Five fresh funding options supporting the new wave of publishing
The publishing world is changing rapidly, and that is having a ripple effect beyond writing and publishing options for authors and book format opportunities for publishers. The very nature of funding options supporting the new wave of publishing is evolving as well. Those funding options help authors support their work, help authors and publishers get new books out there and even support the kind of innovative projects that are hard to define with the terminology we currently have.
Here are five options I'm excited about that are there for utilizing:
1. Pubslush
Pubslush is a hybrid crowdfunding platform for authors and independent publisher of books. Imagine if Kickstarter were focused on just books and chose to go the extra mile for the projects that did the best on their platform by actually publishing those books. Pubslush does just that. Here's how they describe themselves:
"Pubslush is a publishing platfom with a cause. Authors fundraise and gauge the initial market for new book ideas, trendsetting readers pledge their support to bring books to life, and Pubslush supports children's literacy initiatives worldwide."
That's right. For every book Pubslush Press sells, they donate a children's book sold by our publishing imprint (Pubslush Press), a children's book will be donated to a child in need. It's sort of like what Tom's does with shoes and sunglasses, but for books. They just published their first book: A Beautiful Mess, by Ali Berlinski.
2. Livrada
Livrada is a service that lets you give a gift certificate for a specific eBook. I love it. I wrote about this as an issue for eBooks around gift-giving. When we give gifts, we tend to want a tangible object. Livrada lets you give a paper gift certificate that people can then give to the reader as a gift. That reader scratches off the code covering and can redeem the code for a copy of the book from whatever retailer for any eReader device. What's better? They just got funding to expand through Ingram. I expect to see a higher level of push on things like this come this winter's holiday season.
3. Unglue.it
"What if you could give a book to everyone on earth? Get an eBook and read it on any device, in any format, forever? Give an eBook to your library, for them to share? Own DRM-free eBooks, legally? Read free eBooks, and know their creators had been fairly paid?
At Unglue.it, you can pledge toward creating eBooks that will be legally free, worldwide. These books have already been traditionally published, but they're stuck: legal restrictions keep you from being able to enjoy and share them."
That's the idea behind Unglue.it, which is innovative and wonderful. The founders looked at the mess of digital rights and challenges around eBook availability and realized, hey, we've got the technology, we just need the money. They created a forum to raise the money to help make eBooks available to anyone, anywhere, while still compensating authors and publishers for the work. Pretty awesome!
"We are an ever-growing, worldwide network of people devoted to forwarding the interest of awesomeness in the universe."
"...the Foundation distributes a series of monthly $1,000 grants to projects and their creators. The money is pooled together from the coffers of ten or so self-organizing “micro-trustees” and given upfront in cash, check, or gold doubloons."
I just learned about the Awesome Foundation this week and I think it's, well, awesome. It falls somewhere between the idea of crowdfunding and traditional grants. It strikes me as curated crowdfunding without the red tape. And I think it's the kind of model that will support new publishing projects that may not fall neatly into categories that we have right now. It's ideal for an author looking to create an innovative collaborative or multi-media project who needs a little seed money to polish the final product. While it's not focused solely on books or publishing, it is supportive of anything that's awesome that can make a compelling case. And that's the kind of thing I think new authors who are pushing the boundaries of publishing are putting out there.
5. Arts Writers
It's not all about supporting authors and publishers with funding to do the work. There will always be a need for people to survey the landscape and offer intelligent, well-researched, and academic perspectives on what is going on in the creative world. It's an important element of how we gauge our progress as artists, and a tool for study from an angle that isn't "market-driven." The Arts Writers foundation offers grants and scholarships to writers who want to study and write about the new innovations in art since WWII, which is more an more meaning research and commentary on what is being done with digital creativity.
Have you seen any other opportunities out there that the infrastructure supporting new publishing models is offering? I'd love to hear about them in the comments.
Images courtesy of Lead from 401(K) 2013 via flickr, and internal from SalFalko via flickr