Unbound: Books Are Now in Your Hands

Monika Jansen June 7, 2011 Tweet

With eReaders taking over the book world and rendering hard copies of books obsolete, e-book publishers have been popping up left and right.  Seth Godin launched The Domino Project last year, around the time we covered BookBrewer, a service that lets people turn blogs and documents into e-books within a few minutes.  A Google search for e-book publishers yields 26,100,000 results.

Enter Unbound, a London-based startup that brings together authors and readers together so they can decide which books get published. As they say on their website: “Just authors, readers and great ideas.”

Unbound was founded by three writers, Dan Kieran, Justin Pollard, and John Mitchinson, who firmly believe there are lots of potentially great books that are not getting published due to difficulty entering the market.  For already established authors, publishing houses are actually restricting what they can and cannot write.

The Unbound model is very straightforward: the author pitches an idea and if enough readers support it, the author will begin writing; readers can fund the e-book. If you think the book is greatest thing every, you can promote it to other people to gain more support.  The book’s net profit is split 50/50 with the author.

Check out this video to learn more: