It started with a question I couldn't answer.

For twelve years I've written my novel for an hour and a half a day. That's all the time I get. So I take it.

I'm not published. I'm a first-time author finishing a series I've been writing for over a decade. As I got close to the end, a question started keeping me up at night that I had somehow never thought to ask: how does anyone find it? How do I tell people this thing exists?

I've spent my whole career on the other side of that problem. Thirty years as an animator and filmmaker — I picked up a camera at ten and never really put it down. The work I've made has helped my clients earn billions of dollars. Part of that career was spent inside a major technology company, where I learned to put creative and data in the same room and find out what actually moves people instead of guessing.

So I made a trailer for my own book.

Watching it back, I couldn't shake one thought. A film trailer gets two minutes to make you feel something before you ever buy a ticket. Why not a novel? Why not mine? Why not yours?

Then it stopped being about my book. Every undiscovered author I spoke to was standing at the same wall: a finished manuscript, a cover they're proud of, and no way to make anyone look.

So I started a company with my best friend.

Davy grew up in Southern California, around commercials and film his whole life, and spent his career building businesses and building them well. He has the eye for this and the discipline to make it a real company rather than a good idea. Together we decided to bring cinematic trailers to the undiscovered authors of America — and to price them so that anyone with a finished book has a shot.

Why we're called The 1450

Around 1450, Gutenberg finished his printing press, and stories stopped belonging only to those who could afford to have them copied by hand. It changed the world.

We are trying to do the same. Give every author a chance to be seen.

What we're actually here for

Someday an author nobody had heard of is going to tell us that the trailer is what finally made people look. That's the goal of The 1450. Everything else — the studio, the technology, the society on our homepage — exists to make that sentence happen more often.