First and foremost we talk about your project and help to understand where your book is most likely to achieve what you want it to achieve. Not every book is going to end up with a mainstream traditional publisher, and not every book needs to have worldwide distribution and lots of marketing whistles and bells. We start where you are and understand what you need to achieve in order to feel that your writing process and its outcome have been successful. 

We are a resource and happy to provide advice where we can, and we will always be open about our limitations. As a small non-profit supported entirely by volunteers we don’t have huge capacity, but what we do have is the same passion for getting your work completed as you do. We’ll help you find good suppliers and can also act as an independent party in negotiating the services that you need.

If you choose to publish with us, which is not a pre-requisite for receiving our help, we begin by reviewing your manuscript. If it is ready for publication - that is if it has had a professional edit that we feel has made your book the best version it can be - then we begin:

Step 1 - Timeline to Publication - discuss with you when you want to publish, how that is likely to sit within the calendar year and any related events that could support your launch. We will work with you to understand the best avenues to market and promote your work, and we’ll set you up with a page on our website.

Step 2 - Creating the Product - Get your manuscript into book format and a cover to make it pop. That means we will organise designers and illustrators to ensure your book looks like it belongs in a bookshop. After design and when you have a final product, we will help you to arrange a proofread to be extra-doubly-100% sure that the content is error-free.

Step 3 - Publishing the Book - when we have the interior and exterior of the book in place we set you up with our printers CPI and, if it is appropriate, on Amazon and any other e-marketplaces that you would like to exploit. At this stage we can begin sending out review copies to people you think will enjoy it and who are likely to give it a good review.

Step 4 - Celebrate with a Launch - We will support you to organise an event that will do justice to your work. Have a look at our author pages to see what previous launches have looked like. Your launch should be an opportunity for you to celebrate the culmination of your hard work and shout as loud as you can about it to your friends and family. As you will see from previous launches, we like to make a fuss, and endeavour to create an event that is more than a signing and a few glasses of fizz - we work with you to build something that matches the tone and style of what you have written and makes it a memorable and noteworthy occasion for everyone involved. We cover the cost of the first print run for the event.

Step 5 - Distributing the Book - The book is now for sale! This is where, as the author, you will need to be spreading the word in social media and friend groups - we’ll work together to be sure of a clear plan of action, including any local bookshops you should approach and how to go about it. Sales that happen through Amazon will be recorded on our imprint account, and you will receive sales reports at the end of each month for the first three months, and then quarterly for the rest of the first year. For sales through bookshops there is a more complicated process which involves the printer (CPI) receiving orders from the distributor (Gardners) who use the information listed on Nielsen when they in turn receive the order from the bookshop or library itself. This means the reader orders from and pays the bookshop, the bookshop sends the order to Gardners who passes it to CPI. CPI print the book and send it to Gardners, who send it to the bookshop who provides it to the reader. CPI invoices Ensemble for the printing costs, and then Ensemble invoices Gardners for the amount due for the sales (less a distribution fee). This process is long and involved and it may seem dated considering the relatively straightforward alternative that is Amazon KDP, however, if you want your book to be available to buy from brick-and-mortar bookshops, then this is the best way.

We don’t promise you will make money. The likelihood is you won’t make any money from publishing your book. If you are able to recoup your expenses then it will probably be over the course of a number of years. The business of publishing books is not something to quit your day job over.

We can’t do the work for you. It's a hard slog - just when you think you have a final draft, that’s where the next stage of work begins. We’re here with you, we’re on your team, but the book is yours and when it’s done you will know it came from you. 

We can’t sell the book without you. There are some things about promotion that can only really come from the author, you may have even read about the ‘Big 5’ publishers also requiring their authors to go out and flog the book like it was self-published. Your voice will help to sell the work, and at times you might feel like you aren’t getting anywhere. We’re there with you, and will strive to make the process as palatable and even enjoyable as we can, but going into this you need to know that sometimes, it’s just a pain.

Cheap, fast or good - pick two. But you can’t have all three. Our priority is creating high quality publications, so we need you to know that things will take time or they will take money. There is no free version of this service yet and it will take time to get things right. We don’t want to be negative, we need to be realistic. Too many people out there would like to tell you there is a way to make easy money writing books - if we knew how we’d be doing it. What we do know is by removing the need for profit we can promise to make your voice heard, and to be fully fair and upfront we need our authors to accept that profit is not the goal. 

