That’s three questions, but since they’re all good we’ll let it slide. The Writers’ Collective is the first truly new business model for publishing in about a hundred years. A model based on the premise that until now there’s been a gap between professional, traditionally published books that sell in the thousands, and amateurish subsidy and self-published books that sell in the hundreds – if at all. TWC was created to fill this gap, to level the playing field between commercially successful traditional and self-publishing, and we have, though it’s taken longer than we thought it would. When you claim you’ve achieved what the world insists cannot be done, it tends to be a wee bit skeptical. As for a “catch” – the only one will be your decision about whether or not to believe us, though for the record let me say that we’re not a Collective because we share decision-making (though we share more than most publishers do), but because we share the wealth.

Why are we doing this? Easy. I’m a damn good writer who got tired of being offered “deals” that were better for the people offering them than for me, and I decided to find an alternative that would work for other good writers, too. I was smart enough, and tenacious enough to figure out a way to do it.

A question I ponder daily. If you come up with an answer please send it to L.Grant@writerscollective.com.
Oh, and don’t forget to cc my mother.

When we opened our doors several years ago, we said: “Give us your tired, your poor, your not-so-humble, yearning to write free. Yes, anyone. However, I will be as honest with them as I’m about to be with you.”

We went on for another three paragraphs, being so painfully honest our fingers were bruised. Then we discovered that everyone stopped reading after the word anyone.

This was a problem. One thing about publishing no one can deny: more books are published than sold. More writers are published than should be. According to Publisher’s Weekly, 175,000 new titles were published in 2003, and 90% of them never earned back their advance. Thus it is clear that Anyone should probably keep their day job. The big lie that subsidy as well as vanity presses perpetuate is that Anyone’s day job is writing a book. Which brings us to…

Neither company (or any of the so-called “POD Publishers”) will edit your book, insist on a commercial cover or provide interior design. They will not promote it, actively sell it (with a paid sales staff) or distribute it. They cannot obtain mainstream media reviews for your book nor land it on a bookstore shelf. What can they do? Send it to a printer and keep most of the profits that accrue by selling it at vastly over-inflated prices to your nearest and dearest, and to the occasional insomniac on Amazon at 3 a.m.

Should your manuscript be selected by TWC for publication (roughly 1 in every 1,000), it will be professionally edited (at least twice: for content and for copy, plus proofing), be given a fabulous commercial cover and interior design, and an index (if non-fiction) created by a professional indexer. Galleys will be sent to the mainstream media at least six months prior to publication, and a sales kit will be created for the paid sales reps of our national distributor to take to every major bookstore buyer for advance sales. A top-notch national publicist will be hired to work on your book’s national campaign, and regular PR updates will be sent to the sales reps so they can increase sales once the book is launched. But good as it is, it’s not the most important question to ask.

Bingo. What is the real difference between “traditional” publishing, “subsidy” publishing, and publishing with The Writers’ Collective?

You’re about to read a very shocking statement. Minors should exit the room and writers with weak pens should walk away from the computer. Now. Just. Walk. Away.

Safe to go on? Okay then, here it comes:

ALL PUBLISHING IS SUBSIDY, INCLUDING TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING.

What? Author subsidizing traditional publisher? Man bites dog? How can this be? Well, as the great Elaine Benes once declared to Seinfeld’s Jerry: “Oh, it be.”

A traditional publisher buys a book, edits it, does pre-press, sends galleys to reviewers while stoking the sales reps, and loves loves loves it and the author, while waiting for the great reviews that will signal the next blockbuster. If those are followed by happy-dance advance sales, the book “has legs” and a few bucks will be allocated for PR. If not, no problem; initial runs are cut by half to cap losses and everyone buys a new lottery ticket, sure the next one will be a winner. Everyone but the author that is, who comforts herself with the fact that she can at least keep the advance, assuming she hasn’t spent it on hiring a publicist. In this case the spreadsheet is clear: monetarily at least, the writer is ahead because the publisher has subsidized her. Of course, the bad news that comes with the good is a bit of a downer: her book is officially dead. But what about a successful book?

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Good advice in politics; even better in publishing. It costs roughly $30,000 to bring out a mid-list book, in terms of pre-press (editing, cover and interior design), printing/mailing galleys, and for printing a respectable 10k initial run. Add a $10k average advance, and the publisher has laid out, or invested, about $40k. Let’s assume this title is one of the lucky 10% published in a given year that will pay back its advance, with a 100,000 copy sale (hard case; $24.95) and an average 20% return. Add the additional costs to print the extra 90k books, and the publisher is now out of pocket about $182,000.

