Actually, it isn’t necessarily a man at all. It could just as well be a writer of the female persuasion, but men are traditionally supposed to own sheds. In fact, a large number of people who claim to Know About These Things believe that a shed can save a marriage, because it provides space between the two legally-conjoined combatants, and gives the husband a place to which he can retire to pursue whatever solitary and sordid pursuits float his particular boat: model railways, smoking, or just viewing high quality porn.
Unbound? Shed? I’m talking about what, exactly? Oddly enough, it was a brand-new venture in publishing that burst upon an unsuspecting world back in 2011. Instead of an author spending a few months or a few years writing a book and then trying to interest a publisher or literary agent into taking it on, with the attendant risk that the book might never be published, in which case the author has wasted a year or so of his or her life, Unbound (www.unbound.co.uk) came up with a novel – in the other sense of the word – idea.
Before the writer even finished the book, or even got properly started on it, he or she could submit it to Unbound and, if the idea for the work was accepted by the website, details of the proposed book would be displayed and members of the public could then pledge money to the author, essentially providing sufficient funding to pay for the book to be written and then published.
It was an interesting idea, because if the proposal stank and attracted no or very little attention, the author would presumably slink away, back to his or her garret, and try and come up with a better idea or a more compelling plot or take up gardening or something. But if the core idea of the book attracted the public’s attention, then money would flood in and eventually the book would make it onto the shelves of Waterstones and W H Smith. So the concept was, in some ways, a mechanism for assessing the likely popularity – and hence potential sales – of a particular book without the author going through the tiresome process of actually writing the thing.
And the people who agreed to provide funding would benefit in some small ways as well. At the scheme’s inception the minimum contribution was a mere £10, and that produced a copy of the ebook edition of the work, printed the contributor’s name at the back of the book, and provided access to the author’s ‘shed’, of which more later. Contribution levels differed depending on the book, but typically rose through £20, £50, £75 and £150 to £250, the last of which would get you two tickets to the book’s launch party, one or two other bits and pieces, and lunch with the author, which was for some reason seen to be a Good Thing. But I suppose that does rather depend on the author.
If you’d just won the lottery and really felt like taking a punt, it was even possible to fund the entire work, which presumably meant you effectively owned the author for the duration of the project, and possibly acquired some of the headaches – coping with the looming deadline, tantrums, writer’s block and so on – as well.
But – and with most ideas of this type there’s always a ‘but’ somewhere – the bad news was that initially the site was mainly commissioning works from published authors, presumably because that way the finished product would hopefully be competently written and wouldn’t need weeks of editing to knock it into shape. So that certainly wasn’t a quick route to publication for somebody with no track record and was really another avenue that published authors could explore. And that, I suppose, was either good or bad, or both, depending entirely upon which side of the publishing fence you happened at be standing.
And there was another tiny little niggle that I had, not with the idea of the site and its aims, but with that one word: ‘shed’. It’s probably just me, but to refer to the author’s shed – which according to the site simply meant the author’s private area, which could be construed to have some slight sexual connotations as well – just seemed a little dismissive. As if the author was simply an inconveniently eccentric family member who could be dismissed to the garden shed to pursue his solitary vice away from the public gaze of the adults. Why couldn’t they have called it the author’s ‘study’ or ‘office’ or even ‘workroom’?
That aside, I was interested to see how the project fared. When I visited it a decade ago the site was displaying details of five books which had received 100% funding, including one by a first-time novelist named Jennifer Pickup, and nine other books to which money could be contributed, with the existing donation level displayed by each one. Every book was to remain on the site for a finite period of time, and at the end of that would presumably be removed if it had not attracted sufficient support. Looking at the levels of contribution and the days remaining, my guess was that at least one of the books displayed would not make it into either the bookshops or even into the world of the ebook.
I suppose you could argue that it was really not much different to conventional publishing. Normally, a commissioning editor will pitch a manuscript that he likes to his colleagues, and if enough of them agree with him, the book will be bought. Unbound was doing exactly the same, except that there was no commissioning editor, and the people who made the publishing decision were the kind of people who would ultimately be buying the book. So it was really a new slant rather than a brand-new idea.
So did it work? I revisited the site a few days ago and extracted the following data about the company’s first ten years in business:
The Unbound community now numbers 286,387 people from 207 countries. Collectively they have pledged £10,272,862 towards funding 587 projects that include both award-winners and bestsellers. And Unbound’s next big project will be 42 by Douglas Adams, which has ‘bestseller’ written all over it.
So the answer is obviously ‘yes.’
And that means a new expression has entered the world of books: welcome to ‘crowdfunded publishing’.
