Unless you have been under a rock, it would be pretty hard not to have noticed the impact of the global pandemic. Unfortunately, like a lot of businesses, MyManuscripts has also been severely effected. Despite a really positive negotiation with an investor in 2020, the investor was unable to secure the funding they agreed was needed to take the business to where it would be a world class digital service for authors, literary agents and publishers.
Whilst this has been a massively disappointing outcome, it has given us some time to reflect on what we think the market requires when it comes to the creation, submission, review and feedback of manuscripts. Further, the global pandemic has created some significant shifts in the way we live. More of us than ever are reading and the digitisation of certain elements of our daily lives have been many and wide-ranging and offer us further insights into how we interact going forward.
In our little patch of the digital world, we think that we now actually have a greatly enhanced understanding of the relationship between authors and their writing, authors and literary agents and finally, authors and their relationship with publishers.
Further, we think we understand more about presenting data in a digitised way and we believe that there will be huge benefits to publishers in particular if we get this right. We genuinely believe we can help them find that publishable manuscript – that ‘needle in the haystack’.
To this end, we are now in negotiations with several investors and whilst these are in progress, we have decided to temporarily shutdown the operation. The platform is not going away but we feel that until such times as we can start offering greater value, it would be best to take a break and focus on what we believe will be a great product going forward.
So, stay tuned. We will start to blog more in this interim period and will keep you updated on what we hope will be a grand re-opening!
Regards, Norm