The short answer is, we don’t yet. As a non-profit organisation we have decided to focus our objectives away from money-making and towards the important work of getting stories into the world. To find out more about how we structure our financial process have a look at our flow chart. The money from sales goes to the author, and when they have covered the costs of producing the book, they receive the profits and pay a commission to Ensemble Publishing (7 to 15% by previous agreement). This means that when you make money from your book, we can make a little money, but not before, and not more than the author. This way we are still incentivised to produce the best quality work and promote it as much as we can, but the property and the profits still sit where they belong - with the writer and majority investor. 

At the moment we are a small team of trustees (who aren’t allowed to get paid!) and our founder who volunteers their time for free.

Before profitability we take 50% of the sales to cover the costs we have incurred directly related to the book being published and sold. When that has been covered 100% of sales got to cover the expenditure of the writer. 

After this, the writer will receive all but a pre-agreed percentage for each sale. This money will go back into the organisation to support cash flow and ongoing fees involved in the publication of all books - these are things like subscriptions and technology needed to maintain the Neislen account and so on. 

Ultimately, as our portfolio grows, and if we were to publish something that sold really well - we would like to introduce paid roles into the organisation. Our founder works for free as a volunteer, and trustees on the board of a charity are not allowed to take a fee by law, however we do not endorse asking people to work for free for extended periods, and we also believe that part of the gap in representation in publishing is as a direct result of unpaid internships and work experience positions precluding those who cannot afford to work for free. Therefore our funding would initially go towards paid positions including a dedicated sales and marketing manager to support the promotion of all our books, plus legal and financial positions to ensure fair dealing and clear, uncomplicated sales reporting and auditing. Further funding would then go towards paying administrative staff where needed. 

Our ideal would be to reach a point where we could explore subsidising writers who need financial support in order to afford the editorial services required for publication.

Largely the difference is the team of people willing and ready to support the process. You can ask us questions, get advice, and we are always adding to a growing network of respectable, quality professionals who share our values and our mission.  You will still be spending money on publishing your book - that doesn't change - you will also need to be very involved when it comes to marketing, but we will arrange for the printing and distribution, you will be published under our imprint, our barcodes and ISBN, meaning you will share the reputation and reach of our other authors. Rather than being alone in this, you will have a team of people all rooting for you to create the best version of your story that you can. And if that’s not for you, and you prefer to do the admin of publications yourself, then we can still offer advice and connections if and when you need it. Part of serving our objective is improving the general understanding of the industry through education and conversation. We want to build a community of people who are open to making the publishing industry a safer, fairer and more accessible place.

It’s very similar - but instead of being alone, you’re part of a team. Instead of having to handle the relationships with printers, distributors, bookshops and media yourself, you have a partner in your endeavours. Financially it’s almost the same, except you don’t need to pay for barcodes or a subscription to Nielsens or grapple with permissions fees. Unexpected costs are less likely to rear their head at the last minute and you have less chance of being taken advantage of by the sharks that know you’re unprotected. Instead you will be more likely to have good experiences with talented individuals worth every penny they charge.  You will be asked to pay a percentage of your profit (that is what you make after you have covered the costs of your editor, designer and any other supplier) to Ensemble, and that is negotiable throughout the life of the contract. You can be confident that the version of your story that goes out into the world is of a quality and standard worthy of any bookshop or bookshelf and that demonstrates you have done more than ‘just self published’ which will energise the believers and surprise the sceptics. 

Hybrid publishing is a funny term because it can be used to cover all manner of sins - and sinners. You may have heard the term ‘vanity publisher’ referring to the kind of organisation that charges writers at every stage of writing and publishing a book. This is in direct contrast to the traditional publishing model wherein the writer themselves is treated as a supplier - they are paid an advance to provide the content of the book - it is called an advance because it is understood that this amount is expected to be earned back from sales before the writer is able to take any royalties from the profits made. You may have heard that ‘a real publisher makes their money from books, a vanity/hybrid/scam publisher makes their money from writers’. 

Vanity publishers and publishing scammers take the money, provide no real editorial input, charge the author again for a job lot of copies, and then manipulate the stats within their Amazon subcategories to insist they publish multiple ‘bestsellers’. These companies have realised that people are growing more aware of their unscrupulous activities and so many have begun to describe themselves as hybrid - this is not fair on those companies that truly offer a hybrid service: sharing the costs of the publishing process with the author, and then offering a larger percentage from the sales as a result. 

