Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 

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Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction

It is worth underscoring that many of the successful projects have a 

twist; they aren’t simply books or ebooks, but include other elements 

which explain why Kickstarter is attractive. 

Within the book space new publisher Unbound has made the model 

their own. Before a book is published it must reach certain targets 

in terms of pledges. Like Kickstarter there is a sliding scale against 

which people can pledge – those who want to put more money in 

can do so and garner additional rewards like special editions and 

launch party invites. CEO Dan Kieran says that in the first six months 

of Unbound’s last financial year crowdfunding revenue (direct sales) 

was up 400%. Unbound has eclectic taste and takes on a huge variety 

of different projects from ‘difficult’ literary fiction to illustrated books 

to unconventional non-fiction. As it goes from strength to strength, 

and with serious investment, we should expect Unbound to publish 

more and more literary fiction as its output overall steps up. Such 

crowdfunding is an unalloyed good for writers of literary fiction. It 

offers a new, paid route to market and provides alternatives and 

competition to the traditional advance structure. At the minute it’s 

still limited. It mean writers have to be proactive in promoting their 

work in order to see it become a reality. But such attempts are to be 

encouraged as a broadening of the models of support. 

Another area that has seen a huge boom is self-publishing. For 

years this was much derided by those on the inside of those insider 

networks. This should no longer be the case. Thanks to ebooks, and 

the Kindle Direct Publishing platform in particular, self-publishing is not 

only viable but increasingly upending the entire publishing industry. 

In the US this growth has been stark. While big publishers have 

seen their ebook revenues decline, the proportion of books that are 

‘non-traditionally’ published now make up 60% of titles on the Kindle 

and 40% of revenues

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. The discrepancy is largely because many 

are selling in small numbers and the price tends to be lower than 

traditionally published books. Yet there are still self published writers 

selling literally millions of copies. While the phenomenon may be less 

developed in the UK, it’s nonetheless marked. 

In theory this should be good for writers – and it is. The trouble is that 

self-published literary fiction is far more difficult than self-published 

genre fiction. Literary fiction still thrives on the oxygen of traditional 

publicity like broadsheet reviews and literary festivals. Both have 

shown a remarkable hostility to self-published fiction. Self-publishing 

does not, in their view, confer the same imprimatur thanks to its lack of 

a quality control filter. What constitutes literary fiction, and even more 

problematically good literary fiction, is a more uncertain affair than 

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http://authorearnings.com/report/september-2015-author-earnings-report/ 

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