Marlborough, MA — 2026-10-21
Start a Press Opens to Its First Ten Publishers: an AI Agent Handles the Production and Paperwork, and the Publisher Keeps Every Decision
From eBookIt.com founder Bo Bennett, PhD, the white-label platform makes the licensee the publisher of record on every book, distributes through the licensee's own store accounts, and returns every proofreading change to the author as a tracked change to accept or reject.
MARLBOROUGH, Mass. — Archieboy Holdings today opened Start a Press (startapress.com), a white-label publishing platform for book coaches, ghostwriters, small presses and organizations that already work with authors. Each licensee runs a real publishing company under its own name, while an AI agent, named by the publisher, does the production and the paperwork: formatting, cover concepts, ebook conversion, metadata, distribution, quarterly royalty statements and author tax forms. The publisher chooses the authors and books, sets the prices, and approves quotes, contracts, discounts and refunds.
The platform is built around who holds control. The licensee is the publisher of record on every title and buys its own ISBNs. Books are distributed through the licensee's own IngramSpark account and, optionally, its own KDP account, so store payments go to the publisher's bank. Proofreading and copyediting come back to the author as tracked changes to accept or reject, every title passes a quality check before it reaches a store, and nothing is published without the approval of both the publisher and the author. The agent never commits the publisher to money or makes a promise to an author without asking.
"Plenty of people who could run an excellent small press never start one, because of the list: trim sizes, ISBNs, distributor accounts, royalty statements, W-8BENs and 1099s," said Bo Bennett, PhD, founder of eBookIt.com. "An AI agent is very good at that list. What it shouldn't do is make a publisher's decisions, so on this platform it doesn't. The press owns the books and the accounts, the publisher makes the calls, and the author approves every change to their manuscript."
Day to day, the agent answers author email in the press's name, drafts quotes for new enquiries, runs each book's project, imports store sales reports every quarter, applies each author's contract and any tax withholding to produce royalty statements for the publisher to approve, collects W-9 and W-8BEN forms, and prepares year-end 1099 and 1042-S forms. AI-narrated audiobooks are produced on the publisher's own AuthorVoices account and distributed through its own InAudio account to Spotify, Apple, Google, Kobo and libraries. The agent runs on the publisher's own ChatGPT account, billed by OpenAI without markup.
Start a Press states its limits plainly. It does not offer human editing, human narration or translation; authors who want a hand-designed cover are referred to a cover design partner. Books written with AI are supported only when they are built from the author's own material, such as notes, interviews, recordings or drafts, and not generated from a one-line prompt, and AI use is disclosed to the stores as their rules require.
"This is for people who already have authors who trust them: a coach whose clients finish books, a ghostwriter, a small press buried in royalty paperwork," Bennett said. "If you only want to publish a few books of your own, you don't need a publishing company, and our own site will tell you so."
Plans are priced by the number of titles in the catalogue, with no limit on authors: Starter at $99 a month for up to 99 titles, Growth at $199 a month for 100 to 499 titles, and Press at $349 a month for 500 titles and up, with two months free on annual plans. Setup is $1,500 and includes bringing over up to 100 existing titles with their files, metadata and royalty history. The first ten publishers, called founding licensees, pay $500 for setup and keep their monthly price locked while they stay within their plan's title range. One founding place has been taken and nine remain. A public founders' log at startapress.com/founders-log records each feature a founding licensee has asked for and when it was built for every press.
Publishers exploring the idea can try a free Name Your Press tool, which suggests press names and checks .com availability, read a guide to starting a publishing company, and see a working demo press at startapress.com.
About Start a Press
Start a Press is a white-label publishing platform from Archieboy Holdings, LLC, of Marlborough, Massachusetts, led by Bo Bennett, PhD, founder of the publishing service eBookIt.com. The publishing tools behind the platform have run Archieboy's own publishing services for years. Founding licensee applications: startapress.com
Media contact: Bo Bennett, partnerships@archieboy.com
