alliance (ə  lī´əns), n.  A union or association formed for mutual benefit.

The Book Alliance was founded to offer a home to those types of nonfiction that corporate publishing has turned its back on and to give authors much more say over how their books are published. For lagniappe, our authors will eventually (not at first, alas) earn more generous royalties.

The Need for the Book Alliance

As the American publishing industry has consolidated in recent decades, the needle’s eye through which works of nonfiction have to fit has shrunk drastically. Several types of nonfiction—memoirs, travelogues, and environmental reportage, to name a few—have fallen out of favor. So too longer books and books whose authors haven’t cracked the bestseller lists. It’s not that these kinds of writing are no longer profitable. It’s that the modest profits to be had from them aren’t grand enough to meet the increasingly outsize expectations of corporate investors.

And there’s another problem in publishing of longer standing: The one person indispensable to the whole enterprise—the author—is by default treated rather shabbily. She has little say over (or even knowledge of) how her work is published and marketed, and her wage puts her among the worst-paid laborers in the industry, notwithstanding her essential role.

A New Way of Publishing

The Book Alliance is trying something new. We’re putting the publishing house in the hands of authors. Our collective of authors will decide which books to publish, and each author will have primary control (in consultation with the collective) over such matters as the content and length of her book, the design of its cover and interior, which formats it will be published in and when, its price, the book’s marketing and sales strategy, its promotional budget, and just about everything else to do with the editing, production, publicizing, and sale of the work. Book Alliance authors will also eventually earn higher royalties than the industry norm, although this won’t be true until we’ve grown a bit and can capture some economies of scale in printing and distribution.

If that sounds good, maybe a little too good, you might be wondering what the catch is. The catch is that an author-run publishing house is an author-run publishing house. Most of the work of the house and some expenses will be borne by authors. For example, when the alliance publishes a book, the author will usually commit to edit another author’s book, ideally one she helped choose for publication—for which she will be paid. For authors who are currently juggling side gigs, the promise of paid editorial work as part of a publishing package will be a win-win. For Malcolm Gladwell or Elizabeth Gilbert, it would be a pointless distraction. Our model is not for everyone.

We’ll speak more about money when the alliance formally debuts this fall, but for now please know we cannot offer advances, not to our first authors anyway. Our authors are also likely to have to front some production and marketing costs, for example to pay a freelance cover designer or to send a marketing mailing to bookstores. No author, however, will ever pay the Book Alliance to publish their book; we are not a vanity or hybrid press.