United Authors - Is This The Revolution?

For a few years now I've been writing here on this blog and in a few other places that it's only a matter of time until we see a group of authors band together and start the first publishing company  owned by and run by authors. I've used the  United Artists  model to describe it.

The truth is writers want to write. Not run companies. We don't want to be on the business side. But it's happening to us like it or not. How many articles have you read about what authors have to do now to market their books because their publishers aren't? Or how busy editors are and how books aren't being edited as well anymore? Or how poor the proofreading was or how ordinary the covers are?

The more it falls on the author to hire outside help to supplant or supplement efforts once the job of a traditional publisher while still receiving the same royalty, the more authors are going to question the model.

One solution is publishers changing their model.

Some have stared to do that. Roger Cooper at Vanguard has a lot of happy authors who are treated quite differently  - no advances but guaranteed marketing budgets, higher royalties and a real say so in how things happen.  Harper Collins has a new imprint that promises to do things differently.

Another  solution is authors changing their model.

I've postulated that all it's going to take is 5 big names to get United Authors started - big  so that the whole concept of self publishing is blown out the window and big because distribution is going to be one of the more complicated parts of this to work out. It's a new model. And it is on the horizon. And that horizon looks closer and closer all the time.

Enter David Hewson.  David is,  I think,  one  of the top 5 suspense authors writing today. A bestseller in the UK and abroad but not as well know here. His latest, The Garden of Evil was one of the best books I read this year  (Stephen King - are you listening - If you liked Goddard - Hewson will blow your socks off!)

David and I have been talking about the publishing model being broken and why and how and what it means and he's written out the idea of United Authors way more elegantly and in detail thank I could.

Take a look. What do you think? Do you think we'll see a model like this? Would you get involved?

Comments

[Joyce Lavene]

This is interesting and has a lot of good concepts to it. It's a little like the author co-ops. The hardest part is finding a bookstore to carry print books since distributors won't touch them. A lot would have to change, but so much has already changed that anything is possible.

[Debbie Haupt]

Speaking from a readers standpoint, I think it's a great idea. Who better to establish new ideas for publishing than authors who know the inside and out of good and bad publishing, and I think it's a great idea that authors have a bigger role in their own success. It might even get more great undiscovered authors published.

[Douglas Clegg]

I'm about to go read the link, but wanted to add that David Hewson is a great, great novelist.

His novel Garden of Evil was riveting.

[April Alliston]

Count me in.

[Richard Grayson]

Uh, MJ, I worked for the Fiction Collective 34 years ago: http://who-will-kiss-the-pig.blogspot.com/2009/01/kings-courier-profiles-brooklyn-author.html

So this is old, old, old - like me.

You can learn about the Fiction Collective's history here: http://fc2.org/about_us.aspx

[David Hewson]

Glad to have sparked some comment, MJ - and thanks for the very kind words about the book (you too Doug). The principal point it seems to me is that the existing system is crumbling under technological change, accelerated by the recession. Something new is going to emerge. Authors should be helping shape it and make it better all round.

[Mark Sullivan]

I'm wondering what you all think of the google books settlement. I own the copyright on four of my backlist books. Does it make sense to take the settlement, or to opt out?

[Lisa Hendrix]

"a group of authors band together and start the first publishing company owned by and run by authors"

That would be Belle Books — http://www.bellebooks.com/ — founded in 1999 by Nancy Knight, Deborah Smith, Sandra Chastain, Virginia Ellis, Donna Ball, and Debra Dixon. Between them, they'd authored hundreds of books published by traditional NY publishers, but they wanted more. Starting out with Southern women's fiction, they've now expanded into children's books, non-fiction, and now into audio and ebooks.

[Christine Carey]

I think the idea of getting books out there less expensively is all fine and dandy, but I don't see how this will be less expensive. You still need editors, copy editors, cover artists, and all of the people that go along with them. If you're cutting those people out of the equation and expect the writer to take over all of that, then you end up with stuff that I'm really not interested in buying, let alone buying into through writing.