Authory. The tool for writers that no-one told you you needed.
Ah, good ol’ Facebook targeted advertising.
The majority of the time, my newsfeed is full of repetitive and pointless posts (looking at you “budget vs reality” memes) — or local “which station has diesel?!” posts.
The adverts are usually even more pointless.
I mean, as a web designer, why am I being targeted by web design companies..? Completely ridiculous.
But, now and again, something interesting pops up.
Around two months ago, I saw an advert telling me that I could back up all of my writing in an easy, smart way. Cool.
A few weeks later, I saw it again — and decided to look into it a bit further.
Authory is the all-in-one solution for extraordinary journalists/writers/bloggers, according to their home page.
That’ll take some living up to.
I wasn’t convinced. I don’t see myself as extraordinary, but I did once write for the Metro newspaper and a number of other websites about my favourite football team. I also wrote some other pieces, but they’re long confined to the regions of the archive pages I’m unlikely to ever find them.
But, with an itch that needed to be scratched, I began exploring Authory further.
The information pages tell me that it can be used for backing up your work (who doesn’t do that?? *hiding my guilty face*), as well as providing an option to sign readers up to an email list.
This is beginning to get more interesting — especially as, now my boys are in school, I’ve a desire to get back into writing once again.
Over the years since I wrote for Metro, the website has changed numerous times — I don’t even know where to begin to look, now, for the archives — and the login credentials I once used are no longer functional.
But I really want to get a copy of the articles that I once wrote — if only for nostalgic purposes. Only, I don’t have time to go searching and scrolling through for 100+ articles and copy/paste/timestamp each and every one.
Oh, hello Authory.
During the sign-up process, you drop in your name/pseudonym/bylines and the website(s) your content is published on.
A few hours later, sitting in your Authory account, are those articles.
The concept is so simplistically beautiful.
For a subscription fee less than a couple of coffees each month, your account will remain active and continue to pull your articles from the original website in to your Authory account — all completely legitimately and with no concerns around copyright.
A minimalist-yet-beautiful public-facing profile page allows you to focus attention on your work — marking articles as private or publicly available; organise and categorise them however you see fit.
The social media integration is a useful feature, too. I had no idea that an article I published over two years ago would still receive hits — the Authory dashboard tells me that last week alone it received three visits from Facebook.
Now, that might not sound like much (and, lets be honest, it won’t break any records) but think about how you could use that reporting to capitalise on your future writing. Oh, and no need to log in to Google to get that report!
Working with bloggers, as well as blogging myself, I can see how useful this whole concept will be.
No more emails back-and-forth and frantically pulling copies of blog posts into PDFs to send to editors and social media managers when brands need a copy of your previous work before they’ll work with you.
Because no one has time for that.
“Can you send us an example of your previous work, please?”
“Sure — here’s a link: https://authory.com/MattMeir”
“Ryan Shawcross is moving to Inter Miami. Have you written about him?”
“Yup. You can see some articles here: https://authory.com/MattMeir?collection=_all&text=shawcross&view=thumbnail&sort=relevance_DESC”
Sidenote: OMG! All of the articles are searchable from a simple term and can even be publication-specific!
If you’re a writer or you have written content “out there” on the interweb, I can’t recommend Authory strongly enough to help you not only with organising a portfolio, but also with backing up your work just in case that website or service goes offline.
And, if that awkward editor still needs a PDF of one of your articles? No problem. You can download a copy to send them directly from your dashboard.
Like I said. Simple.
Disclosure: By writing this article, I may be eligible for a one-year subscription to Authory for free. The views expressed are my own without influence from Authory or it’s representatives. As I’m a subscriber, by using my referral link you can sign-up to a one-month free trial (usually 14-days) to test Authory for yourself.
