Charlie Hoehn has spent 16 years in publishing, helping hundreds of authors and selling more than 10 million copies of books. But he knew the traditional process was broken. “Books are really hard,” Charlie said. “I could only take on three authors at a time. The first draft alone usually takes 9 to 12 months and 97% of authors never even finish it.”
Charlie co-founded Author.Inc to fix that. The company helps entrepreneurs write and publish nonfiction books faster than anyone else in the world. What once took months now takes days. Manuscripts that once failed to get finished now appear in less than an hour.
Zapier sits at the heart of it all. By automating editorial workflows, moving files, updating dashboards, and connecting AI with human editors, Author.Inc has built a multimillion-dollar publishing business with just a tiny team, and margins of nearly 70%, in an industry where 40% is considered excellent.
Author.Inc’s results, by the numbers:
Manuscripts drafted in under 1 hour once recordings are available
Publishing timeline cut from 12 months to just days
Team productivity increased 20x, allowing more authors to be served
Company scaled to multimillion-dollar revenue without raising money
Maintained 70% profit margins vs. 40% industry benchmark
Turning recordings into first drafts
The biggest bottleneck in publishing is the first draft. Authors can spend months staring at a blank page, and ghostwriters often need up to a year to deliver something workable. Charlie calls it the stage where “97% of projects fail.”
Author.Inc solved this by combining Zapier, Airtable, and AI. Authors simply drop their audio recordings, rough versions of their book ideas, into the system. From there, Zapier takes over:
Sends files for transcription
Breaks transcripts into chapters with AI
Processes and formats each chapter
Creates the manuscript draft and routes it to the right editorial folder
By automating the process, the company reduced what used to take months into hours. “We consolidated months of ghostwriting into days,” Charlie said. “We can now produce a complete draft in under an hour once recordings are available.”
The impact has been transformative. Authors who once struggled for years to finish a draft can now hold their manuscript within days of starting the process.
Coordinating editorial workflows at scale
Publishing isn’t just about writing drafts. Each manuscript passes through layers of editing, review, and production. Traditionally, this requires entire teams of project managers and coordinators. For a small startup, that overhead could have been crippling.
Instead, Author.Inc uses Zapier to keep operations lean and efficient:
Transcripts and drafts move automatically between Airtable, Google Docs, and editors
Dashboards update instantly with project status
Notifications are sent to editors and authors when tasks are ready
Bottlenecks are eliminated, since workflows progress without manual intervention
“Zapier handles the coordination that used to take multiple full-time people,” Charlie said. “We didn’t need to raise money or hire a big ops team. We stayed lean and profitable.”
This automation-first approach means a small team can deliver the kind of throughput usually reserved for large publishing houses.
Staying lean and profitable
Scaling usually means adding staff, building infrastructure, and raising outside funding. But Author.Inc wanted to grow differently. By relying on Zapier to handle operations, the company avoided traditional overhead while still growing to multimillion-dollar revenue.
Zapier connects AI tools, authors, editors, and publishing platforms, removing the need for manual handoffs. It updates dashboards, sends alerts, and ensures that every part of the process runs without delay. For the team, this meant they could focus on creative and strategic work, not chasing files or updating spreadsheets.
The payoff is clear: margins of nearly 70% in an industry where 40% is considered excellent. “We didn’t need to raise money or hire a big ops team,” Charlie said. “Zapier made it possible for us to stay lean and profitable.”
Building a full-stack publishing company
Charlie says one of the most impressive workflows is the chapter creation pipeline. Once transcripts are ready, Zapier helps AI break them into sections, processes them with delays to prevent system overload, and generates polished drafts. Depending on where the author is in the system, Zapier routes the output to the correct place, ensuring a seamless editorial flow.
The result is a publishing engine that can handle projects end-to-end — from raw ideas to manuscripts to finished books — with remarkable speed. “We’ve essentially built a full-stack publishing company on Zapier,” Charlie said. “It’s life-changing.”
Results beyond efficiency
What used to be a 12-month process now takes days. What used to have a 97% failure rate now succeeds almost every time. And what used to require entire editorial teams can now be managed by a handful of people.
The business impact is undeniable: more authors served, more books published, and a healthier, more profitable company. But the personal impact matters just as much. “Zapier let me scale my experience helping authors,” Charlie reflects. “Instead of being limited to three clients at a time, I can now help dozens — and do it better.”
About Author.Inc
Company size: 1-10
Industry: Publishing
Location: United States
Zapier empowered Author.Inc to achieve what traditional publishing models could not: speed, scalability, and profitability. As Charlie puts it: “Zapier didn’t just automate a workflow. It helped us build a multimillion-dollar company with margins that most in the industry would consider impossible.”
Charlie Hoehn is a 2025 Zappy Awards winner in the AI Solution Innovator of the Year category.
