This recent concept (launched in May 2011) at the Hay Festival brings writers closer to readers by enabling readers to choose between suggested ideas for a book and to follow its progress even suggesting ideas for that book’s content as it grows. My friends think this is a brilliant idea that enables a greater number of people to involved in the evolution of the work and they profoundly wish Microsoft had the same ethos. I took a little bit of a different slant on the proposals which are even now growing in popularity.
Some significant writers are joining in this Unbound concept and readers send them money to be part of the project and those projects which get full funding go ahead and some of those will be published by Faber & Faber. Readers get mentioned in the book and get a free copy…well not entirely free as they paid anywhere from £10 to hundreds to be part of the writing experience.
The writer splits the royalties 50/50 and this is where I am not happy about the proposals at all because basically you have free ideas being fed to you by people who will never receive a penny for them. A better idea would be to have a community of people give ideas to writing a book and having that book published and no one get any money for it because it is given away free or at cost. This Unbound concept as explained on the web site seems to me to be geared towards profiting the writers by feeding off people’s longing to be able to write.