A hybrid publisher will often advertise the larger slice of the pie for authors, and will still usually work with in-house editors and suppliers on the books they publish. Writers will still be paying to get their book published, which again is in contrast with the traditional approach, but because the publisher will also make money when the books are sold (and not just from the writer themselves) they are incentivised to produce good-quality books and market them accordingly.
Ensemble is different because we don’t want to make money, we want to make books - and so we share the money from sales 50/50 until we have covered the costs we have incurred (always significantly less than the writer), and then 100% of sales go to the writer until they have covered their costs. Then the sales (profits) go to the writer with Ensemble taking a percentage of that (between 7% and 15%) which is fed back into the organisation to support the production of further manuscripts.

We take into account what you have spent to get your book out there - profit is calculated as you would when self-publishing: have I received back from sales what I spent on services? We don’t have in-house editors and so you have the freedom to select your own suppliers and negotiate pricing and contracts. You’re supported in both these things by Ensemble, who are able to act as an independent party ensuring that each party is being treated fairly and with understanding and consideration.

It might not be better for you, it might be that you check in with us when you need to so you can be sure you are being treated well by whichever publisher you choose. It most certainly is better than becoming the next victim to one of those horrible vanity publishers just out to make a quick buck.

A traditional or mainstream publisher is set up with all the facilities necessary to produce your book in-house. That means it employs its own trusted editors, designers, marketers, typesetters, proofreaders, lawyers and accountants. They will have established deals with printers, distributors, bookshops, agents, reviewers and media outlets. Because of this they have established reputations with readers that cannot be matched. And because all this costs money, they have to keep a keen eye on how well your book is likely to sell, as well as how well they will be able to sell it. 

This means that when selecting a new writer or project, they will be considering all manner of things: does this story seem like something people are likely to buy in great numbers? Does it match current trends? Does the protagonist feel relatable to a broad range of people? Does it line up with other books in related genres, and will bookshops know where to stock it? Does this story and style match our brand - will people who know us expect this from us, and will loyal customers be pleased with this as a product? Is it too similar to something else already in the shops - either through us or another publisher - is it too different? 

Their motivations are entirely logical and make complete sense, particularly in an environment that requires publishers and book sellers to fight for their very existence. The result, however, is a narrow path to publishing that becomes increasingly difficult to access. As the number of people who can write, do write and have the technology to write increases, publishers - and in turn agents - have to choose from an exponentially growing pool of potential stories, and they must choose them using commercially focussed criteria.

When they select a writer, they pay them to complete the work. Their pay is seen as an advance on what they think it is reasonable to expect the book will make in sales, and when the necessary numbers have been achieved the writer will then receive a royalty from each sale. In this way the writer is treated a little like a supplier - they are paid an advance to provide the content of the book. The publisher is a business, their expenditure is the huge team of professionals needed to produce and sell the work, and the author is compensated in the first place with a calculated financial risk, and later with a share of the money received from sales. A good agent will ensure a writer’s contract includes bonuses for books that become popular beyond expectations. If a writer has an agent, they too take a percentage of the royalties made.

At each stage of the process the motivation to do a good job is reflected in the money made from the book’s success: a well negotiated contract will pay an agent only if the book sells, they do their work for free, and they are rewarded for being able to see potential in a writer and understand the commercial needs of the publisher - and all the questions they need to ask; a well produced and marketed book will produce profits for the publisher in multiple forms including copyrighting the material, translations, adaptations and reputation.

So how is Ensemble different? We flip the script: Instead of the publisher getting the profits and the writer getting a royalty, the writer gets the profits and the publisher gets a share of each sale. This is because the writer takes on the financial risk of employing freelancers, suppliers and professionals, and so retains greater control and ownership over the creative choices and results.

In turn, our overheads are limited to the costs associated with putting the book into print and the management is done by volunteers. We make our costs back quicker, leaving more proceeds from sales to the author. We are still incentivised to sell as many books as possible, but our model doesn’t rely on it.

It isn’t! This isn’t about one perfect system, this is about establishing a new avenue for good books to get into the hands and heads of readers. Because our objective is to make good stories more accessible to a greater number of people, if the work Ensemble supports ends up in the hands of an agent or mainstream publisher, then all the better! We will feel we have served our objective if any one of our authors find themselves in the position to publish with an established organisation that can further boost their readership. We’ll happily help support the process of submitting your manuscript to agents and publishers, if that is what is best for the writer and the work, and if your book does well with us and gets the attention of a mainstream print we will be the first to crack open the champagne. The copyright and the property of the text still belongs to the writer, making it possible to transfer those rights to a mainstream publishing house if the option comes available. We love mainstream publishers, they do amazing and important work - but they can’t do what we do because they need to cover overhead and in-house teams, they have to consider shareholders, commercial appeal and profitability. This is only a bad approach if it’s the only approach, because it limits what ends up on the bookshelves - but we want to be a partner to the mainstream, working alongside it, feeding it and supporting it. 

