In our early days, we lived and worked together in Bali and Peru. These days, Publishizer is headquartered in Amsterdam, with offices in New York and Michigan.
Co-founder
Lee has spent the past 5 years merging technology with book publishing as a literary agent and entrepreneur. His recent book deals include The Business of Influence by marketing podcaster Neal Schaffer (HarperCollins), That One Cigarette by award-winning Hollywood screenwriter Stu Krieger (Harvard Square Editions), Live Big by investor and business coach Ajit Nawalkha (BenBella Books), and Arthritis Foodie by Instagram influencer Emily Johnson (Hachette).
Head of Engineering
Tobias is a book and music lover. And he loves great and reliable solutions on the web, that’s why he built the Publishizer app right from the beginning. Being a full stack developer and project lead for over a decade now he’s always looking for the right technologies to push Publishizer forward.
Master of Contests
Jesse, the most recent addition to the Publishizer team, sits squarely at the intersection of publishing and promotion – having signed two publishing deals on two different continents and navigated the world of becoming a best-selling author twice. It has been his honor to publish 100+ books during his 6-year tenure as founder & publisher of Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press. His role consists heavily of conceptualizing new contest ideas for the platform based on current world events and trends and helps to manage payments and finances.
Agent
Julia works with history, philosophy, and literary fiction. Recent deal includes IKIGAI by Chiemi Souen (Brandylane). Since early age she collects Russian classics and gets mesmerized by Japanese fiction touch, while enjoying satirical books such as A Confederacy of Dunces by J. K. Toole. Julia comes from the Project Management industry and she’s a polyglot: Spanish and Catalan are both her native languages, though she’s also fluent in English, French, Russian and Italian. You can either find her digging around in a record store or at a library in the foreign authors section. Favorite book: The Egyptian by Mika Waltari.
Agent
Ben thinks some of the best conversations revolve around books. He enjoys reading aloud The Chronicles of Narnia to his daughter. He loves reading fantasy because it reminds him of the magic and beauty in this world. Ben comes from a background in the magazine industry, coffee, and photography. One of his favorite books is The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Publishizer started as a crowdfunding platform for books, and was soon accepted into the 500 Startups accelerator in Mountain View, California. Publishizer, Inc. was born on May 22, 2015.
We realised early on that authors were stuck between a rock and a hard place: traditional publishing rejected 96% of book ideas, but self-publishing was both insanely expensive and didn’t help great books get discovered. Publishers started taking notice of our authors, who were raising substantial amounts of money through pre-orders, and were able to offer authors a fairer deal. Our New York City office was opened in Brooklyn in 2017.
In 2018, Publishizer started landing traditional publishing deals for authors. With an injection of funding from Rockstart and Arches Capital in Netherlands, we opened our Amsterdam office. Publishizer BV was incorporated in March 2019.
Today, Publishizer is revolutionizing how books get published. We crowdfund books, negotiate publishing deals, and sell foreign rights. Through our team of literary scouts and agents, we identify great book ideas, enable them through crowdfunding, and spread them by negotiating traditional and independent publishing deals that reach the most readers.
We believe thousands of great books go unpublished or undiscovered every year. As a crowdfunding literary agency and non-traditional approach to publishing deals, Publishizer gives up royalties to focus on technology and pre-orders.
Every year, over 1,000,000 book ideas are rejected by traditional publishing. Through the use of technology, data, and a bit of automation, our agents help to ensure more authors get discovered by readers and publishers.
We live by three values: Quality, Customer Success, and Innovation. We're avid book lovers, but we believe there's more to life than books. We're an international team who live at the intersection of publishing and technology.