Building a book's sales, one tweet at a time

Mark Twain used door-to-door salesmen. Now we use social media.

These are strange times for the book. Technology now enables us to shrink an entire personal library onto an electronic device the size and weight of a single paperback. Yet at the same time, it is also bringing back one of the most old-fashioned ways of funding how books reach readers.  

I published my first three books along recognisably conventional lines – I wrote them, my publisher printed them, bookshops sold them, I got a cut of the profits. But my most recent project – a card game called Literary Trumps in which writers such as Enid Blyton and Leo Tolstoy go head to head in categories such as 'quotability' and 'speed' – is being generated in quite a different way. It is being crowdfunded via specialist publishers Unbound. 

Crowdfunding is very much the flavour of the month, whether it’s financing maternity leave in the USA or the building of the Otter Farm kitchen garden school in Devon. And indeed the idea of crowdfunding a book is nothing new – Mark Twain sold 40,000 copies of Huckleberry Finn by the ‘subscription in advance’ approach, while patrons were key to ensuring works such as Samuel Johnson’s dictionary made it into print. 

Unbound works in a similar way, selecting books (or in my case, something bookish) they feel deserve to see the light of day, then working with the author to encourage financial pledges from hundreds of individual patrons. There are no advances or royalties, but there is a 50-50 profit share with the author. So far they have funded 140 books – including the Man Booker Prize longlisted The Wake, and Letters of Note which has sold over 100,000 copies in the UK - and raised more than £2 million in pl edge revenue. A joint venture with Random House means that the books also make it into shops.

But this success is only possible thanks to the myriad new ways we now commonly communicate with each other. Attracting the hundreds of supporters needed to make sufficient online pledges to get the work into print means spreading details of the project far and wide, harnessing the international power of Twitter, and Facebook, email and blogs, online communities everywhere.