Open Press Guild.

Coming soon

You write the book.
We'll help it get found.

Free tools and honest numbers for self-publishing authors. Genre trends, keyword guidance, brand checks. Built by one of us, for the questions that arrive after the manuscript is done.

What's on the bench

  1. Brand Check

    In the workshop

    Is your pen name, imprint or brand still free? One search across 92 platforms and 12 domain extensions.

  2. Genre Check

    On the bench

    Is the genre you write in growing, steady or crowded? Monthly snapshots with history, so a trend is a trend.

  3. Keyword Guidance

    On the bench

    Which words pull their weight in which genres, drawn from what readers are buying, not from a list someone sells.

Why this exists

I write books and publish them myself. The writing is the part I signed up for. The rest arrived uninvited: which category to list in, which seven keywords to type into a box, whether "cozy" in a title helps or hurts, what a sales rank means, why a book that sold well in March sells nothing in May, and whether any of that is my fault or the market's.

I spent more hours on those questions than on some of my books. The information exists, but it is scattered across forums, paid courses, and tools priced for publishers with a staff. Most of what I learned, I learned too late to help the book I was learning it for.

Open Press Guild is the shelf I wish I had found on day one. It does the looking so you can keep writing.

Writers should write.
Every hour spent decoding a marketplace is an hour not spent on the next chapter. The tools here give those hours back.
A good book deserves a megaphone.
Readers have to find it, and finding it depends on choices that are easy to get wrong and hard to see. We measure the market so you make those choices on purpose.
Evidence over folklore.
Self-publishing advice is mostly stories about what worked once for someone else. We collect the numbers every month, keep the history, and say when a number is an estimate.
Free first.
The questions every author asks should have free answers. Paid tools pay for the collecting and go deeper, but the basics stay open to anyone with a manuscript and a plan.
A guild, not a gatekeeper.
Nobody here decides what you should write. The guild shares what it learns so each of us starts a little further ahead than the last.