The Author Directory · a credit page for the authors behind school-published books — opening as authors list themselves

A school can point at the cover. This is the address where it can point at the name.

Every year, schools publish real books — a literary magazine, a class anthology, a centennial history written by a teacher, a staff-written title nobody outside the building ever hears about. The books exist. The credits mostly do not. There is no address where the person who wrote the third story in the anthology can be found, cited, invited, or thanked. The Author Directory is being built to be that address, organised around one question a bare cover cannot answer: who wrote this, and in what role.

It is an early-access address. To be exact: there are no profiles here, no submissions, and nothing listed. It opens as authors list themselves.

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No ratings. No reviews. No ranked order. No paid placement. Those are refusals, not features we have not got to yet — the reasons are set out in full further down this page.

Three people arrive at an address like this, and they arrive holding different things

A directory is only as good as its guess about who is standing at the door. Here is the guess this one is built on, stated plainly enough that you can tell us it is wrong.

The author of a school-published title

A teacher who wrote the district’s hundred-year history. A librarian who edited the anthology. An alum whose first published paragraph was in a litmag in 1998. They arrive holding a real credit with nowhere to live. Their book has no retail catalogue number, so the retail surfaces cannot hold it. Their name sat on a school page that got rebuilt. What they want is unglamorous: a stable place to say “I wrote this, in this role, in this year,” that they control and that outlives a content-management migration.

The contributor who is not the cover author

An anthology has one cover and many writers. On every surface in the incumbent field, a book has an author — singular, the one on the spine — and everybody else is invisible. The contributor arrives wanting the thing the field structurally cannot give them: a credit at contributor granularity, on the record, in their own name. If they were a minor when they wrote it, they arrive with a guardian, and that changes what this directory is allowed to do — see the consent section below.

The person holding the book, looking for the name

A librarian cataloguing a donation. A reunion committee trying to find the person who wrote the class history. A local bookshop deciding whether to invite someone to read. A parent who found a keepsake edition in a box. They arrive with a cover and no way forward. Search gives them the school’s current homepage, which has never heard of the book. This directory exists so that search has something correct to find.

If you are none of these three, you may still be in the right place — but you are the case we have designed for least well, and we would rather hear that than guess. The contact link at the foot of this page goes to a person.

The bare-cover problem, stated concretely enough to argue with

Here is the failure in one motion. A school publishes a literary magazine. It is real: it is laid out, printed, bound, and sold at the winter concert. Four years later somebody wants to know who wrote the piece on page 31.

They try the obvious things, and each one fails for a structural reason rather than an accidental one, which is why waiting for the field to improve does not help:

The school website. The page that announced the magazine was a news post. It survived exactly as long as the next site rebuild. No one deleted it maliciously; a content system was replaced and the old posts were not carried across. The author never had a say, because the author never held the record.
The retail surfaces. These are keyed on a saleable product identifier. A school-published magazine usually never had one issued, so there is nothing for the listing to hang on. This is not an oversight in those products — it is what they are for. A catalogue of things for sale cannot hold a thing that was never for sale.
The review and reader-shelf networks. Same key, plus a second problem: their unit is a book with an author. Page 31 has an author too, and that person is not on the cover, so the record has no slot for them.
The library authority record. This one is genuinely good at permanence — better than anything we will build — and genuinely bad at everything else here. It records a name as a cataloguing authority. It does not record a contributor role inside a school anthology, it offers the person no control over their own entry, and it is not a place anyone gets found and invited from.
The author’s own link page. The author does control this one, which is why so many working writers keep one. But it is a tenancy at somebody else’s address under somebody else’s terms, and it is a list of links, not a credit record — there is no role, no year, no publisher of record, nothing another system could read.

Five surfaces, five different reasons, one outcome: the credit does not exist anywhere that is both durable and controlled by the person who earned it. That is the gap this address is aimed at. It is a narrow gap. We would rather describe a narrow thing accurately than a broad thing vaguely.

Every category above is good at something. None of them is aimed at this.

