Pete Brown's Beer Blog - I'm writing a new beer book - and testing out a new approach
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The publishing industry is in a state of flux, but new models are emerging - one of which allows me to write my first book about beer in six years. And you can get involved.
A great deal has changed since I had my first book published in 2003. The beer scene, obviously, has changed beyond recognition. And so has publishing. When Man Walks into a Pub came out, there were lots of bookshops but no smartphones, no kindles, and most people didn't know what a blog was.
Like everything else, publishing has now fragmented. And like many other careers, being a writer means you have to have several different projects on the go at any one time. The books I have published by mainstream publishers are moving further away from beer - and I hope to have confirmation of a new book in that direction in the next few weeks. But the only problem with this is that I do miss writing books about beer...
Which is why I was delighted just before Christmas when a chap called Jason Cooper, who commissioned and edited my first two beer books at Pan Macmillan, dropped me a line to tell me that he is now working for a new kind of publishing venture.
Unbound is a new concept that combines the best bits of crowdfunding and traditional publishing. It was founded by authors who wanted to establish a different way of creating books. The idea is that the author and publisher work together on every aspect of a book idea. We work out the costs of actually bringing the book to market, and we crowdfund that bit of it. So you can pledge £10 and get an e-book that has your name in the back; twenty quid gets you a unique hardback edition, available only to subscribers, and so on. As the pledge levels go up, you get bigger rewards.
But the really cool bit is that once the money is raised and the book is published, it goes into the market just like a normal book does. It gets distributed by Transworld, part of the biggest publishing group in the world, and appears in bookshops, on Amazon etc just like a book for any other publisher. So if you want to pledge to help make the book happen, at the very least you get a special edition with your name in that's different from the one in the shops. If you find the whole crowdfunding thing is not to your tastes, you can simply wait until the book comes out, and buy the normal edition as you would any other book.
It works best for authors who've already got a bit of a following who want to write something different from what their mainstream publisher is after. Unbound is publishing people like Raymond Briggs, Jonathan Meades and David Quantick, a lot of music, food and drink and business titles, and they've already done one title made it to last year's Booker longlist. You can check out the full range of books thing they do, see which ones have met their target and which are still open, and browse what different pledge levels get you, on the site here.
Beer books are perfect for the model. So tomorrow, my first beer book proposal since Hops & Glory will be going up on the Unbound website with an invitation for you to pledge and be part of it. It's an idea that I'm really excited about, a return to the territory and style of my first three books (although it doesn't involve me going to sea for three months) and has the additional benefit of me having learned a lot more about beer - and writing - in the intervening years.
Depending on how long it takes to make the pledge target, the book should be published some time in 2016 - there's still a bit of travel left for me to do this summer, though I have done a lot of it over the past few years.
I'll be revealing the idea and scope of the book on this blog tomorrow, and linking to the Unbound page where there will be a bit more detail, and a short excerpt from one of the chapters I've already written. I'll also be able to answer any questions you might have.
So see you back here Thursday pm. I hope you're going to like it.
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