Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers and a civil rights activist who founded an eponymous publishing company in 2020, has branched into the burgeoning AI publishing space. Lumi, an AI-based platform, is intended to level the publishing playing field for authors and other creatives by providing them with the tools necessary to independently produce, publish, distribute, and market books in both digital and print formats.
“Lumi addresses an unnecessary dependency on gatekeepers that slows creators down,” stated Kaepernick, “Lumi allows creators to get back to what they ultimately want to do: create. The platform empowers creators to work freely and independently, deciding when and how they want to collaborate with others.”
To date, Lumi has raised $4 million in venture capital funding. It will focus initially on comic books and graphic novels, “a market with the need for multiple creative skill sets.” In a release, Seven Seven Six, the venture capital firm providing funding for Kaepernick’s latest initiative, pointed out that the publishing industry is dominated by a few corporations deciding what gets published and when, arguing that this limits the diversity of books being released into the marketplace.
“Lumi aims to open the [publishing industry] funnel, enabling anyone to access storytelling superpowers, ultimately fostering a more inclusive and equitable world,” the release stated. While Luma’s users will create content, the platform will take care of all the logistics of publishing, distributing, and marketing the content, “transforming any creator into a company like Disney.”
Kaepernick noted that Lumi was inspired by his own experiences, both as an author and principal of Kaepernick Publishing—he has written or edited five of the press’s eight releases to date—having to contend with “high production costs, long production timelines, and gatekeeping within the industry.” Such obstacles “generate significant friction for creators, preventing many projects from getting off the ground,” Kaepernick said. By providing this alternative to traditional publishing, as well as to hybrid companies or vanity presses that may exploit writers, he added, “Lumi opens the funnel of creativity to the world, enabling a new wave of diverse and innovative stories to come to life.”