This is not a claim that the incumbent field is bad. Several of these categories are excellent, and two of them do things we will never do as well — a library authority record will outlive us, and a guild directory carries a professional standing we do not confer. The claim is narrower and, we think, harder to argue with: every column below is a requirement of a school-published credit, and no existing category satisfies all five. The middle of that board is empty, and it is empty for a structural reason: almost the whole field is keyed on a commercial product, and a school-published book is not one.

Structural product categories, not named vendors -- each row is a KIND of product, so the comparison holds as individual products come and go. Every cell states its verdict in words, so the table reads without colour. The last row is what this directory is BEING BUILT to do: nothing in that row is live today, and the status section below says so without hedging.
Product category	Holds a title with no retail identifier	Credit at contributor granularity	The person controls their own entry	Minor contributors consent-gated	No rating or review surface
Retail bookstore listings	Needs a saleable identifier	Cover author only	Claimable if in catalogue	No minor model	Reviews are the point
Reader-shelf and review networks	Same identifier key	One author per book	Claim, not control	Public by default	Ratings are the product
Professional guild and society directories	Trade-published only	Member, not credit	Member-managed	Adults only, excluded	No reviews
Speaker and booking listings	Bio, not title-keyed	Person, not credit	Listee-managed	Adults only, excluded	Testimonials common
Library authority records	Catalogued regardless	Named contributors only	Cataloguer-controlled	No consent model	No reviews
Self-serve link pages	Any content	Links, not credits	Fully author-held	No minor model	No reviews
School and district web pages	Any title	If someone typed it	School-controlled	Varies, often none	No reviews
The Author Directory (being built)	Title and role are the key	The unit is the credit	The author holds it	Recorded guardian consent	Refused, by design

Read the last row as a design specification, not as a shipped feature list. Nothing in it is running. The point of putting it in the table is that it is the thing we can be held to later.

Where the field does worst is where we win cheapest: the credit, not the book, is the unit

Almost every product in the categories above makes the same modelling decision, and it is a reasonable one for their purpose: the record is a book, and a book has an author. Title, author, identifier. Everything hangs off that.

School publishing breaks that model on the first try, and it breaks it in the common case rather than the edge case. A class anthology is not a book with an author. It is a book with an editor, a cover artist, a faculty adviser, and every writer in it. Bolt that onto a one-author record and the anthology gets one entry, under the editor’s name, and every writer inside it is represented by nothing at all. Not by a thin entry — by nothing. They are not in the data model.

So this directory inverts it. The record is a credit, not a book. One person, one title, one role, one year. A title with many contributors is many records that share a title, rather than one record that hides them. That single decision is what makes the whole category of school publishing addressable, and it costs us nothing that the field would want back.

Illustrative example · not a real book, not a real person, not a real credit

The same publication, modelled two ways

As a one-author book record (how the field does it): one entry. Title: a placeholder anthology name. Author: a placeholder editor name. Everyone else who wrote in it: absent, with no field they could have occupied.

As credit records (how this is designed): one entry per person — the editor as editor, the cover artist as cover artist, the faculty adviser as adviser, and every contributing writer as a contributing writer, each with the piece they wrote. Same publication. The difference is not that the second is longer; it is that in the second, the contributor exists.

Every name, title and role in this example is a placeholder written to show the shape of a field. Nothing here is a real credit, a real person, or a real publication, and this page carries no count of how many of either exist — because the answer today is none.

What one credit record will hold, and why each field earns its place

A short record is a design position, not laziness. Every field below has to justify itself against one test: does the person holding the bare cover need it, or does it only make the page look fuller? Fields that failed that test are listed underneath, with the reason.

Field 01The name, as the author wants it written
Not as a cataloguer normalised it, and not as the school’s system stored it. A married name, a pen name, a name with the diacritics restored: the author decides. This is the single most common reason a person cannot find their own credit on any existing surface.
Field 02The title, and the publication it appeared in
Two separate things, because in school publishing they usually are: a short story has a title, and the anthology it sits in has a different one. Collapsing them is what makes a contributor unfindable.
Field 03The role — the load-bearing field
Author, contributing writer, editor, co-editor, faculty adviser, translator, cover artist. This is the field the whole directory is organised around, and the one the incumbent field does not have. “Wrote the third story” and “edited the volume” are different claims and a directory that cannot tell them apart is worse than useless, because it makes a false one.
Field 04The year, and the publisher of record
The school, the district, the press, or the magazine that actually published it — named plainly, even when that name is just a school. This is what turns a claim into something a librarian can check.
Field 05A short line of context, in the author’s own words
Bounded on purpose. Enough to say what the piece was; not enough to become a biography, a pitch, or a place to accumulate keywords. The directory is a credit, and a credit that grows into a marketing page stops being a credit.
Field 06How, or whether, to be reached
Set by the author, off by default, and never a raw address published to the open web. A directory whose whole purpose is being found is obliged to make being found optional.

