We’re live!

The site was ready. We were ready. And we think writers with manuscripts are more than ready! So we took the site live, just this morning. We’re finishing up the details with more publishers and we look forward to adding them to the site very soon.
We’ve built the car. Come on in and kick the [...]

What we’ve been up to

It’s been awhile since our last post, but that doesn’t mean things haven’t been happening here. Quite the opposite! Since our last post, we’ve met with one of the major publishing conglomerates in the U.S., and we’re happy to announce that at least one of their big imprints—one that’s normally closed to unsolicited submissions–is on [...]

Outsiders’ #1 question

When we tell people outside of publishing about how Creative Byline uses software to match up manuscripts and editors, they invariably ask, “You mean something like that doesn’t already exist?” To them, using technology in this way is a no-brainer.
While there is a market for manuscripts, until now, there hasn’t been a marketplace. There hasn’t been a centralized place–real or [...]

Publishing industry research

We spent about two years researching the industry. We wanted a thorough understanding of the traditional (paper) submission process so we could come up with an electronic process that satisfies everyone’s needs. Here are a few of the things we learned.

Publishers say they are able to discard 80 – 85% of unsolicited manuscripts within a [...]

The guy behind the idea

Creative Byline founder and CEO Brad MacLean didn’t exactly dream of working in publishing. He got an engineering degree from University of Michigan but has never held an engineering job. (“It taught me a way of thinking and approaching problems,” he says, when asked why he bothered.) He worked in the computer industry for awhile [...]

All about first readers

Someone recently asked us who our first readers are.  Eighty percent of first readers have some type of advance writing or literature degree. They work at the direction of Creative Byline’s editorial director using specific criteria, which we’ll talk more about in a later post. We’ll supplement those readers with readers who have specialties. Most large [...]

The beauty of Creative Byline for editors

It’s audacious of us to think we can change the submission process—or it would be, if we hadn’t done our homework. But we have. And we know that editors really do want to receive manuscripts, but only certain kinds of manuscripts, i.e., the ones they happen to be looking for at the moment. So we [...]

How to submit a manuscript using Creative Byline (when it goes live)

Creative Byline’s online manuscript submission service won’t launch until later this fall, but when it does, here’s how the process will work for writers.
Step 1: Join Creative Byline (free, for a limited time) and post your writer profile—whatever you want editors to know about you. You can post a bio, credentials, awards and memberships, and (if you’ve already been [...]

Why the manuscript submission process is tough on everyone—go ahead and vent

The submission process is every writer’s favorite whipping boy. Writers complain about having to wait six to 12 months for a response to their submissions, and when a response finally does arrive, it rarely contains any feedback about how to make the manuscript stronger. Furthermore, writers are frustrated by the lack of access as more [...]

How it all began: Creative Byline

Here’s how Creative Byline began: Somebody whined.
That’s right—somebody complained about how outdated the manuscript submission process was. Brad MacLean listened patiently and with great empathy to the rant, at first only because said whiner was his wife.
But the longer he listened, the more interested Brad, a former executive at one of America’s most admired companies [...]