Now that ebooks have finally become a viable market and it is no longer necessary to purchase, transport, store, and eventually pulp tonnes of paper every time you want to sell a new book, we figured it was time to get into publishing and try out some of our own ideas.
Publisher’s virtue
This is our big idea. Publisher’s virtue is a simple yardstick.
We believe a publisher’s virtue can be measured with a simple equation: author’s income from a book/publisher’s income from a book.
We believe a publisher’s virtue should never be smaller than 1 and should often be greater.
How we work
Here’s another one of our ideas: producing a book needs to become more like making a record – a group of people with complementary skills join forces to make something great.
Continuing the record analogy, Byrnes Woder acts as producer and label: bringing people together, getting it done, and marketing it.
Our business model is all about sharing the love. And by love we mean the income generated by the sale of books.
We split any income with the author, 50:50, after agreed costs, and out of each side also comes cuts for other back-end participants. This may include editors, designers, illustrators, etc (the “band”).
Unlike normal publishers, our income split increasingly favours the author as more and more copies are sold until Byrnes Woder’s share declines to 10%.
In the long term the popularity and income of any book rests with the quality of that book and so with the author. In the short term, when a book is released and the future is unknown, we ask for a more equitable split to improve the chances that our investment is covered.
Of course there are more details, but that’s it in a nutshell.
We’re not for everybody. And if you think we might be the publisher for you, look into how easy it is to create an ebook (eg, using Sigil) and consider how much better 100% of income is compared to 50% or any other number.
If you think we are for you, you can submit your manuscript to Byrnes Woder by clicking here.
Thanks for reading,
Jimmy Wondrasek
