Unbound opens doors for authors
Crowdfunding site gives them opportunity to be published
Technology has created as many opportunities for the publishing world as it has difficulties. U.K.-based writer Dan Kieran, after seeing his writing income shrivel up during the 2008 recession, founded a crowdfunding platform called Unbound where readers could pledge to support the publication of a favourite writers’ book. Kieran is in Toronto telling his story at the publishing industry’s annual Book Summit on Thursday.
In our view the reader is the most underutilized asset in publishing. Readers and authors are the two bits that matter — they’re the only bits that really matter — so it seems insane that we’re not letting them communicate.
I spent eight to 10 years writing books for a living. My first book was a huge bestseller. As with lots of authors, they go in with something commercial and then gradually get to write the books that they really want to write. So I did lots of humour titles and then gradually I managed to shift into non-fiction and then into travel, which is my real love.
(Then came) the crash of 2008 and, along with Amazon’s (payment policies), authors very much bore the brunt in terms of the money they earned started to collapse. So I effectively lost my income and I lost my profession. We (Kieran and partners Justin Pollard and John Mitchinson) figured publishers would embrace the Internet. So we just went for it and we built a platform that connects authors and readers directly together.
Readers have incredible taste and judgment and that’s borne out by a book we published by Paul Kingsnorth called The Wake, which was turned down by every publisher in London — and it was turned down for a perfectly reasonable financial reason: because it’s written in its own language and it tells the story of the resistance, the invasion of1066, so on the face of it this is a really hard sell. But we found 400 people that were like, “No, this is a work of genius, this is amazing.” And then it gets published and it gets long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and a few weeks ago at the industry awards in the U.K., it won Book of the Year. So this is a book that only exists because 400 readers said we think this is brilliant.
But (Unbound) is still a very heavily curated platform because we want to produce amazing books. So on one end you’ve got people who are publishing on Amazon, some to great effect, but they’re desperate to have hard copies and they’re desperate to be in bookshops.
We can offer an author that by helping them find their audience and capture it. These are people who are avid, passionate book lovers. And they don’t want to be told what to read, they want to be able to curate their own experience, they want to go online and say “That’s interesting” or “I really admire that guy” or “I really love that woman’s books and I want to help make that happen.” This interview has been edited for clarity and length.