Adventures in crowdfunding: a literary trumps odyssey

Just how do you calculate George Eliot’s pace over 100m?

I started as a journalist just as hot metal was banging itself out and while I’ve always worked in print, once digital opportunities to interact with readers emerged I was immediately attracted to them. Over the last 25 years I’ve seen the good and the bad of this, the chance to easily reach like-minded readers around the world as well as the soul-destroying time spent as the online comments moderator at The Independent (if you’re appalled by what appears under the line on newspaper sites, just imagine the awfulness that doesn’t get through).

One of the most interesting experiments I’ve taken part in is attempting to crowdfund a project.

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. Crowdfunding a book is certainly 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.

Back in 2011, in my role as the entire staff of Shedworking I was approached by the publisher, podcaster, QI co-founder, and writer John Mitchinson. He was setting up Unbound, the world’s first crowdfunding publisher and was after some advice about getting hold of a garden office to launch it at the Hay Festival. Happily, I was able to help him a bit and now a decade later they’ve become very successful – among their hits are Nikesh Shukla’s The Good Immigrant, Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, and Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note – and I’ve helped to fund about ten of them.

At that time, I’d published Shedworking: The Alternative Workplace Revolution along recognisably conventional lines. I wrote it, my publisher printed it, bookshops sold it, I got a cut of the profits. And that’s how it worked for my next two books. But then I came up with the idea of producing a card game about books along the lines of the familiar Top Trumps.

I’ve always loved card games, especially those involving trumps – as a child I spent hours with friends battling racing cars’ engine capacities and windjammers’ displacements, and for my 30th birthday the invitations to my party were in the style of the original Dubreq Top Trumps cards featuring categories such as ‘Turning circle’ (which I humbly decided was ‘on a sixpence’).

My Literary Trumps were to take a more writerly approach to the concept. So instead of deliberating over whether a Heinkel He 177 A-3 heavy bomber has a higher ‘Ceiling Altitude’ than a Spitfire Mk. XIV interceptor, you could instead pit Leo Tolstoy against Maya Angelou, Mark Twain against Aphra Benn, Beatrix Potter against Jack Kerouac.

Having no idea how to make this actually happen, I thought of Unbound where Jimmy Leach (my former digital editor at The Independent) and Scott Pack (who came within a whisker of publishing the Shedworking book) were both working.

This was the pitch.

Each pack to contain 30 cards featuring famous characters from literature, all given ratings in half a dozen categories. Thus we could discover whether Emma Bovary is officially a better bet than Mr (Fitzwilliam) Darcy for ‘Sexiness’, if Inspector Rebus beats Kenneth Widmerpool for ‘Quotability’ or Katniss Everdeen could defeat Ivor the Engine on ‘Speed’. It would answer queries about Mary Poppins’ potential as the GOAT for ‘Parenting skills’ or if Nancy Drew really is the ace in the pack for ‘Reliability’.

They loved the idea and said they’d be happy to take it on. We agreed terms (as with other authors, no advances/royalties but a 50-50 profit share with the possibility of a major traditional publishing house deal). In the end, we went for actual authors rather than fictitious folk, and I started researching it. Here was an early mockup:

We also did a video promotion featuring the very amenable Phil Connor and Georgia Odd from Unbound who gamely spent a day with me and a camera crew:

And then came the hard work, looking for people who were happy to cough up the cash to make it happen. The way that Unbound works is that once it has selected a book (or in my case, something bookish) that they feel deserve to see the light of day, they then work with the author to encourage financial backing from hundreds of individual patrons. 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, Facebook, Instagram, email, blogs, et al, and making the most of online communities everywhere.

It’s not only a timeconsuming job, it’s one that requires a deft touch. Swamp your friends and contacts with constant pleas to fund your work and you risk turning people off and away. Fail to mention it widely enough and you simply won’t raise enough moolah. Once it’s all underway, there’s a marvellous feeling of genuinely building a relationship with readers. I’m always grateful to everybody who forks out their hardearned money to buy one of my books, but every time a new pledge for my game came in, it felt like an old-fashioned personal connection had been made.

Long story short, I didn’t raise enough money to make it happen. We got about the third of the way after about six months and then progress was so glacial it felt like it was better to pull the plug than watch it wither on the vine. No harm done, punters got their money back or credit towards pledging on another book, and I just regarded it as another interesting online adventure that didn’t quite work out. Not every Unbound project does and while I have pledged for Iris Murdoch’s Beermats, I do fear for its future.

But the story has a happy ending. I still thought the concept had legs, so I contacted Laurence King which publishes lots of games and bookish gifts as well as books. They also agreed on its leg potential and, long story short again, we produced two packs, one of ‘Modern Authors’ and another of ‘Classic Authors’. This time round things were rather more traditional and I got paid up front (though with no royalties).

It was an interesting experience putting it together. Some early ideas fell by the wayside. I’d initially thought it would be interesting to have a ‘speed’ category, partly in homage to those games of my childhood where it was always included. But calculating the likes of George Eliot’s pace over 100m proved too taxing. Quite rightly, that was a non-starter.

The main issue though was the sheer size of the winnowing. The first pack we published featured modern authors who, alas, are no longer with us, so essentially that meant a century of writers to pick from. The Classic Authors pack spread the net even wider to anybody writing before the 20th century, allowing Virgil to properly get to grips with Voltaire.

Of course numerous wordsmiths picked themselves. It would be unthinkable to leave out Shakespeare, especially as his Adaptions rating of 99 reflecting centuries of productions of his work makes him a key card for a winning hand. It also felt right to ensure that the poet Baudelaire’s somewhat ‘colourful’ life should be celebrated with a cracking Biopic factor of 90 (though bettered by that big beast Hemingway with a well-deserved score of 93). And as the generally accepted best-selling author of all time, you’ll want to keep Dame Agatha Christie for her perfect 100 (Commercial Success), if not for her Shock factor (30). It was important too to make sure this was not simply a pack of pale, stale, males.

While the games are fun, I hope they encourage readers to try unfamiliar writers such as Murasaki Shikibu, a female Japanese novelist from around the 10th century whose The Tale of Genji (originally published in ‘orihon’ concertina style and possibly co-authored with her daughter Daini no Sanmi) is arguably the world’s first novel. Personally, I was happy to make official my soft spot for the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa – also a favourite of Philip Pullman’s - who wrote using more than 70 literary personas (even though I felt obliged to mark him down with a rotten Adaptions score of just 3). His unclassifiable masterpiece The Book of Disquiet, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, deserves wider recognition.

There is plenty of fuel for disagreements about the scores in both packs and indeed Laurence King did make a few adjustments. This is as it should be and I hope people have ended up spending as much time discussing Chrétien de Troyes’s Radical rating when he comes up against Mary Shelley as I did as an eight-year-old quarreling with Paul and Keith about the width of battleships.

Currently reading: Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids: An Indie Odyssey by Nige Tassell. If you listened to indie music in the 80s, then you’ll know exactly what C86 meant to many Generation Xers. Tassell does a fine job in tracking down the leading lights from the compilation tape with humour, tact, and just the right amount of nostalgia.