Marketplace to commission custom books from experts
Problem
Readers who need a book on a very specific topic often find nothing exists — no publisher will commission it. There is no marketplace connecting people willing to pay for a book on a niche subject with a network of authors and experts who could write it.
Opportunity
A commissioning platform where readers post a topic and budget, vetted authors/experts bid, and the platform handles evaluation, writing milestones and delivery (ebook/print-on-demand). AI-assisted drafting could lower production costs for niche commissions.
Market analysis
The supply side already exists (Reedsy lists 250+ vetted ghostwriters; Upwork and Fiverr sell ghostwritten books daily); what's missing is demand aggregation, which is exactly the hardest half to bootstrap. Two-sided marketplace economics with high ticket prices and months-long delivery cycles make this very heavy for a solo builder.
Market · Niche readers, researchers, and organizations needing ultra-specific books; demand is real but fragmented and unproven at marketplace scale.
Pricing · Professional ghostwriting is high-ticket, negotiated per project; fulfillment via print-on-demand (Blurb) covers the physical side.
Pros
- + Genuine unmet demand for hyper-specific books no publisher will touch.
- + AI-assisted drafting plausibly lowers production cost enough to widen the market.
- + Print-on-demand removes inventory risk on fulfillment.
Cons
- − Classic chicken-and-egg: no authors without commissions, no readers without authors.
- − High ticket size and multi-month cycles mean low volume and slow marketplace liquidity.
- − Adjacent incumbents (Reedsy, Upwork) could add a commissioning board trivially.
Existing / similar tools
Source
r/SomebodyMakeThis (Reddit)
This marketplace already exists in pieces: Reedsy has a large pool of vetted ghostwriters and the general freelance platforms will happily sell a ghostwritten book today, so the imagined platform’s only new component is the demand-side flip where readers post topics and budgets. That flip is also the hardest part to bootstrap, because authors will not wait around where commissions are rare and readers will not post where nobody bids. The unit economics compound the difficulty: a serious niche book is a multi-month, high-ticket engagement, so even a healthy take rate yields few transactions and small absolute revenue. The realistic solo-builder version is a curated agency or curation layer that matches commissions to vetted writers, with AI-assisted drafting shrinking costs, rather than an open two-sided marketplace that needs liquidity it cannot buy.