Yehuda Niv is the Founder and CEO of Spines. He built the infrastructure that allows authors to publish, grow, and reach readers at a scale traditional publishing was never designed to handle. An author himself, much of what he builds still traces back to one question: what would have made his own initial publishing experience less frustrating? Today, that question shapes the product, technology, and strategy that carry an author from manuscript to market, and everything that comes after.
The hardest part of writing a book shouldn't be getting it published.
Yehuda’s publishing journey started with a book he almost didn’t publish. Written at night while working as an electronics engineer, the manuscript was left in a drawer for nearly four years before finally being published in 2012. Getting that book into the world proved, firsthand, how outdated and indifferent to authors the publishing process had become.
That frustration ultimately turned him into the founder of a full-fledged publishing company. Still working towards his master’s, Niv Publishing was launched out of his dorm room with a single goal: spare other authors what he had experienced. For more than a decade, he sat on the authors’ side of the table, learning the business one writer and one book at a time.
That decade revealed a direct insight into the ceiling of the old model. He understood that no matter how well a traditional publishing house ran, it was limited to a certain number of authors, leaving most writers standing outside its gate. As AI advanced, he saw a way to change that. Rather than fight to preserve the way publishing had always worked, he set out to build something better. To give authors a path he never had.
In 2021, Yehuda founded Spines. This time, the goal was far bigger than one publishing house could ever reach: he sought to make publishing possible for every author. Spines grew exponentially faster than he could have imagined. What started with seven authors became 200, then 2,000, as more and more authors found something in Spines they hadn’t found anywhere else. By the end of 2025, more than 6,000 authors had published through the platform.
Today, Spines continues to make publishing simpler, faster, and more accessible than ever. A full-service publishing platform emerged as an industry leader to support authors across every stage on every page. From manuscript formatting, all the way through book marketing. And Yehuda continues to look for ways to improve the publishing journey.
Spines was created by an author who knew firsthand how overwhelming publishing could be. That experience shaped a platform built around the real needs of writers, bringing cover design, translation, marketing, and every other step of publishing into one place so authors can move forward with more clarity, support, and confidence.
The name Spines was born from an image Yehuda kept returning to: an infinite library, where the spines of countless books stretch into the distance. Each represents an author who brought their story to the world. The library he’s building. One book, one author, one story at a time. With Spines.