Getting Published: Which Route Do I Take?

Saturday’s speakers invited us to look again at the literary world. There are big issues about revenue and selling that the industry has to contend with, but we should be encouraged by some of the entrepreneurial ventures that now form part of the publishing landscape. There are more options for writers: more avenues for getting their words and images into print and e-book. The traditional agent-author route remains the main way to get published (a mere 5% of books purchased last year in the UK were self-published). The latest figures (Nielsen statistics) show a percentage ratio of  70 / 25 / 5 between print / e-book / self-published book sales or in terms of numbers of copies bought a split of 227 million / 80 million / 16 million: that’s a lot of books and a lot of reading however you want to interrogate the figures! 

It’s true the overall market is flat and it’s self-published titles that are rising most strongly. If you don’t feel you have the energy, skills, money, inclination or time to DIY-publish your book, you could investigate one of the recent crowd-funded or subscription-based operations run by small, independent publishers. Pundits like to declare that we are in the midst of a publishing revolution, perhaps, but revolution has another meaning too: (re)cycle, going round in circles. Like all good ideas, the new business models are borrowed from the past. And Other Stories was set up in 2011 to publish literary fiction, with an emphasis on translated works in a not-for-public-profit model. Unbound, the first UK crowd-funded platform for authors, is another take on the subscription model – familiar to nineteen-century readers of Dickens or Twain and long established in the magazine world. 

Both And Other Stories and Unbound are starting small, but are garnering much attention, not just for the quality of their publishing, but for the direct contact they have with their readers. It’s what attracts indie-authors too. The usual publishing process can seem to take a long time. Conventionally, an author’s work reaches a reader after passing via an agent, editorial, production, design, publicity and sales channels; subscription models sell up-front. Reading groups are a key part of And Other Stories: helping to identify strong, new talent. Subscribers can sign-up to receive between 2 and 6 books a year before the titles are printed, thus allowing the publisher to manage it’s costs more directly -  essentially a print-on-demand model. At Unbound, readers are asked, via an author’s pitch, what they want to give financially and can pledge different levels of support in return for a range of personal benefits (goody bags, author lunches, their donor names in the hardcover edition etc.). Knowing you have a captive readership is a rather motivating proposition for an author, but also a sense of community and literary togetherness is created between reader and author via the publisher. 

So, despite those bemoaning the state of the publishing industry, there are so many more options available to writers now; and, in turn, this means more varied and exciting material for readers. Thank you to everyone who attended. Now - go forth, writers, and publish!

For anyone interested in future events, please take a look at our events page. Our next conference will focus on self-publishing and more details can be found here.