stories, subscribe to new content, and follow and create a community around an author, with much of the work falling into mass-market genres including crime, erotica, fantasy, romance, science fiction and thrillers. ‘Inkitt, then, crunching data and employing proprietary algorithms, determines which work has the most commercial potential,’ said PW. ‘That work is then promoted and sold on the company’s Galatea platform.’
Inkitt said it has 33 million users and, on its website, claimed that ‘one of every two authors published on Galatea go on to become bestsellers’. ‘The company does not reveal by what metric they determine a book to be a bestseller, though the publisher states that it has had titles that have generated more than $1 million in revenue’, said PW, which reported the company plans to use its new financing to develop AI-generated and personalised fiction using large language models such as ChatGPT and Anthropic, and DeepL for machine translation, as well as to develop AI-generated audiobooks, videos, and games. It already offers AI-powered features, including a ‘Choose Your Own Narrator’ audiobook option, character chatbot, graphic novels generator, and summary tool.
Category: International news
