LetsAuthor (www.letsauthor.com) is an independent publishing house based in Bengaluru, with a strong and fast-growing list of titles. It was set up as a platform for authors to collaborate with peers and co-author books.
Its founder, Saumita Banerjee envisioned the start-up as one that empowers authors to bring their ideas to life. At LetsAuthor, the authors come from various walks of life, and also from across continents. The team strives toward publishing books to high editorial and production standards. LetsAuthor publishes in the areas of popular science; business & management; mind, body & spirit; lifestyle; general non-fiction, as well as in fiction (short stories and anthologies), and books for children and young adults.
Quite a diverse list of subjects for a publishing house that is still in its start-up phase. But this diversity is only a reflection of Saumita’s own diverse interests. She is an Entrepreneur and a technology enthusiast with experience across Industrial R&D, Technology Analysis, and more recently, Book Publishing. Saumita is an ME, PhD in Biotechnology and is an alumnus of premiere Indian institutes BITS Pilani and IIT Kharagpur.
A chance conversation that Saumita had with the CEO of a leading Open Innovation company is how the seeds of LetsAuthor were sown. He had spent years working in the area of innovation and had a lot to share. He wanted to write a book but what he didn’t have was the time to write the entire book all by himself.
Like the name of the company suggests, Saumita decided to turn writing from a solitary pursuit into a collaborative exercise. Today over 80 authors are collaborating to write their books on the ‘LetsAuthor’ platform, with constant support from their Commissioning Editors, and their Community Manager. The publishing house currently has 15 books at various stages of development. More authors are signing up for the platform every day, thus validating the idea and the need that Saumita had articulated.
Recounting her journey with the I-Win program, Saumita shares that she’s learnt valuable lessons on running a business enterprise. She loved going back to the classroom and cementing her ideas more fruitfully than self-learning would’ve done for her.
Saumita and LetsAuthor deserve amazing success and we wish them just that!
This is one of the the sixteen startups in the current cohort being incubated under I-WIN, I-Venture @ ISB’s flagship program for women-founded and co-founded start-ups.