About byline.pub

byline.pub helps readers discover indie books by the people who wrote them.

Authors can sign in, create a public profile, and add books they want readers to find. Those profiles and book listings can then appear in the byline.pub directory, where readers can browse authors, books, genres, links, and other public book information in one place.

It does not replace an author website, newsletter, storefront, or social account. It is another doorway in.

You should still have your own website.

Your author website is your home base. It is where readers can learn more about you, join your mailing list, read your updates, and follow everything you are building.

byline.pub is different. It is a shared indie-author directory where readers can discover authors and books they may not already know.

Think of it this way:

Your website is your house. byline.pub is a signpost on the main road.

Most book platforms keep author profiles, book listings, reviews, and discovery tools locked inside their own systems.

byline.pub is experimenting with a more open approach.

Instead of creating another profile that only works in one place, the long-term idea is to help authors create public book and author records that can be reused by other compatible sites, tools, and directories.

The practical version is less copy-paste, more reusable book data, and more roads leading readers back to the author.

That is the goal.

byline.pub is being built so author profiles and book records can become portable public records, rather than another profile trapped inside one website.

That means other compatible sites, tools, or directories could eventually read and display the same public author and book information, while still pointing back to the author.

byline.pub may be one directory, but the data does not have to live and die here.

byline.pub is built on the AT Protocol, the same open network used by apps like Bluesky and Gander.

When an author creates a profile or book listing through byline.pub, those public records can be written back to the author's own AT Protocol account data. byline.pub then indexes those public records so they can appear in the directory.

The important part is that byline.pub is not the only place that information can exist.

It is meant to help surface it, connect it, and make it easier for readers and future tools to discover.

byline.pub is still early.

Right now, the focus is on building a useful author and book directory, improving the profile and book management experience, and testing how open author records should work in practice.

The longer-term goal is bigger than one website: a small, practical piece of open publishing infrastructure that is author-controlled, reader-friendly, and useful beyond byline.pub itself.

byline.pub is developed by Jason Butterfield, an independent author and software developer building publishing tools around open records, author control, portable metadata, and practical discovery.

Mostly, I'm trying to make the kind of thing I wish existed already.