Brash New Kids on the Block
Brash Books
Not long ago I had a conversation with Joel Goldman about
his new venture with Lee
Goldberg. The two Edgar-award nominated winning bestselling authors
have set up a publishing company that brashly claims to publish, “the best crime
novels in existence.”
Each author found considerable success
in self-publishing their own books that had gone out of print when the
copyrights reverted to the authors.
As prolific writers Joel and Lee had extensive backlists they were able
to turn into active sources of income. Between them they sold 750, 000
books. Their self-published books
were indistinguishable from traditionally-published books with cover art,
formatting and editing as professional as any publisher could provide. The venture was more lucrative for the
authors than traditional publication as it exists now.
They discovered that each of them
had a mental list of wonderful books of crime fiction by other authors that
were out of print including books by many female authors and minority
authors. Although some works had
been out of print for twenty years or more, they believed the books would be as
appealing to readers today as they were when they were first published. After some discussion they decided to
seek out the authors or their heirs and get the right to reissue the works
through their own publishing company — Brash Books. In some ways the discussion brought to mind United Artists,
which was set up in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks
and others, in part due to allow expression of their artistic sensibilities and
in part as a response due to the uncertainty that existed in the motion picture
industry at the time.
Joel said he and Lee wanted to
limit the books they release at any time to a number low enough for Brash Books
to full support the releases. They
are open to new works but the numbers they will accept will be limited and
their standards will be high.
You can find out more on facebook,
Youtube and their website http://www.mysterythrillerbooks.com/
I hope they will be successful and
I will be watching with interest
There is a huge rush to get out-of-print books back into "print" – even more so on the eBook side than in physical print, however.
ReplyDeleteGiven POD publishing there is very little outlay required to take a previously published book and get it republished. Cover art and layout are the two main tasks, other than proofreading to make sure no transcription errors are introduced.
Consequently, profits are high for those who can get to the good stuff first. These two are trying to cash in on that, which is a perfectly good business model.
~ Jim
Business models for authors are getting changed all the time. I think this model is one of the best I've seen,
ReplyDeleteWarren, that sounds like a good idea to me. I hope they are successful, although it seems like they already are with the amount of books they've sold.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, this is well worth watching. I hope they are successful! I think we will be seeing different experiments in the near future, and who knows what will work and what will not. With all their experience and their obvious interest, these two may be on the cutting edge of the future of publishing.
ReplyDeletethey have a formula for producing quality--something often overlooked these days!
ReplyDelete