Edgeverse publishing

What kind of publisher is Edgepub? The simple answer is that we’re the new kind, and a kind we hope that becomes more common in the future.

Edgeverse Publishing is run by A.P. (Jack) Atkinson and Seth Godwynn, a pair of professional authors, writers and editors. They have had several books published between them, as well as many years of professional writing experience. They lost faith in the modern publishing industry and decided to step back and take a look at how best to approach the idea of setting up their own independent publisher.

Modern publishers sell books at a continually escalating price, and a price that’s getting so high that it’s extremely difficult to justify. The buying public is finding books to be increasingly difficult to afford, where they should be very attainable. We should be encouraging readers, not alienating them.

The bigger problem, of course, is the nature of the material that they’re publishing. The book industry had all the same pernicious problems that we’re now used to seeing in movie and television media. Activists have been chosen to select what is getting published and it slowly throttled the entire industry.

The eventual outcome of all this was that 98% of published books now fail to make a profit, with the publishers surviving on the income from the remaining 2%. Most authors can also expect to earn less than $10 in their entire career. With this in mind, Jack and Seth decided that they had to find a different way.

Most people who have read a book haven’t paid anything to do so. Paperback books are most commonly borrowed from libraries, in which case they are borrowed for nothing. In the instances where a copy is bought, it is shared, passed around and swapped between other family members, friends and readers. In other words, a large number of readers does not equate to a large income.

The majority of digital books are read through Kindle Unlimited, where a flat monthly fee is paid and the owner of the account can read as many books as they choose. In this case, the writers receive a tiny, nominal amount in exchange for their work.

Selling a book to a publisher means giving away your rights. If your story is picked up by a mainstream agency then you, as an author, are required to give away any rights over your work. This doesn’t make any difference to authors who have no real interest in their writing, for those who just create something in order to make a little money (hopefully more than $10). Genuine authors, who are heavily invested in their stories, are much more hesitant to give up control over their narratives.

With this in mind, the primary reason for a loss of control is always financial. George Lucas lost control of Star Wars for this very reason, and a sci-fi legend became a derailed train-wreck that he could only watch and lament over. Many authors have hated the adaptations of their work to other mediums but, once you’ve accepted payment for it, that is going to be largely inevitable. Whether you accept money from a publishing house, advertisers or even the paying public, you can no longer absolutely control the nature of your work. By definition, you are being paid to do something and the something you are doing is going to be dictated by others.

So, Jack and Seth decided that the only way to remain entirely in control was to make their work absolutely and entirely freely available to anyone who wanted it.

So, they followed a model called ‘better than free’. This is a model where a thing that is available for nothing also has a better option, which the buying public might prefer. While it might seem ridiculous, this model is all around us and is very commonly used, it’s just never been applied to publishing before.

Radios have, for decades, let the audience listen to music for free. People listening might decide that they’ve enjoyed the music enough to want to buy their own copy, a copy with additional tracks, versions or edits. Similarly, movies can be watched on TV, often for free, but people still buy box-sets with additional features.

The free versions that are available on our site might not be ideally suited to all readers. We offer a watermarked PDF version that can be read on the site with our embedded reader. It’s optimised for both PC and mobile use but it does have a vague copy of our logo in the background. This version can also be downloaded without cost, and without a need to sign up to our site. We also offer the most popular EPUB format for use on dedicated readers.

If you choose to buy a copy you will get a clean version that isn’t watermarked and with additional commentary on the writing of the work and often with additional short stories. If you want to read our books on an Amazon Kindle, we have put them on Amazon where anyone with an ‘Unlimited’ account can read them at no additional cost.

We also have a Patreon page where we invite audience members to sign up and receive additional content, exclusive stories and access to all out non-watermarked content.

For all this, the core of our business model is the free downloads. That creates awareness and interest in our work and is the driving force behind every potential sale that we make. This means we no longer have to focus on sales, we simply have to focus on writing the best stories we can possible write so that we never sell our audience short.

We believe that the publishing industry has let us all down. It doesn’t encourage or promote new authors and it’s increasingly stale and murky thing that is more interested in promoting radical leftist agendas than telling a good story. For publishing to survive for future generations, we believe it’s time to offer our books without any expectations and hope that we might help be part of a movement to get people interested in reading books again.