iAuthor

» see iauthor.uk.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Adam Kolczynski had already run a small publishing services outfit, Polybius Books, when he started asking people in the industry what its single worst problem was. The answer came back almost unanimously: discoverability. Writing the book was hard and printing it was solved; what nobody had an answer for was the gap between a finished book and the reader who would have loved it and will never hear that it exists.

iAuthor Ltd was incorporated in London on 18 January 2012 as his answer. After a few months in beta the platform opened to all authors and publishers on 26 July 2013. What you got was a wall of covers rather than a list of titles, and the organizing unit was a theme instead of a genre. Real examples, from the site's own copy: books that lay bare the human condition, novels with a deeply flawed protagonist. Every theme was assembled by users. There were no editor's picks, which was deliberate, and which is also why nobody who had not seen the site could be told what it was.

Underneath the covers were two pieces of actual machinery. LitSampler was a reader that let a visitor take a run at the first pages of something without leaving the page, and there was a dashboard where an author or a publisher could watch how their book was performing. The business model was native advertising, which is visible in an unexpected place: the company's registered trade classification at Companies House is 73110, advertising agencies. A book site filed itself as an ad agency because that was the honest description of where the money was meant to come from.

Then it went quiet. The last accounts the company ever filed were made up to 31 January 2020, the English Wikipedia article still describes the site as active, and somebody eventually hung a maintenance tag on that article complaining that nothing had been updated for eight years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the discoverability bet ~

The bet was reasonable and it has been lost by better funded companies. If genre is too coarse to find anything with, and if algorithmic recommendation only works once you have an enormous pile of behavior to compute over, then a human-curated middle layer looks like the obvious missing piece. The trouble is that readers will happily browse a beautiful wall of covers and then buy the book somewhere else, and an advertising business needs either volume that a curated site cannot reach or prices that small publishers cannot pay.

None of this came anywhere near me. iAuthor sold itself to people trying to move English-language books in Britain, through The Bookseller and through a partnership with Book Aid International, so its whole audience had a postcode. I know the site exists because its hostname stopped resolving and turned up in a sweep of dead domains, eight years after the last press coverage of it.

~ the paperwork ~

Most of the small sites on this list died without anybody writing anything down. iAuthor is the opposite case, and it is worth laying out because the dates are exact and free to anybody. On 5 December 2020 the company filed a DS01, the form for voluntary strike-off. On 15 December 2020 the registrar published the first Gazette notice, which is the public warning that an objection can still be lodged. On 16 March 2021 it published the final one: dissolved via voluntary strike-off.

That route matters. Voluntary strike-off is what a solvent company does when the people running it have decided to stop, and it is not what happens when creditors force the issue. Nobody was chasing iAuthor. Somebody sat down with the guidance notes, paid a small fee to ask the state to remove the company from the register, and the state did it in three months.

What it leaves behind is a shutdown notice in the driest register there is. Nobody wrote a goodbye and no author who had built a theme on the site got a reply to anything, because there was nothing to reply to except two Gazette entries and a one-page PDF.

~ what kept answering ~

The website outlived the company by three years and change. The Internet Archive has iauthor.uk.com serving pages of eleven to thirteen kilobytes as late as 2 June 2024, and by 30 September 2024 the same address answers with 1,377 bytes, the size a parking page comes in at. By March 2025 it is down to 619 bytes, by August 2025 it is a redirect, and today the hostname does not resolve. The company's other domain gave up the pretense earlier and openly served a file called parking.php. A book that nobody finds and a website that nobody visits fail in the same silence, and one of them had been built specifically to end the other.

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