Deliberately absent, and why: no rating and no review (see the refusals below — this is the one we care most about); no follower or view count, because a credit is not a performance metric and counting turns a directory into a leaderboard; no sales figure, because money is off across this platform until it is genuinely switched on and a fake number is worse than no number; no full biography, because that is a personal site and you should own yours rather than rent one here.

Every field above describes the record’s intended shape. None of it is running: there is no profile to fill in today, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise by writing it in the present tense.

Keyed on the title and the role — never on a commercial identifier

This sounds like a technical footnote. It is the reason the whole category of school-published books is invisible on the surfaces people actually search, so it is worth being explicit about.

When a record is keyed on a saleable product identifier, three consequences follow automatically, and they are consequences of the key rather than of anybody’s intent:

A title that was never sold cannot be recorded at all. No identifier was ever issued, so there is nothing to key on. This is the ordinary case in school publishing, not the exception — which means an entire category of real, printed, bound books is structurally invisible.
A title that stops being sold tends to stop being findable. The record was there to support a transaction. When the transaction ends, the reason for the record ends with it, and delisting follows. The credit was never the point.
The identifier belongs to the publication, not to the person. So the contributor cannot be the key, and a contributor-level credit has nowhere to attach even in principle.

Keying on the person, the title, and the role avoids all three, and it has a second effect worth stating because it cuts against our own interest: a record made of plain text is portable by construction. A name, a title, a role, a year, a publisher, one line of context. There is no proprietary identifier in it, so there is nothing about the record that only we can resolve, and nothing that gets stranded if this address one day goes away. We did not build a lock, which means we cannot later decide to turn one.

Read that as a structural property of the data, not as a shipped export feature. There is no export button today, for the plain reason that there are no profiles today. When there are, that claim becomes checkable, and we would rather you check it than take it.

The three objections a working author actually raises — answered, not deflected

These are the three that come up. They are all reasonable. Two of them have good answers and one of them has an honest answer that is less satisfying than a good one would be; we have not swapped it for something smoother.

Objection one

“I already have an author page. Why would I keep another one?”

Mostly you should not, and if your work is trade-published with a retail identifier, the surfaces you already use will serve you better than this one will. This address is aimed at the credit those surfaces structurally cannot carry.

The concrete test is this: go and look for your school-published credit on the page you already have. If you contributed to an anthology rather than fronting it, it is almost certainly not there — not because someone forgot, but because a one-author book record has no field for a contributor. If the title never had a retail identifier, it is not there for the same kind of reason. And if the credit lives on a school page, it lives at the mercy of a rebuild you will not be consulted about. Those are the three cases this exists for. If none of them is yours, we would honestly rather you did not bother.

Objection two

“If I list myself somewhere that also handles student writers, am I now inside a child-data system?”

No, and the reason is worth being precise about, because the precision is what makes it true rather than reassuring.

The consent gate is a property of the minor’s record, not of the directory. An adult author lists themselves; that is an adult publishing their own credit, and it does not create a school record, a class, a roster, or any relationship to a school’s student data. A student author’s page follows the same consent gate as every other minor record on this platform: not public without a guardian’s recorded consent. The two live under different rules in the same address, which is ordinary — a library holds adult and children’s sections without the adult borrower joining a child-data system.

The stronger commitment is the one about shape rather than permission: there is no browsable index of student contributors, and there is not going to be one — not even of consented ones. Consent permits a specific credit to be visible to someone who looks for that person or that title. It has never been a licence to compile children into a list, and a directory that can be enumerated is a list whatever it calls itself.

