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The Friday Project has become the first UK publisher to offer all contracts as profit share agreements between it and the author.
The move is similar to a business model followed by Harper’s US imprint HarperStudio. The boutique imprint offers writers a profit sharing model with advances limited to $100,000 (£70,000). However, while not ruling out advances, The Friday Project is planning to avoid paying for the majority of its new titles. Profits will be split between author and publisher once overheads have been covered.
The imprint will also make the majority of its books free to read online as part of a range of new digital initiatives to target new readers. Scott Pack, publisher of The Friday Project, said: “Our profit share contracts will give authors a bigger stake in the success of their books and by making much of our list available for free online we will have direct access to readers, enabling us to generate that all important word of mouth before, during and after publication.”
John Bond, managing director of Press Books, said: “We always intended our investment in The Friday Project to create a laboratory for experimenting with new models for publishing and marketing books in the digital age and I look forward to this coming to fruition in 2009.”
The Friday Project was established in 2004 with the primary aim of finding material on the internet and turning it into books. The publisher went into liquidation in February last year and HarperCollins bought the assets from the administrator.