Interest Form: HERE.
Text: If you’re an author, you know the marketing landscape is brutal. We’re not competing with other authors. We’re competing with Netflix and HBO, with AI companies flooding the market with stolen goods, with Amazon deciding which book to show to which search terms, with social media algorithms deciding which posts and videos to show people in the five minutes they’re checking their phones.
You’re a writer. You focus on the words, honing your craft, taking classes, reading craft books, trying to find the perfect critique group, revising and editing and revising and editing and revising and editing so you could tell the best story possible. And now the world says, “Great. But no one will read those words unless you are a cover artist, a graphic designer, a developmental editor, a copy editor, a publicist, a book distributor, a videographer, and a contracts lawyer … or have the money to hire a dozen people to work for you while you write your next book.”
Maybe you can get an agent who can sell your manuscript to one of the Big Five and get you a huge advance. Do you know what they will expect you to do with that advance? Spend it on marketing. Hire those twenty people. And then, if the first book is successful enough, maybe some of the advance on the next one can go into your pocket. Maybe. But you probably shouldn’t quit your day job just yet.
What if there were a different way, a new model?
Imagine working with a group of authors who are all in the same boat. Only each brings their own special skills. Someone, in addition to writing, actually enjoys spending time on social media. Someone else hates that but loves giving developmental feedback to fellow authors … if they could only find the time. Someone else likes doing live events and hand-selling to readers. Someone else likes talking to bookstore owners … but they don’t have the graphic design skills to make a really nice catalogue to hand across that counter. Someone else has those skills, but the idea of talking to strangers about their book freaks them out. They wish someone would give them a script and a lot of other books to talk about so they wouldn’t have to talk so much about their own.
Did you see yourself in there? Imagine if 50 authors worked together in a highly organized way. Five of them work on social media and tell the other 45 to post about specific things each week. Five make that great catalogue and write the script for bookstore owners so the other 45 know just what to say when they walk into their local bookstore. Five keep an eye out for live events and organize people to work those booths. Five are submitting your manuscript to be considered for all the prizes it might win if you only had the time to submit. Five are working on the best possible cover art. Five are helping with copyedits. Five are doing developmental editing for books that aren’t quite there yet. Five are evaluating manuscript submissions to decide what the group should publish next year. Five are reviewing the budget to make sure every red cent is accounted for and clear to all the other members.
And here’s the key thing: Those fifty authors own the company. If they are successful in their efforts, even if they are helping get a fellow author’s books into bookstores and social media feeds and ultimately into readers’ hands, they win, too, because their share of the company is more valuable at the end of the year than it was at the beginning due to their efforts. And some serve on the budget committee to make sure every penny of the members’ ownership is transparent and accounted for.
Not a Pipe Publishing has been around since 2013. Back then, we had one title. Those of you in the indie scene know how hard that is. Even if a reader loves your work and wants to support you, you don’t have anything else to sell them. They got your book, they liked it, maybe they even left a review somewhere and told a friend about it, but after that …? Slowly, Not a Pipe has built a library of fantastic books. I am so proud of our titles, so grateful for the talented authors I’ve had the honor to work with. I’m also proud that Not a Pipe has remained, and will remain, a traditional press in the sense that the money flows one direction. Our authors never pay us for cover art or editing or marketing expenses. The royalties go to them.
But these books should be read by more people, and those authors should be earning more royalties. Everyone is trying to do their own marketing, and I never feel I can do enough for them.
And then, as some of you know, I ended up in the middle of this giant online scandal because a big corporation stole a store my partner, Chrys, and I owned. And while it’s been a nightmare, it got me thinking about the other company we co-own, Not a Pipe Publishing. I think this company who treated us and their other franchisees so poorly could have avoided the PR disaster if their franchisees had been the owners and had real authority in the corporation. One of the things I would value in a member-owned model is that the decision making would be democratized. We all decide what books we should publish, how we should market them, etc. We make decisions together, and in a clear, consistent, and organized way, with the small decisions made by the small groups who are becoming experts in a given area, then signed off on by the whole membership. I just imagine if the CEO of this other corporation knew he would be going to the membership to ask for their input, everything would have been different. “Hey, should I rip off these franchisees who are your fellow owners of this company? Hey, people found out we ripped off those franchisees and are really angry. Should we lie and pretend we didn’t do it? Hey, we ripped off some franchisees and lied about it. Should we still be in charge of this company?” If the franchisees owned the company, they would have put a stop to it at every turn, and maybe they would have prevented the situation which will probably require the CEO’s replacement or the destruction of the whole company.
Also, this fits with our values. Not a Pipe has always been committed to being an activist press. This is evident in the pages of our award-winning poetry collections, our Antifa Lit Journal, our great YA books that help young people consider who they want to be and what kind of world they want to create, and our novels for adults that help readers understand the people around them differently. We believe reading great fiction is a work-out for your empathy muscles. Maybe it’s the poet you get to know between the lines, and maybe it’s a character who is unlike anyone you’ve ever met before; reading prepares you to care about the nine billion people you share a home with but haven’t had a chance to meet yet.
Yet our governance structure, despite being, over the course of Not a Pipe’s life, a queer co-owned, neurodivergent co-owned, and Black co-owned business, has been a very traditional, hierarchical structure, and as our cishet, white, male co-owner, I can see that’s probably due to a lack of imagination on my part. So I want to try something new, something that proves a different model can challenge certain capitalist assumptions about power and work while also making sense in terms of the bottom line for the people doing the labor.
This is not a brand new model. There have been employee-owned businesses in lots of industries, and there are some small presses that are already structured this way, so it’s a proven model. I’m excited to develop it with our own group of authors and design it together to be exactly what we want it to be.
Now, some of you are wondering if this is a scam. Good for you! There are far too many scammers preying upon authors. I get those same emails offering to put my novels into book clubs that don’t exist or to optimize the SEO of my website in exchange for my passwords and bank account information. One of the things this community has done and will do more effectively is help us dodge those scams. And every penny of the company’s money will be transparent and managed by one of the subcommittees of authors.
This is all very preliminary, and that’s intentional. I don’t want to come to anyone and say, “I’ve figured this all out by myself. Want in?” That flies in the face of the distributed authority that makes it better than our current model. Instead, I want to put together a design committee of people excited about the idea to flesh out the details together before anyone commits to being a member. If it sounds like something you’d want more information about, there’s a form to put your name in the hat, and if you’d like to serve on the design committee and create the structure itself, there’s a spot to nominate yourself for that as well.
How long will it take to get the whole thing up and running? That will be up to us, together, to decide. My goal is to have it formulated and ready to go by January 1st. I think this model is very possible and could have exciting results for a lot of authors out there. I look forward to working with you!
Interest Form: HERE.