Objection three

“What happens to my credit when you get bought, pivot, or lose interest?”

This is the objection with the honest answer rather than the good one, and here it is: we cannot prove this one to you yet, because there is nothing running to prove it with. No profile exists, so no export exists, so any promise we made here would be a promise about software that has not been written. You have heard that promise from products before and it is worth exactly what it was worth then.

What we can offer instead is structural and checkable today, on this page, before you commit anything. The record is plain text with no proprietary identifier in it, so there is no artifact that only we can resolve. Nothing here is built from a scrape, so the directory will never hold anything about you that you did not put here — which caps the downside at exactly what you deposited. And the entire commercial layer is switched off across this platform: there is no fee, no commission, no paid placement and no ranked order, so there is no business model that would later need your credit held hostage to work.

That is three structural facts and zero promises. When the profile engine exists, the export becomes a thing you can test rather than a thing we assert, and that is the point at which you should believe it — not now.

What this directory refuses to do — and why each refusal is in your interest

A refusal costs something. Each of these gives up a feature that would make the product more engaging, better ranked, or easier to sell. They are listed with what they cost, because a refusal presented as free is a marketing line rather than a commitment.

No ratings, no reviews, no stars, no comment threads

This is the one we would defend hardest. A class anthology contributor is often fifteen years old, and the piece in it is frequently the first thing they ever published. A rating surface pointed at that is a harm, and it is not a harm you can restrict to adults once it exists — a review box on a shared title reaches everyone in it.

There is a second reason that applies even where no minor is involved: a credit is a fact and a rating is an opinion, and mixing them makes the fact less reliable. This directory answers “who wrote this”. It is not qualified to answer “was it any good”, and pretending otherwise would degrade the one thing it is for. What this costs us: the engagement loop that makes reader networks sticky. We are not going to have that.
No profile built from a scrape

No entry is generated by crawling the open web, a school website, or a published programme. An author appears because they listed themselves. What this buys you is a guarantee that runs in the useful direction: an absence here is not a statement about you. On a scraped directory, being missing means something, and being wrongly present means arguing with a machine that already published you. Here, empty is the default and only you can change it. What this costs us: a directory that could have looked populated on day one. It will look empty instead, because it is.
No minor’s page public without a guardian’s recorded consent — and no index of student contributors at all

The first half is the platform-wide rule for every minor record. The second half is the one that matters more in a directory specifically, and it is stricter than consent: even with consent recorded, there is no browsable list of student contributors, no “students” view, and no way to enumerate them. Consent makes a particular credit visible to someone looking for that person or that title. It was never permission to compile children, and compiling them is precisely what a directory is otherwise good at. What this costs us: the single most obviously useful feature a school would ask us for.
No paid placement, no ranked order, no featured tier

Nothing is for sale here, and beyond the commercial layer being off, ordering itself is refused. A ranked list of authors is a popularity contest, and a popularity contest with a child’s first published story in it is worse than a bad product decision. Results are organised by what you asked for, not by who paid or who scored. What this costs us: the ordinary directory business model, which is selling position.
No selling your work, and no feeding it to an outside AI to train on

Work you post is not sold, and posted material is not fed to an outside model as training data. Note the scope, because it is doing real work: this is a claim about sale and training, not a blanket assertion that no byte ever leaves a machine. A hosted service moves data to run at all, and a promise that pretended otherwise would be false in a way you could not check. This one you can hold us to, because it is narrow enough to mean something.
No listing anyone else — not a colleague, not a student, not the dead

There is no path to add a person other than yourself, and no memorial or estate page is created automatically. A school that wants to honour a late faculty author will find this frustrating and it is a real cost. It is also the only rule under which “the author holds the record” stays true, and a posthumous page nobody consented to is the exact thing that turns a credit directory into something people have to police. What this costs us: the tribute case, which is genuinely sympathetic.
No submissions, no slush pile, no editorial judgement

You cannot submit work here and nothing here decides whether a piece is worth publishing. That is a different job and it has a different address in this family — composition.software is the writing and submission side, and litmag.press prints the edition. This directory starts after a title is published and records who made it. Keeping the credit separate from the gatekeeping is what stops a credit from implying an endorsement.

