Review: Authory – The perfect way to move your articles with you

As bloggers, writers, and journalists will know it can be pretty tricky to keep tabs on everything you write over the years. Maybe you move hosting platforms from WordPress to Medium to wherever.

This can be especially a problem if you have a personal website that you like to keep up to date with your work from around the web. A switch of platforms can mean hours of work collating and then republishing on the new system, not to mention the loss of all that lovely SEO goodness you have been building up if you are any good.

Authory is a new platform for writers of any level that not only solves this issue for content creators but also potentially for readers too. It allows a writer to pull together all published or self-published work from any number of sites and collate them into one big, sortable (and downloadable but more of that later) internet archive of, well, you.

Upon finding the Authory website you simply sign up (there is a 14-day free trial that you can easily extend out to a month by using your own social media to link to it) and give the site a pointer in the direction of where you want it to trawl.

I gave it PC Guide and a few other places I used to work, including a really old site from many years ago. Within 48 hours (it took maybe 36 for me) you will get an email telling you your Authory page is ready and sure enough, I was presented with hundreds of things I had written over the years, all presented in one of three layout formats/

You can search between publication/blog and even specific periods of time. It’s very cool. With a little fiddling around with the provided  RSS feed, you could even manage to import the content into, say, a new personal portfolio page.

This, while possible probably isn’t the optimum way of proceeding for either yourself or Authory to be fair. Authory would very much like you to use their platform as a means to publish future articles and blogs and provides you with a few useful tools to seal the deal.

For example, readers can subscribe to you there and then and be notified when you write something new, anywhere on the web (as long as you have pointed the software to crawl that site).

It’s pretty good to be able to follow your favorite content writers wherever they may publish. Certain freelancers and bloggers pop up on multiple sites and this way you won’t miss anything if you sub to them and several big-name journalists are signing up as you can see from the on-site testimonials.

Beyond the convenience level Authory also offers a feature that could be the thing that propels it to killer app status for writers of any level. Once collated you can download all your articles either in separate HTML files or one massive XML document giving you the perfect way to archive all your work without putting hardly any time or effort into it.

That means that book of internet poetry you have always wanted to self-publish but meant too much work searching through all the sites you submitted too can become a thing of reality.

As for how it works, two articles I have written today for this very esteemed website have already been cataloged within a couple of hours of going live. I’m going to see if Authory grabbing an article about itself effectively breaks the Matrix when this goes live.

Authory works for me because I have been looking to collate all my work together for a long time and I know plenty of people out there from amateurs to professional writers that feel the same way. Time gets in the way though, there is always something else that needs to be completed so without this I’d never have got round to it.

The free 14-day trial will give you a feel for things and you can see how useful it might be for you. After that, it’s going to be $10 per month (less if you get a year subscription in advance). That level of cost might take it away from some people who don’t want yet another subscription service to pay for at the end of every month, but if you are a journalist or freelancer that needs a way to collate and indeed showcase work to potential new clients, it could pay for itself very quickly indeed.