Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 
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Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction
It is worth underscoring that many of the successful projects have a 
twist; they aren’t simply books or ebooks, but include other elements 
which explain why Kickstarter is attractive. 
Within the book space new publisher Unbound has made the model 
their own. Before a book is published it must reach certain targets 
in terms of pledges. Like Kickstarter there is a sliding scale against 
which people can pledge – those who want to put more money in 
can do so and garner additional rewards like special editions and 
launch party invites. CEO Dan Kieran says that in the first six months 
of Unbound’s last financial year crowdfunding revenue (direct sales) 
was up 400%. Unbound has eclectic taste and takes on a huge variety 
of different projects from ‘difficult’ literary fiction to illustrated books 
to unconventional non-fiction. As it goes from strength to strength, 
and with serious investment, we should expect Unbound to publish 
more and more literary fiction as its output overall steps up. Such 
crowdfunding is an unalloyed good for writers of literary fiction. It 
offers a new, paid route to market and provides alternatives and 
competition to the traditional advance structure. At the minute it’s 
still limited. It mean writers have to be proactive in promoting their 
work in order to see it become a reality. But such attempts are to be 
encouraged as a broadening of the models of support. 
Another area that has seen a huge boom is self-publishing. For 
years this was much derided by those on the inside of those insider 
networks. This should no longer be the case. Thanks to ebooks, and 
the Kindle Direct Publishing platform in particular, self-publishing is not 
only viable but increasingly upending the entire publishing industry. 
In the US this growth has been stark. While big publishers have 
seen their ebook revenues decline, the proportion of books that are 
‘non-traditionally’ published now make up 60% of titles on the Kindle 
and 40% of revenues
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. The discrepancy is largely because many 
are selling in small numbers and the price tends to be lower than 
traditionally published books. Yet there are still self published writers 
selling literally millions of copies. While the phenomenon may be less 
developed in the UK, it’s nonetheless marked. 
In theory this should be good for writers – and it is. The trouble is that 
self-published literary fiction is far more difficult than self-published 
genre fiction. Literary fiction still thrives on the oxygen of traditional 
publicity like broadsheet reviews and literary festivals. Both have 
shown a remarkable hostility to self-published fiction. Self-publishing 
does not, in their view, confer the same imprimatur thanks to its lack of 
a quality control filter. What constitutes literary fiction, and even more 
problematically good literary fiction, is a more uncertain affair than 
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http://authorearnings.com/report/september-2015-author-earnings-report/ 

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