Many if not most publishers pretend that it’s 1998—and act accordingly. As such, they rely almost exclusively upon stalwarts such as email and Microsoft Word. Maybe a few adventurous ones use Google Sheets and Docs.

Yawn.

RacketHub

Racket Publishing takes a decidedly different tack. Its clients use RacketHub—a powerful, proprietary, and customizable book management system. Compared to the antiquated tools that most traditional publishers use, RacketHub represents a quantum leap forward. It helps with all facets of the publishing process. It’s a single, integrated solution for a book’s entire lifecycle, including research, planning, project management, marketing, communications, and collaboration.

The result: Clients and partners spend less time on administrative matters and more time on producing a professional book. Oh, and they save a great deal of money, too.

Although RacketHub excels on many fronts, it cannot fulfill every conceivable function. That’s simply not possible.

• General communication and collaboration: As hundreds of millions of people already know, Zoom works well for video calls.
• Scheduling: For finding mutually convenient times, Calendly rocks.
• Content creation: Racket’s über-talented designers lay out books via Adobe InDesign. Clients can use tools such as Canva to create mockups of figures and covers of their books to save on related costs.
• AI: Used the right way, artificial intelligence can make things easier. At a high level, it can save time. For instance, Squadcast, Otter.ai, and their ilk can quickly transcribe and summarize interviews. Using tools such as these is a no-brainer. Let’s not overdo it, though. It’s foolish and even irresponsible to use AI as a primary writing or research source. If everyone can access it, then how will it make your book any different than myriad others? Ditto for Gemini, Claude 3, and the rest of the lot. (Pro tip: It won’t.) If this concern doesn’t bother you, then we probably shouldn’t work together. Racket clients want to write books that really matter.

A Final Word

As a first-time author, you may be tempted to manage your book-related project via email, Microsoft Excel, or Google Sheets. How hard can it be, right?

Don’t.

Doing so is a recipe for disaster—and Racket won’t be a party to it. Writing a quality text is hard enough; there’s no sense in amplifying the difficulty by refusing to embrace modern applications. Tech matters. If someone says otherwise, run.