Student authors: consent-gated, never public by default, never enumerable

School publishing means a contributor may be fifteen. That single fact constrains this design more than every other requirement combined, and it is stated here in full rather than buried in a policy page, because a rule nobody reads is not a rule.

Adults list themselves

An adult author publishes their own credit, by their own decision, and edits or withdraws it on the same authority. That is an adult acting for themselves — not a school record, not a class, not a roster, and no school-official relationship is created by it.

A student author’s page is consent-gated

It follows the same consent gate as every other minor record on this platform: never public without a guardian’s recorded consent. Recorded is the operative word — consent that was assumed, implied by a school’s permission slip, or inherited from another system does not count here.

Consent is not a licence to compile

Consent makes one credit visible to a person looking for that person or that title. It never produces a browsable index of student contributors, and there is no view of this directory that returns children as a list.

No rating surface can reach a student’s work

There is no rating or review anywhere in this product, so there is no mechanism by which a fifteen-year-old’s first published story receives a score. This is why that refusal is architectural rather than a setting someone could switch on later.

This page describes no specific age threshold, no photo, face-matching or capture mechanic of any kind, and no consent workflow beyond the plain posture above — because the workflow is not built, and describing an unbuilt workflow in detail is how a page ends up promising a confirmation email that no code sends.

How it will work when it opens

None of the five steps below is running. This is the shape the directory is being built to take, written in the future tense throughout, because there is nothing to describe in the present tense yet.

An author claims their own entry. Self-serve, by the person whose name it is. Nobody lists anyone else, and no entry is waiting to be claimed because no entry was generated in advance.
They add credits, one per title and role. Name as they write it, the piece, the publication it appeared in, the role, the year, the publisher of record, one line of context. A title they contributed to and a title they edited are two credits, because they are two different claims.
A minor’s credit stays private until a guardian’s consent is recorded. Not private-by-setting; private as the only state that exists before consent. And even after, it never joins an enumerable list of students.
The credit becomes findable by name and by title. Which is the entire point: the person holding the bare cover types the title and reaches the people who made it. Ordered by relevance to what was asked, never by payment and never by score.
The author keeps control of it. Edit it, restrict how they can be reached, or take it down. A credit removed is removed — and when there is code behind that sentence you should test it rather than trust it, which is the same standard we asked you to hold us to further up this page.

Until then, this page describes that shape and lists nothing. There is no search on this site today and no form to fill in.

Where this actually stands today

Plainly, and without softening it: nothing is live. There are no author profiles, no credit records, no submissions, no listings, and no search behind this page. There is no roster, no count, no waitlist, no testimonial and no review, because none of those things exist to report. This is an early-access address and it is empty.

What is real right now: this address, this description of what is being built, and the early-access mailbox that reaches a person. That is the complete list.

What is planned: the credit record and the self-serve claim path, the consent gate for minor authors, and search by name and by title. Each of those is described above in the future tense on purpose.

We are telling you this in the largest type on the page rather than in a footnote, because a directory that implies it is populated when it is not is a lie with good typography, and the whole argument of this page is that a credit is only worth having if it is true.

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Where the edges are, so you land at the right address

This is one of several addresses around school publishing, and the boundaries between them are real rather than decorative. If your work is on the other side of one of these lines, the neighbouring address will serve you better and we would rather send you there than hold you here.

Books are here. Working copy is next door. Newspaper and news-site reporting, concert programme notes, grant narratives and district communications belong on thewriter.directory, which is organised by the kind of writing and the turnaround rather than by a book credit. If your credit is a byline on a deadline, that is the address.
Scripts are a different craft with a different question. A play carries a performance-licensing question that a book does not, and playwright.software is built around it. A script credit is not a book credit and this directory does not pretend to hold one.
Writing and submitting is a tool, not a credit. composition.software is where a student author drafts, edits and submits, and where an adviser curates a literary magazine. This directory begins after that work is published. Tool then credit; they are deliberately separate so that appearing here never implies anyone selected you.
Printing the edition is its own trade. litmag.press lays out and prints the keepsake edition a school can sell. It makes the object. This records who made what is in it.
Commissioned art is keyed on a brief, not a title. theillustrator.directory lists people who take assigned work — cover art, spot illustrations, programme covers — and shows the brief against what was delivered. A cover artist may hold a credit here and a commissioning profile there; they answer different questions.

