Macmillan - Britain's 5th biggest publisher and an old & prestigious industry name - set up an outfit a couple of years back called Macmillan New Writing. (See its FAQs page here.) MNW:
- offers no advance, but ...
- offers reasonably generous royalties
- takes work in any adult fiction genre - literary fiction to space-opera, and I expect operatically spacey literature too.
- gets the full support of Pan Macmillan in terms of design, production, PR, sales & marketing, etc
There are two schools of thought on this. One (voiced by a disgruntled agent who sees this as the thin end of an anti-agent wedge) derides MNW as the Ryanair of publishing. You could even argue that MNW is exploitative. Advances are there, after all, to offer authors some kind of insurance against the vagaries of a very vagariferous market.
The other school of thought says hooray. The market is too narrow and the compulsive rush towards unaffordable advances is one of the mostly corrosively narrowing forces at work. MNW broadens the kind of work that can be taken on. It gives authors a chance to build a reputation. It's a return to the most old-fashioned virtues of publishing. Long may it flourish.
So what d'ya think? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Would you personally care to have your novel published by MNW - or do you think this is exploitation by a different name? Let's all have a heated debate ...
2 comments:
I would consider it - being published is being published. The advance isnt the be all and end all.
However, you would want some reassurance that royalties would follow within a reasonable timescale.
You say also that the publisher would still do all the normal promotion and marketing things. There would be a small worry however that they are not going to prioritise the promotion of these novels over those that they where have a large advance to recover .
One thing MNW did was a certain amount of promotion of the six launch titles as a group, a single identity, which, despite the wide variety of genres, did get a lot of coverage.
But in general, no, they don't do as much promotion as they would for an author to whom they'd paid lots of money. On the other hand publishers don't do much for any low advance books with modest expected sales - they just don't have the budget of money or time - and in that MNW is little different from the experience of other such authors. Either way, it's up to the author to do most of it.
The cleverness of the model lies in the way they've set it up so they can break even on a book which a more traditional model would make unpublishable: it's no coincidence that the founder is a production guy. The other thing is that as I understand it MNW isn't expected to make a profit, only to break even and act as a testing ground and feeder for PanMac proper. In that sense it's not a model that standalone small publishers wanting to focus on new writing can realistically follow.
If anyone's inerested, the group blog of the MNW authors is here:
http://macmillannewwriters.blogspot.com/ . They're a cheerful bunch - much more cheerful than your average planeful of Ryanair travellers, that's for sure.
Post a Comment