How we’re working for a better future for writers

From one writer to another, it ain’t easy being creative. Everyone who works for Ghostwoods is a writer, from Tim Dedopulos, the founder and managing editor, to Gábor Csigás, who designs our covers. We all put our money where our mouths are. We all make some or all of our livings from writing. We all do our best to help other writers get better at their craft, meet other writers who can advance their careers, and make sure they receive a reasonable (and hopefully growing) percentage of a book’s earnings for their labours.

In 2010, we started out with 50% royalties on ebooks. In 2013, we published our first print book. In 2015, we published our first audio book. This year we will publish a book for which we’ve paid a higher advance and worked with some agented writers.

None of this has been easy. We wish we could do more and do it faster. You can help us do more by buying our books and by telling people about our model and asking them to support it. People find new books via recommendations from friends more than any other method, so if you like one of our books, recommend it. You can do so with the knowledge that money spent on our books goes to the authors and to keep our press going.

If you’re a small press, you can do more to help authors and artists:

  1. Give a higher percentage of royalties to authors.
  2. Publish anthologies that put known authors in the same book as new authors.
  3. Invite well known editors to write anthology forwards. (They’ll read the books and invite authors they like to contribute to books they edit.)
  4. Introduce authors to narrators. This can lead to new opportunities for both.
  5. Introduce designers to authors. Publicize your designers’ work. It will help them get new design clients.
  6. Do interviews, both written and audio, with authors not just about writing, but about their lives, giving them to opportunity to charm the audience.
  7. Publish diverse writers. Give people of different backgrounds an opportunity to allow the world to see their work and learn about the amazing ways we are all different.
  8. Involve actors and performers, filmmakers and other creatives in your process. The more media you can involve, the more chances there will be to get people reading, listening and watching.
  9. Do strange and weird things! That’s what creativity is about.
  10. Always be fair, honest and professional. That said, reading is about entertainment. Approach everything with a sense of keeping it fun.

Our New Book Project: After Red Phone Box

If you’ve been following along recently, you know we’ve stopped publishing and are on hiatus. This happened for a couple of reasons. The inciting incident, so to speak was that Salome, our acquisitions editor was very  ill and in the hospital for weeks. Then she spent months recovering. But underlying issues also existed.  Salome and […]

We’re Taking a Hiatus from Publishing Novels

The core of Ghostwoods Books is being fair to authors, which means splitting a book’s sales 50/50. That’s our strength, but it’s also a vulnerability. Most books don’t sell that many copies, and that’s true right across the publishing industry. When you’re being fair to authors, and to readers, that means not much income. We’ve always […]

Evolution or Revolution? ¿Por qué no los dos?

When Tim started Ghostwoods Books, he was mostly thinking that digital publishing might allow publishers to share profits equally with writers. We tried that for a while before realizing that books were very hard to sell unless you had a strategy for attracting readers. We continued publishing while also doing editing and writing as a […]