NEW YORK -- In the ever-growing book of dot-com failures, the rise and fall of Inkspot.com may get hardly a shake of the quill.
Yet its growth from a home-grown site for authors into the arm of a promising dot-com business demonstrates the fantastic success the Web made possible.
Its demise six months later -- having been jettisoned from online publisher Xlibris in a capital crunch -- illustrates the pain of defeat in last year's dot-com collapse.
Begun in 1994 by a Canadian writer as a page of Internet links for authors, Inkspot.com grew into a popular resource that attracted a large, loyal audience.
Its e-mail newsletter signed up 50,000 authors. Websites garlanded it with awards. Writers flocked to its discussion boards to share stories of the publishing world. Young authors turned to its myriad columns for advice and encouragement. A core group of advertisers kept the site chugging along.
By 1999, Inkspot was an undeniable success.
So much so that Debbie Ridpath Ohi, who founded the site and ran it alone from her Toronto home, decided she could no longer handle it on her own.
Eager for her list of authors, companies approached her to buy the site. Old world publishers, worried that the Internet would leave their businesses behind, were swallowing up smaller websites about writing and publishing, and Inkspot was next in line.
Among the six or seven companies that inquired, one stood out: Xlibris, a Philadelphia-based online publishing company that was also one of her advertisers.
Xlibris' website lets authors create and publish their works in paper form. For a fee, the site will design a cover for a finished manuscript, print books, and ship them to bookstores and others, on demand.
Its revolutionary method -- circumventing the dance of literary agents and huge publishing conglomerates -- sparked interest among major publishers. Random House, the publishing arm of media giant Bertelsmann AG, took a significant minority stake in the company last April.
"I liked how they treated authors," Ohi said in an interview. "I was also especially attracted by how their core service was free." Until recently, when budget cuts prohibited it, Xlibris had offered some basic publishing services at no cost.
In July of 2000, Ohi sold the site to Xlibris.
"Having someone else worry about administration and marketing," she wrote in a note to her readers then, "leaves me free to focus completely on writing and editing, content and community."
However, the sale of Inkspot marked the beginning of its eventual demise. It would take just six months to bring down a website that took more than five years to develop.
In February, visitors to Inkspot.com were greeted with red letters announcing that the site would be shut down permanently.
Today, Xlibris is looking to give Inkspot a new home, but there is no guarantee that the site will live on. Xlibris offered to give the site back to Ohi, but she said she could not afford the legal fees or the time it would take to develop new relationships with advertisers.
So what happened?
After a half-million dollars worth of investment, Xlibris said it could no longer afford to run Inkspot. That site was not the only casualty. Xlibris cut its staff by 30 people, closed an office in New York, and postponed plans for a European expansion.
"At the end of the day Xlibris was a dot-com business locked in the war and the agony of growth," John Feldcamp, Xlibris' founder and chief executive, said in an interview.
"We have a lot of idealistic goals, but at the end of the day Xlibris is an economic animal," he said. "Inkspot was also very idealistic, but came out of a much more artistic and cultural set of roots which really wasn't subject to the economic weather out there."
Ohi, exhausted after years of developing the site, has learned her lesson.
"Honestly, I assumed everything would work out, and that Inkspot would continue and grow," she said. "I'm probably more naive than the average person."
She recalled traveling to Philadelphia to build the site under its new owner, only to find that despite her title of editor-in-chief, she did not have the same kind of control she once had.
Xlibris hired a small full-time staff without giving Ohi a say in the final decision, she said. One senior staff member was hired against her recommendation, she added.
Then, the site was set for a redesign, catching the original Inkspot team off guard.
The stresses built to the point where Ohi no longer felt that she should continue participating, she said. In early February, she offered her resignation from a site she had spent more than five years building.
The next week, Ohi said she found out that Xlibris had laid off the full-time staff of Inkspot, and said it would shut down the site. Ohi said she is leaving on a sabbatical with her husband. Her managing editor, Moira Allen, is back to freelance writing.
Ohi's advice to other dot-com entrepreneurs? "I would make sure that you hire a lawyer to look over the contract," she said. "And anything you want, to make sure it's put into the contract."
Meanwhile, Xlibris chugs along with perhaps a little less steam than before the dot-com bubble burst.
"I just don't sense that Debbie or Moira were ever happy with the intensity and the process, and how quickly things happen in this world," Xlibris' Feldcamp said. "They were a small site. It was supported by a whole bunch of freelance, or free or nearly free, content and services. And that kind of culture has its own pace."
"When we brought the two together," he said. "it failed."
