Helsinki-based Get Lost has announced the alpha launch of BookID, an AI-powered manuscript analysis tool designed to help authors and publishers position their work in the market with insights that have traditionally been available only to traditional publishers.
The tool analyzes uploaded manuscripts using what Get Lost calls a "purpose-built fiction taxonomy with hundreds of analytically defined sub-genres." BookID generates reports that include "emotional pattern analysis, audience personas, recommendations for market positioning, and BISAC category guidance."
"Our tool shifts the balance of power back to the writers," said cofounder Steve El-Sharawy. "For me, the most exciting part of using this technology is enabling writers maximum creative freedom."
Get Lost was founded by Cramer, El-Sharawy, Nick Moreno, and Eero Jyske, a team with experience in television, mobile games, data-driven creative production, AI, and audience psychology. Cramer said the company has trained the system on literary fiction across multiple subgenres, from romance to Dan Brown-style thrillers.
The company said all manuscript analysis is handled on its own offline hardware, and manuscripts are not used to train external AI models.
"We work with local models," James Cramer, cofounder of Get Lost, told PW. "We don't work with ChatGPT. We don't work with Claude. Everything is stored on our own hardware."
The company, which is initially working with self-published writers, said marketing remains the number one challenge for independent authors despite self-publishing growing at more than three times the pace of traditional publishing.
In 2023, more than 2.6 million books were self-published, and indie authors captured over 40 percent of global ebook sales, nearly $9 billion, according to Cramer's research.
"Our goal as a team is simply to get more people to discover and read more books they love," Cramer continued. "One of the major hurdles to achieving that goal is an industry-wide data drought. BookID is our first step towards fixing that."
Cramer said the company's longer-term vision includes taking best-practices from mobile gaming development, a field in which Cramer previously worked, and translating those to the publishing industry. These include creating automated marketing campaigns and broader testing of marketing materials, a practice Cramer called "burst campaigns" to identify the best-performing promotional materials before committing to a larger marketing spend.
