Tertulia, the book discovery and e-commerce platform that launched in 2022 with the aim of recentering editorial recommendations over algorithms, is gearing up to launch Tertulia for Authors (TFA), aimed at helping "authors to create and manage their online presence," on November 18, per an announcement.
Spearheaded by Tertulia CEO and cofounder Sebastian Cwilich and cofounder Lynda Hammes, TFA's flagship product is an automated site-building tool which, since beta-launching in April 2025, has garnered more than 10,000 accounts and 3,500 paying subscribers. Using the data stores Tertulia can access through its partnership with Ingram Content Group, which handles fulfillment and distribution for Tertulia, the tool can generate a basic author landing page, including subpages for bio, reviews, contact info, and blog posts, from a single ISBN number.
According to Cwilich, TFA was an "outgrowth" of the work the company was already doing on the e-commerce side to coordinate pre-order campaigns for authors whose publishers were not facilitating them.
"They're in some ways two sides of the same coin," Cwilich said. "We have a lot of people looking for books, and a lot of authors creating websites" that can help strengthen their connections with current and future readers.
So far, the site-builder, which Tertulia will launch with Ingram at a demo webinar later this month, has been popular among beta-testers, with Cwilich citing an "off the charts" 35-40% conversion rate of free trial users to paying subscribers. Cwilich said that most of the interest TFA has seen so far has been inbound, with publishers who, looking to kickstart or boost their marketing work, recommend the tool to their authors.
On the TFA site-builder, authors who enter their ISBN info can see their homepage materialize nearly instantly, a "magical" moment that Cwilich compared to how authors might feel when they hold the first print copy of their book. He also noted the low barrier of entry for customizing the resulting site.
"Squarespace is a complex product because it's made to be table to build a website for anything," Cwilich said. "We are built only to create websites for authors, so we can simplify it in a lot of places." TFA's tool, for example, requires no knowledge of HTML to use, instead providing authors with pre-loaded templates whose content and basic design components—such as color schemes and the order of the content blocks—they can finetune.
Hammes, whose teams oversees customer success, said that TFA also hosts Zoom support sessions for authors who need extra guidance, as well as more specialized information sessions teaching users how to integrate multimedia content into their sites and optimize their web discoverability.
On its book discovery platform, Tertulia gets around 100,000 unique visitors per month, around 10,000 of which are paying members who receive discounts on book purchases, according to Cwilich. For $25 annually, members also claim a share in the Tertulia Co-Op, which holds a partial ownership stake in the parent company, which increases in proportion to users' book purchases. Hammes told PW that the average Tertulia member spends $139 annually on book purchases.
Hammes said that she expects Tertulia's existing audience of readers to be excited by the idea of directly supporting their favorite authors—a possibility that the author portal opens up. She foresees this particularly helping self-published authors, whose books, lacking mainstream distribution, sometimes don't make it to Tertulia's digital shelves.
"People who are members of the Tertulia Co-Op are on average kind of idealistic and buy into the idea of supporting a healthier books ecosystem," Hammes said.
