New Deal Press - 50/50 Publishing

The old description of what we were originally planning to do is left below for the sake of nostalgia:

The New Deal Press was established for two reasons. First, we want to challenge the accepted wisdom in the publishing industry that authors only merit a slim portion of publishing profits, usually between 4% and 7% of the cover price (5% to 15% of net for non-fiction). Secondly, we want to make money doing it. The New Deal Press is a for-profit enterprise, and we will only publish books we believe we can make money with.

How can New Deal Press pay authors 50% royalties on net profits from our books? We will use two recent but proven technological innovations in the publishing world, on-demand printing and Internet marketing. This approach differs greatly from traditional publishing in several ways. First, there are no initial print runs, which means no inventory, no printing expense, and most importantly from an author's standpoint, no sell-in to traditional bookstores. Most new authors for any publisher will never see their books on a store shelf, but we can practically guarantee it. With Internet marketing, customers will either buy our books online or order our books through stores, even though it means an extra trip to pick up the book.

It takes a special kind of book to generate the online interest it takes to succeed in an on-demand world and we believe we have the ability to identify these books, which often stand no chance of being acquired by a big trade because the potential market is seen as too small. In brief, traditional publishers are married to big print runs that can only be justified by big sales in just the first few months of a new book's life. If the book doesn't generate enough sales to remain on bookstore shelves, and only a small fraction of new books do, it's quickly remaindered and the publisher moves on to the next title.

New Deal Press is only interested in publishing books that will sell more copies in their second year and their third year than their first. We will publish exclusively non-fiction, with a preference for professional, how-to, and business books that don't require photo illustrations. We are accepting proposals now for nonfiction books to be published in 2005. All books acquired by New Deal Press will have large excerpts posted on this website to generate interest and sales. We are experts at Internet book promotion, and will invest many hours in customizing the campaign for your book. Authors will have the option to participate in the promotion of their books online through answering reader questions or moderating discussion lists, but such participation is not required.

Most publisher contracts seek to retain the rights to your book even when it no longer makes good business sense for them to do so. If your book fails to earn you $1000 in any 12 month period (four consecutive royalty statements) after it's published, the rights will revert to you on your written request and the book will be taken out of print. Frankly, if your book only earns $1000 in a 12 month period any time in the first couple years after publication, we've lost our shirts on the deal and will be happy to see you both off:-)

We have no interest in acquiring rights to books that haven't been completed yet. We may be willing to look at a proposal for a book that hasn't been completed, but under no circumstances will we offer a commitment to publish an incomplete book. You are welcome to submit to as many publishers as you want simultaneously with us, and if you can land a large trade publisher, you'll certainly receive a larger advance.

We truly believe that anybody intelligent enough to write a good book is intelligent enough to bypass all publishers (ourselves included) and self-publish their own books. However, we also believe you have to be willing to work at it full time if you expect to succeed.

New Deal Press will officially launch when we find 3 manuscripts suitable for our business model. See our proposal guidelines and our author contract for more information.