The author is ecstatic. For selling 80,000 copies after returns, at 10% of cover price she’s netted $182,000 – it’s Cristal time! Oddly enough, it’s the same amount the publisher spent to produce the book. Poor publisher. Except of course that the publisher has netted, after those expenses, royalties, trade discounts, picking, packing and shipping and paying the sales rep commissions: nearly half a million. Dollars. That’s right. In this equation the publisher has recouped its money for all up front risk and expenses – every penny of it. And that money came directly from the profit the author could have otherwise reaped had she published the book herself. In other words, the author paid for the cover design, the printing and the galleys herself; she just paid for it over time in the form of low royalties, as if she’d charged the items on a credit card instead of paying cash up front. If you’ve ever charged an item on your card and made minimum payments for it you understand: at the end of the day your $2500 flat screen HDTV cost you $5000 bucks.

No one has talked much about this equation or done the spreadsheets to prove it for several reasons. First, artistes aren’t supposed to worry their creative little heads about filthy lucre (let the multi-media conglomerates do that for you, my dear), and second, until now there hasn’t been a viable alternative.

Yes. And everybody knows what that means: A barely literate Neanderthal scrawls deeply felt, indecipherable prose upon a brown paper bag with a crayon and proclaims it genius. He sends it to a vanity press along with a check for $25,000, and in return a truck pulls up to his garage a month later with 5,000 badly made books he will use later that winter—and for many winters to come—to fuel the fireplace. And thus, a cry went up across the land: THE PARVENUS ARE COMING!

And in a way, it was true. With self-publishing as it existed before TWC, every mistake that could be made has been made, like expensive digital runs (the often misnamed Print-On-Demand or POD) that lose money on every trade sale. No real distribution (which means a paid sales team selling the book into the chains for volume and advance orders), because listed in Baker & Taylor or Ingram doesn’t count. Add lack of project management, which means no one standard set for pre-press production. Translation: non-commercial covers, amateur interior designs; non-professional editing and indexing, lack of reviews and frankly, a well-deserved lack of respect. Worse: because self-publishing by definition means “small,” there was no branding, a large component of successful pre-sales and mainstream media reviews. This meant that (unlike a traditional house on the rise) there was no one imprint under which titles could be brought in to reap the benefits of a growing reputation for excellence. A reputation that would enhance every future title published under it.

But every paradigm has a tipping point, and self-publishing has reached its own. Neanderthals and vanity presses still exist of course, but The Writers’ Collective is a new hybrid that matches the best of what traditional publishers do and offers it to writers who possess the skills, publishing savvy and titles that allow them to invest in themselves, and to reap the profit that once exclusively belonged to members of the Gentleman’s Club. In fact, when deconstructed, the traditional industry as we know it today turns out to be little more than an investment club for books. Publishers purchase, assemble and ship a product for which they’ve laid out capital, hoping for a return—of money, not books—on an investment. But since TWC provides a traditional publishing umbrella as well as a “reputable brand” for self-published books, successful writers are beginning to catch on. Why settle for $200,000 royalties on 80,000 copies when you can net – double.

None taken. You’re right, but we’re stumped. We do everything traditional publishers do—and then some, since we let writers keep their rights—but we’re more honest about where the money to pay for the publishing comes from. We’ve tried “Author-Supported” but that feels like euphemism, “Co-op” has been co-opted as a vanity option for some University and small presses, and we are nothing like 99.9% of all “subsidy” presses as they exist today. Come up with something better that means “the best of both worlds” and if we use it in our FAQ we’ll send you a check for $100 dollars. As for the numbers…

FOLLOW THE MONEY II

As a new [insert a far more apt term here and get a hundred bucks] publisher, TWC has many advantages over traditional presses, including being small and nimble. While it can take a traditional publisher up to a year just to make an offer, TWC can decide on a ms. in weeks, though we only take on (and please write this down), fewer than 1 in 1,000 projects (fewer for fiction). And we can launch that manuscript in a bit less than a year; far faster than the twenty-four months it’s taking most big houses now. But the most crucial advantage we have is that we can spread the risk for every single title we publish among all our authors, while cutting the work each author would have to do on his own to bring a book to the commercial marketplace with a reasonable hope of selling tens of thousands of copies.

Here’s how it works: TWC has searched for and recruited a top-tier team of editors, indexers, cover designers, publicists and offset printers who offer discounts on their services because of the volume and project management we provide. We are signed with a major national distributor that provides us with professional sales reps who sell our titles into the chains, independent bookstores and libraries. Because TWC has neither a demographic niche to fill nor stockholders to please, we are free to cherry-pick the market for manuscripts that are both commercially viable and artistically good, and we prefer working with authors who are already successfully traditionally published, whose manuscript could go anywhere, but who prefer to make real money this time.

What do we call real money? Let’s return to the 80,000 sold copies ($24.95 hard cover) as an example. The traditionally published author earning a 10% of retail royalty ($2.40), and who received a $10,000 advance, would net $182,000. Great! A TWC author selling the same number of books would, after ALL pre-press expenses, PR and print runs, net approximately $407,000. Don’t know about you, but I call that better.

Let’s examine a few current examples and up front costs. Our authors typically pay an average of $2k-$3k for pre-press charges which include a digital galley run. Add another $10k for a 5000 copy print run (hard cover) and $5k for a publicist, and you’re up to about $18,000, paid out over the year it takes to launch the book.

