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"Democratic" publishing venture launched at Hay
31.05.11 | Charlotte Williams
A publishing platform which allows readers to choose what should be published has been launched, supported by Faber and created by "QI" writers John Mitchinson and Justin Pollard, and Crap Towns author Dan Kieran.
Launched at the Hay Festival today (29th May), Unbound.co.uk will enable authors signed up to the site to pitch book ideas directly to readers. Readers then pledge their support to an idea, from £10 to funding the whole book. When an idea has attracted enough support, the book will be written.
Supporters of the book will receive a clothbound limited Unbound First Edition with their name in it, and can also receive rewards such as e-book downloads, book launch party invites and lunch with the author.
Faber will sell and distribute trade editions of selected titles under an Unbound imprint. Authors will receive 50% of all profits from their Unbound books. Authors Terry Jones, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, Amy Jenkins, Tibor Fischer, Rupert Isaacson and Jonathan Meades are among the first authors to sign up to the idea.
Mitchinson, Kieran and Pollard said: "There are lots of great books that we're not getting the opportunity to read. Unbound democratises the book commissioning process by enabling authors and readers to make the decisions about what does or doesn't get published."
Supporters can track the progress of the book through the author's private area on the site, where they can upload blogs and recorded interviews and meet the author and other supporters.
Faber c.e.o. and publisher Stephen Page said: "We're delighted to be partnering with Unbound. This is an age of great opportunity for writers, and at Faber we are always looking for imaginative ways of partnering with authors. Unbound offers a new, rich means for writers to connect with their readers and we're excited to be involved."
He told The Bookseller, "Our criteria for publishing will be a good editorial conversation with Unbound about the commercial opportunities of a trade edition and part of that will be a sense that we can print a decent number . . . We haven't settled on exact criteria yet but a several thousand copy first run would be necessary."
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Mmm...this is a good idea, and the time is right for such a platform. But I don't see how this is 'democratising'. The setup only allows published authors and agented writers to pitch books. So the supposed open choice for the reader is equivalent to entering a bookshop and deciding to buy a book, right? And as for opportunities for new authors - it's the same story of closed doors. Maybe it develops into something revolutionary, but at the moment I see agents and publishers selling advance copies online with gimmicky perks.
Sounds like a grand endeavor. I would be flattered to be on the ground-floor this. Keep me posted as the logistics are ironed smooth.
It should help the book industry, I'm all for it.
@sceptical - I understand that they intend to open up the process to authors who are unagented/unpublished in time, but want to concentrate on getting the thing right in the first place, without being deluged by unsolicited manuscripts (which they undoubtedly would be) in the first few weeks & months.
This sounds fair & reasonable to me, though whether it actually comes to pass is a moot point....
This could turn out to be a great innovation in the process and is a heartening example of the publisher's confidence to relinquish control of their processes to the reader (or end-user, to put it another way). Any suggestion that it would be a path to diluted quality or concentrate the amount of 'trash' in the current market are more than a little facetious, if anything structures like this will open up the content set to reflect the many tastes and interests of the reading public - and could bring new readers to the table who had previously felt disinterested through being disenfranchised by the process.
Good luck with the venture!
How original is Unbound?? It reminds me of a Dutch initiative called Tenpages.com
'TenPages.com Introduces Crowd-Funding In Book Publishing': http://telfleur.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/tenpages_selfpublishing/
And part two:
'Crowdfunding in book publishing': http://telfleur.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/crowdfundingbookpublishing/
Gr. Fleur
Hahaha... above all, it allows QI to pass on some of the production costs to the readers and to build a pre-sell database of buyers.
Nothing to do with supporting writers, everything to do with supporting QI and Faber!
Fo sho, blud
This venture follows very closely a scheme that I suggested in an essay titled "Back to the Future: Old Models for New Challenges" that appeared in the April issue of Against the Grain, which will soon be posted at this web site: http://www.psupress.org/news/SandyThatchersWritings.html.
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