The story behind The House of Lit.

In July 2015, I sold my business and found myself in the fortunate position of having enough savings to spend a couple of years writing full-time.

I already had several half-completed books, a stack of ideas and a burning desire to create. My genre was comic fantasy. I had been weaned on Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree and grew into Tolkien and Ursula Le Guin. In my teenage years I had the anticipatory pleasure of waiting for Terry Pratchett’s next release. I was a reader. I devoured books. I started writing my own in my early teens. I produced a comic with an emu versus hunters theme à la Road Runner comedy. It wasn’t very funny. For a while in my twenties my short pieces looking at the humorous side of life as a young mum of toddlers were published in a local rag. I didn’t get paid but I did get a lot of letters from other mums saying how I lightened a dark day, so perhaps I did get paid, in kudos, at least.

It took me seven months to finish my first complete book. It was brilliant. A masterpiece. My beta-readers all told me how brilliant it really was; they couldn’t put it down; the characters came alive and it was sure to be the next Harry Potter. Apart from three who remained silent on the whole subject of my book. When I tentatively enquired whether they had had a chance to read it, they demurred.

My husband told me he was proud of me, had I sent it out to publishers yet? My sister, a published author, warned me about how difficult it would be to get published. No, I thought breezily, not with my prodigious talent. I will be snapped up.

I spent a further three months querying.

Some agents didn’t bother replying, others sent drunk notes of encouragement; we read it, it didn’t gel, it didn’t wow, it’s not for us, BUT carry on, don’t give up. We need more authors.

No, they don’t.

I fell into rabbit holes on Substack about how publishers aren’t publishing new writers, about how you have to have written seven books before they will even read your work, about how they are looking at a slowing market, publishing classics only or publishing only if the author covers the marketing costs.

How utterly shit it is to be an author.

My husband listened to me moaning and said, “So, you aren’t going to earn any money?”

“Let me keep trying,” I said, and I wrote short stories, one a day, for a month and sent them off to competitions, to magazines.

Oh God. So many rejections.

Then, joy, one of my pieces got somewhere, through to the second round of a prestigious prize. The Bridport. Holiest of holy prizes, golden beam, well, pinprick, of light at the end of my resident rabbit hole.

I can write! I told my failing ambition. Despite every editor indicating otherwise, someone, somewhere, liked something that I wrote.

Meanwhile, I discovered that I had run out of reading matter. Yes, genuinely. I had read everything that my favourite genre had to offer. Some of it I hated but I still read it. Some of it I loved and bought every book by the same author only to find, no, I just didn’t find everything else as good.

There must be more, I thought. I began looking at self-published works. I scoured the markets for more comic fantasy, and I began to notice how bad some of these self-published books were; there were books entirely generated by AI, with no character expression, no variability of prose and little imagination. I found books where the author didn’t even complete the story but published anyway, I found books that had little or no sentence structure, no grammar or spelling checking and sometimes, deep, deep in a pile of unedited trash, I found a gem.

There must be an easier way to unearth these.

That’s where this website began.

So, to all the underappreciated authors who have been disillusioned and let down by traditional publishing. I give to you the first, as far as I can tell, website that sorts your book from the half-hearted clutter that is filling up the book repositories of self-publishing sites.

I have designed the algorithm to judge your book in a way that separates your skill and effort from AI-generated dross, and also from authors who couldn’t be bothered to proofread their own work.

It’s not foolproof. AI is going to get better, it’s going to get harder to detect, but I’ll keep refining and testing it. If you feel that your book doesn’t have the score that you expect, feel free to email me and I will check that it hasn’t been unfairly judged.

Please upload your book for free. You will receive an email with a literary score. Feel free to edit your book and re-upload if you wish, or not. It’s up to you.

There are costs involved with running the site, not least, the hefty percentage taken by the payment provider, as well as the processing cost of the algorithm and hosting. I don’t want to irritate you with ads. I hate them and I am sure that you do. I don’t sell any of your data; it’s used only, with your permission, to analyse who is accessing my site and when. I use this to help me make the most of the money that I spend getting awareness of the site out there. And I take a piece of your profit. Sorry.

Unlike some other sites (I won’t name them; they’re much, much bigger than me), I don’t tie you in or take any of your rights. You’re free to publish and unpublish your work wherever and however you like.

The only thing I do do is set a price for your book; I think £2 to £5 is fair for an ebook.

You can argue, I’ll listen, but I probably won’t change that. At least, not for the time being.

Anyway, good luck.