A not-for-profit publisher
Every industry that stood between a person and an audience has been rebuilt in the last thirty years — classifieds, advertising, music, film, news. Book publishing is the last one still working the old way, and it is the one where the gatekeeping costs us most: not revenue, but which ideas get to exist in public.
GroundSpring Publishing exists to remove the part of publishing that money buys, and to automate the part that skill buys. We are a not-for-profit. We take no rights, no equity in your work, and no cut of your book.
What already happened, in three numbers
US newspaper advertising revenue, from a peak of $48.7 billion in 2000 to $9.8 billion in 2022. The internet did not compete with newspapers for readers. It took the classifieds.
Pew Research Center, Newspapers Fact SheetGoogle advertising revenue in 2024 alone — more than twenty-seven times what every newspaper in America earned from advertising that year. The money did not disappear. It moved.
Alphabet Inc., Form 10-K, FY2024The median book income of a full-time, established American author in 2022. Not the struggling ones. The professionals.
Authors Guild 2023 Author Income SurveyThose three numbers are the whole argument. Publishing did not stop being valuable — it stopped paying the people who make the thing. The case, with sources.
What we do
It is structural editing, copy-editing, typesetting, cover design, metadata, ISBNs, format conversion, distribution set-up across half a dozen retailers, accessibility, an audiobook, a landing page, and the patience to do all of it again when a retailer changes its rules. It is the reason a good book by someone without money stays in a drawer. Every one of those steps is now automatable, and we automate them.
Your copyright, your rights, your list, your readers, your royalties. We are not a publisher that acquires you. We are a machine that publishes you.
Print interior and cover, EPUB, a web edition you can link to, an audiobook, the metadata each store demands in the shape it demands it. Done in hours, not quarters.
No reading fee, no package, no upsell, no “marketing tier”. We are funded as a not-for-profit precisely so that the answer to “can you afford this?” is never the thing that decides.
Books, on us
Free to read in your browser — no account, no email, and nothing to download unless you want to. Surf the AI Wave was written, edited, illustrated, typeset, paginated and published through the pipeline this organisation is built on. The other is a medieval family record set as an illuminated manuscript, and it is here because it is nothing like the first one: when a publisher tells you what it can make, you should be able to open the thing and judge for yourself.
John David Marx · September 2026
On 8 March 1262, outside Strasbourg, a knight rode out of his own line and challenged a knight of the prince-bishop's army to single combat in front of both hosts. His name was Marcus von Eckwersheim, and what the record keeps of him afterwards is just as striking: twenty years on the council of the city he had fought for.
John David Marx · September 2026
New roles. Bigger possibilities. A brighter future. An illustrated guide to the thirteen jobs the AI build-out is creating — from the architects who design the systems to the electricians who power the buildings they live in.
Get in touch
We will send you how the process works, what we need from you, what it costs you (nothing) and what we cannot do. We confirm your email address first, so that nobody can sign you up for anything using an address that is not theirs.