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The directory opens as authors list themselves. If you wrote, edited, translated or contributed to a school-published title and you want a credit that you hold rather than one that lives at the mercy of a site rebuild, say so and you will be among the first entries when it opens.

What you are agreeing to is small, and worth stating so it is not oversold: an email to a person. There is no form, no account, no waitlist number to be assigned, and nothing to pay — now or later, because the commercial layer on this platform is switched off. Tell us the title, the role and the year if you have them; tell us the objection you still have if you would rather do that instead. Both are useful and the second one is more useful.

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Common questions

Can I search the directory today?

No. There is nothing to search: no profiles, no credit records, no listings. The directory is empty and opens as authors list themselves. The only thing to do here today is request early access or write to us.

Does my book need a retail catalogue number?

No, and that is the specific reason this address exists. The record is keyed on the person, the title and the role, so a literary magazine, a class anthology, or a staff-written history that was never assigned a saleable identifier is recorded exactly like anything else. Almost the entire incumbent field cannot hold those titles at all.

I contributed one story to an anthology. Is that a credit here?

Yes, and it is the case the directory is built around. The unit of the record is a credit, not a book, so a contributing writer is a first-class entry rather than a name that had nowhere to go. On a one-author book record, that contributor is not represented thinly -- they are not in the data model at all.

Can a school list its authors for them?

No. There is no path to list another person, including by a school, an adviser, a colleague, or an estate. An author claims their own entry. That rule is what makes the claim that the author controls the record true rather than merely stated.

Are student authors listed?

Not by default and not publicly. A student author's page follows the same consent gate as every other minor record on this platform: never public without a guardian's recorded consent. Separately and more strictly, there is no browsable index of student contributors at all -- not even consented ones. Consent makes one credit findable; it is never permission to compile children into a list.

Why are there no ratings or reviews?

Two reasons. A contributor to a school anthology is often fifteen, and a rating surface aimed at a first published story is a harm you cannot confine to adults once it exists. And a credit is a fact while a rating is an opinion: mixing them makes the fact less reliable, and the fact is the only thing this directory is qualified to hold.

Does listing here put me into a school's student data system?

No. An adult author lists themselves, which is an adult publishing their own credit. It creates no school record, no class, no roster and no school-official relationship. The consent gate is a property of a minor's own record, not of the directory as a whole.

What happens to my credit if this address goes away?

We cannot demonstrate an answer yet, because nothing is running to demonstrate it with, and we would rather say that than promise an export that no code performs. What is checkable today is structural: the record is plain text with no proprietary identifier, so nothing about it is stranded if we disappear; nothing here is built from a scrape, so the directory holds only what you deposited; and there is no commercial layer, so no business model would ever need your credit held hostage.

Is any of this paid?

No. There is no price, no fee, no commission, no paid placement and no featured tier -- and there is no checkout on this site. The commercial layer across this platform is switched off, and this page will not quote a number that has not been set.

How is this different from thewriter.directory?

Books are here; working copy is there. thewriter.directory covers reporting, programme notes, grant narratives and district communications, organised by the kind of writing and the turnaround. If your credit is a byline on a deadline rather than a title in a publication, that is the address you want.

How is this different from composition.software?

That is the tool: drafting, editing and submitting, plus the adviser side of curating a literary magazine. This is the credit that exists after a title is published. Keeping them separate is deliberate -- it means appearing in this directory never implies that anyone selected, edited, or endorsed you.

Will you use my work to train an AI?

No. Work posted is never sold and never fed to an outside model as training data. Note the scope of that claim, because the scope is the honest part: it is about sale and training, not a blanket assertion that no byte ever moves between machines. A hosted service transmits data to function, and a broader promise would be one you could not check.

How do I get in touch?

Request early access from this page, or use the contact link. Both reach a person. There is no sign-up form, no account, and no waitlist position to be assigned.