'Crowd funding can be quite arduous'

‘Crowd funding can be quite arduous and you have to be persistent - to the point of being very concerned that you are nauseating and repetitive! But if you stop, then the funding dries up pretty quickly. You have to keep going and you need to be of a mindset that you're happy to do that. If you're an author who's so involved in the creative process that you're not interested in getting involved with your readers, then it's probably not the route for you. But if you're someone who embraces every facet of putting a book together and selling it, then it's quite exciting!

Unbound are great to work with as a team. The author is in control as much as they would like to be within the process, which was attractive. With a book of children's poetry, I think the realistic expectation is that it will have a limited market, but that's fine with Unbound and crowdfunding because a limited market is all it needs to justify its publication. How Unbound's lists develop over the years will be really interesting to see. Will it be a random shotgun of potpourri or will it end up specialising in different areas? I don't know!

There are certain elements of Unbound's model that other publishers must look at and think are really interesting, because the low risk associated with no advances and breaking even before you start is obviously attractive. But I think there's also a finite amount of goodwill and crowdfunding money around. I can't imagine that if there were dozens of publishers doing crowd funding that it would necessarily work. You see other publishers setting up imprints which are e-only or have different royalty rates or no advances, which in some ways is a halfway house, decreasing the risk and increases the income for authors based on sales alone. Publishing is an enormously diverse industry covering every single aspect under the sun, so I imagine diverse models will remain in place.'

David Roche, author of a collection of his own humorous family and children's poetry, Just Where You Left it and Other Poems (How To Survive School, Parents and Everything Else That's Unfair In Life) in an interview in Bookbrunch. His book is at https://unbound.com/books/just-where-you-left-it