Over at Earlyworks Press we have found ways of avoiding making a profit from writing competitions, from running a subscription club, or from publishing books. Now, why would we want to do a thing like that, and why would I want to tell the world about our marvellous failure?

To stop people sending me rude emails! Yes, we are in a very murky business and we’re part of a growing army. Slap a competition on a website, charge people a fiver a time to enter, sit back and wait for the money to roll in. Tell everyone who enters that they’ve won your competition and you’re going to publish them, squeeze a couple of hundred efforts into an anthology, then charge the writers to get a look at the result. Set up a writers’ club, drop hints that the secret centre of the club carries the key to fame and fortune and nail a ‘subscribe now’ button to it: More money rolls in. Tell dreaming would-be authors their sweated-over manuscripts are the work of genius, that you are willing to publish them for a price, and watch them fall for it… No wonder everyone hates online ‘publishers’!

The world is changing (as Galadriel said). The Internet offers many ways for an aspiring author to help themselves along and the idea of Earlyworks Press is that what one can do alone at considerable effort and expense, a group working together can do far more easily. We wanted artists, writers and business-minds to come together and share their skills. We wanted independent and freelance writers to conquer their isolation and form themselves into a worldwide marketing network. We wanted facilities to swap editing, proofreading and skills-development tasks and organise book-selling, promotional and cultural events… and we wanted to put something that’s fun for writers and illustrators on the website to attract members… so the first thing we did with our new website was set up some writing and art competitions.

And the first thing the world did was send us some rude emails about ‘exploiting writers’. We read them very carefully and decided that if the competitions made us rich, we were indeed doing something wrong.

We managed not to make any money. We managed it by taking the time and the trouble to put only the very best of the entries into books, and by producing books that were worthy of the writers’ and illustrators’ efforts (that meant spending time consulting the authors about editing and proofreading, finding suitable artwork and spending time and money on the design of the books). When the books were produced (real, paper books that were delivered on pallets, not print-on-demand books that never really exist beyond the website) we sent the authors free copies of the books, and continued to make further copies available to them as cheaply as we could. We sent out review copies and began the long and intensive process of trying to promote books by authors with unfamiliar names – using the books to promote the careers of our chosen authors.

We managed not to make any money from the online club, too. We managed this by closing the club forum to search engines. The reason so many websites have public or semi-public forums attached is that forums collect text, and text attracts higher search engine rankings. Most writers’ clubs ride very high on the search engines and attract thousands of members because writers, by their very nature, deposit vast amounts of text on a forum. It’s great – the webmasters don’t have to keep writing long articles to attract Google’s attention, they can just sit back and let the forum members spill their thoughts out for them.

The problem for the writer of course is that they go to a forum to try out a piece of writing and it’s instantly relayed all over the web. Their work may be read and copied by all comers and, if they try to offer it to a publisher, they may find it’s turned down because it is ‘already published’ – although in a manner that does their career no good at all. At Earlyworks Press this doesn’t happen. We do have public exhibition pages where our writers and illustrators can and do display samples of their work, but the club forum is totally private. Members can use the workshops, discuss their careers and make recommendations (or post warnings) about publishers, agents and competitions without fear of anyone outside the club reading their posts.

As for publishing books, our exclusive method for failing to make money at this is as follows: When setting up competitions, don’t just stick to short stories – think up interesting and demanding challenges and allow for stories of different genres and lengths. This will reduce the number of entries but encourage unusual and specialist work. Don’t automatically throw out second or third entries by the same person – if one writer comes second, fifth and twelfth in an anonymously judged competition, why then they deserve three prizes.

Finally, if there is still a risk of making money from the books, you can avoid it in the following ways: Increase the discount to the authors and to club members. Send out more free copies – to club members as prizes for in-house competitions and to reviewers – to enhance the profile of the contributing authors.

 

I don’t suppose the people who keep sending us rude emails are actually going to read this but maybe, just maybe some of the new writers wandering the web will see it and learn a little bit about how to avoid being taken for a ride by those publishers and competition-organisers who DO deserve rude emails. If you still think we do, please tell me why here and we’ll argue it out in public.