[NOTE: These costs are all paid directly to the various printers and publicists involved; none is paid to TWC]

If all 5000 copies sold (and we only take on titles we believe will sell at least that many in the first six to twelve months), the author will net $21,920 after ALL expenses. She will break even after the sale of just 2,260 copies sold. And she will still own all the rights to her book.

Sound like a lot of books to sell, relative to more “typical” self-publishing sales? It is, but TWC isn’t typical. Two cases in point: Good To Be King, by Michael Badnarik, and The Calcium Bomb, by Douglas Mulhall and Katja Hansen—our Fall 2004 line, and the first two books to go through the entire hybrid process. The first title arrived at the distributor’s warehouse in November, and sold out in 14 days. We've just done a second run, and there are back orders for nearly half. The second title also arrived at the warehouse in November, also sold out in two weeks, and the reprint – 7500 copies – arrived two weeks ago and is already gone. We’ve just gone back to press for a third run, and we anticipate selling 100,000 copies – hard cover – by year’s end. Who knows – we might have reached that goal by the time you read this.

What does The Writers’ Collective bring to the party besides an eye for books that sell? Just like any traditional publisher, TWC performs all project management and oversees every aspect of edits, re-writes (lots of those), pre-press design, mainstream media reviews and publicity. In fact the book has been, in every way that counts, traditionally published; we’ve just diversified the risk. The author makes a monetary investment, while TWC takes on all time and labor risk and management. If we haven’t produced a fabulous, commercially viable product at a cost the sales reps and the chain buyers will love love love, we’ve spent a year of production for nothing.

But if the title sells well the author gets a drastically rearranged bottom line—in her favor. That $400k is more money than most successful mid-list authors will ever see from a traditional house for 80,000 copies sold even with an advance (which many small presses don’t even pay these days), but even though money talks, transparency talks louder. Just seeing their name in print may thrill new writers, but experienced, best-selling authors want a lot more than that. Like real numbers for print runs, monthly reports from the sales reps themselves, real-time inventory and oh yes, statements more than once or twice a year, preferably in English. TWC provides those things too.

That’s not publishing, that’s printing. Digitally, through Lightning Source, which is owned by Ingram and which is why the book will be listed there at all. The reason the average sale per title with online “publishers” is less than twenty-five copies – annually – is because “listing” a book with Ingram is like “listing” it on Amazon. Anyone can buy it, but very few people outside friends and family do. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – it’s just not what TWC is about. Our goal has always been to make self-published books as respected by the media and as commercially viable as traditionally published books, and we can now claim some success. Though in all fairness, it has taken us three years to get here, and we began by being closer to the model you just indicated and growing (through learning by experience) to where we are today.

Still, the reality of the book industry is that whether it’s Random House that lays out the money, takes the risk and keeps the profit – or you who lays out the money, takes the risk and keeps the profit – someone needs to lay out real money for real publishing.

We’re competing in the same commercial market as the Big Boys and in that world non-fiction is King, so if you have a great concept and are prepared to play in their sandbox by working harder after publication on PR than you did before it, contact us.

However, even great fiction is a hard sell today unfortunately. Most of the time you’re better off putting that first novel in the desk drawer than on sale. At least the desk drawer won’t blackmail you ten years from now when you finally learn to write and want to burn every copy of My Life At Ten So Far. That book won’t sell - so save your money for writing classes and good books on craft. Ditto if you’re still receiving form rejection letters from publishers or agents. However, if those letters are glowing, but contain a lot of phrases like: “fabulous writing, but it doesn’t fit our current demographic niche” – you might have a shot.

No problem. If you’re publishing other writers’ work, and it’s got great content and equally great production values we might be able to accept you as an Associate. Please send a query.

Simple: send us an email with details about you and your book that doesn’t begin:

“My manuscript is out with my agent/friend/grandmother; but if no one wants it I may consider using TWC. What’s your 800 number?”

Ahem. Request an interview, and give us the best time to reach you. That’s the time to tell us about the passion for your work, why you love it, and why you believe 10,000 strangers will too. We’ll ask a lot of questions and answer any and all you may have. If we’re ready (and willing) to review your manuscript after that discussion we’ll request it. Once we’ve reviewed your manuscript and had a few more conversations, we may tender an offer. By that time you’ll be thoroughly versed in how we do things and what they’ll cost, but we’ll be sending you a ream of contracts that spell things out as well. Please take them to an attorney for review before signing, and plan on seeing your book on the bookstore shelves about a year from then.

Our real name is Princess Leia. Next…

The number of people able to think out of the box AND work for a fair number of years in pursuit of that vision without a paycheck is finite. Make that miniscule. The publishing world (online and off) is filled with middlemen dipping a lot of hands into an awfully small stream, and The Writers’ Collective has created a new business model that stands the old one on its head. If this sounds like A Good Thing (and you’ve read all the fine print), ask to join us. If not, we wish you a brilliant career elsewhere.

But whatever you do — keep writing!