Inkshares has strategic relationships with Ingram for North American book distribution and The United Talented Agency for representation and packaging in television and film.

The original notion for Inkshares was developed by Woodman, whose parents founded a successful computer-book publishing company called Ventana Press in the 1990s.

The original notion presented by Woodman was to create a platform akin to “Kickstarter meets Random House” but complete with the ability to sell shares in a book so that readers could participate in the revenue stream for titles.

Inkshares initially launched without the equity component, receiving extensive press in outlets including Fast Company[1] and Publishers Weekly.

Though this “pre-order” model made it harder for books to fund, Thomas, Woodman, and Gomolin believed that it would stop the type of vanity publishing that frequently occurred on Kickstarter and help map to genuine reader interest.

In 2015, Inkshares sold the streaming television rights for Filip Syta's The Show to Blackpills in a large deal publicized by Business Insider.

Later that year, Inkshares would sell Mike Mongo’s The Astronaut Instruction Manual to Legendary Entertainment[4] and J-F Dubeau's A God in the Shed to Skydance.