Always ask yourself: What’s in it for them? 

When navigating the somewhat shark infested waters of the publishing industry, always consider what benefits the publisher or service provider will get from working with you. When it comes to paid services, if the prices seem fair and reasonable then that’s your answer. When it comes to publishers, they should be looking at our book as an asset that will build their reputation and their bottom line by selling your book. (Not by charging you money)

So what’s in it for us? If we don’t make a profit why do we do this? Well - when we publish a book that is well written, professionally put together and easy to engage with, we look good. It helps to build our reputation and also helps to change the way people think about ‘self-published’ books. Other people will begin to see us as the type of organisation that produces good books that are worth stocking, selling, reading and promoting. 

When we promote your book we promote ourselves, and we also get people talking about the publishing industry, what is working and what isn't - how we might all benefit from certain changes. So really every good book both proves our need to exist and helps to promote better education and conversation around how the books that we read are selected and produced.

We believe that divisions in society can be healed through empathy, and that the most effective means of promoting and developing greater empathy within society is through sharing and engaging with the experiences and lives of others. And the most efficient way to live someone else’s life for a moment is to read a book. 

And so that’s how we chose to achieve our social objective of improving society - by getting accessible and well written stories into the hands of the public.

Unconscious bias is just what it sounds like - it’s all the ways we pre-judge someone or something that we don’t notice. Some biases are conscious, and they can be understood, addressed and even justified within their relative context. However, unconscious bias, by its very definition, is something that we can’t see in order to address. Everyone has it, it could be as harmless as going for the red cereal box design over the blue cereal box design because its the shade of your grandma’s old mixing bowl. Its impact can be limited to your own happiness - perhaps you never read fantasy novels because as a child a classmate you found annoying used to read them. But when it comes to the professional world and selecting, for example, which book to publish, unconscious bias can have impacts we might never fully understand: does the data really say that ‘people don’t want to read about X’ or do you have a reason that you can’t see that makes you interpret the data that way? Is the synopsis of this book really too similar or not similar enough to one of your other publications, or does their style remind you of a client you don’t enjoy talking with. The strength of the selection process is the experience and expertise of the people who are undertaking it - and consistency is what makes an imprint or a brand recognisable - however the downside is that the filtering process may include some grains of bias that prevent good work getting through.

And this is why we don’t have a selection process. Come on in, you’re already accepted! In order to eliminate as much bias (of all kinds), we are willing to publish anyone who would like to be published by us. What we do insist on, however, is quality. And that means we work with writers from any background, any level of experience or education, and we make sure they receive whatever support they require to produce a book that is of a comparable quality to those who were selected by the most prestigious publishers in the industry. Taking this to its extreme - you don’t need to be able to read or write to tell your story through us. The most important thing is that your story is not viewed as less valuable because it has less commercial appeal, and that you are not seen as less legitimate a writer because of the level of support you might need to achieve your ambition. 

We do - sometimes. IngramSpark consolidates the process so that, like Amazon, it both prints and distributes the books. However, unlike Amazon, it is a viable means of getting books into brick-and-mortar shops. The level of compensation per sale when done through IngramSpark is much less than dealing directly with CPI/Gardners, and there are a number of limitations that we have faced when using them in the past. The only instances when we make use of their services is when a book’s design or format cannot be produced by Amazon with the necessary level of quality or consistency. This relates mostly to publications which have lots of detailed designs, images or colours which require high attention to detail - we have found that Amazon’s quality control is insufficient to ensure those ordering online will receive the same quality as those in the shops, and so in this case we have Ingram print and sell through Amazon. 

I Read Your Writing is a for-profit company that provides editorial services. It is owned and run by the founder of Ensemble Publishing, Charlotte Fleming. 

I Read Your writing started as service offering copy editing and proofreading for all kinds of writing - from academic to professional to creative. It has since focussed its services into developmental editing for long-form creative writing, ie books. Over the last ten years, Charlotte has not only honed her skills as an editor, but also experienced the best and worst of the publishing industry’s processes. Working with writers from a huge variety of backgrounds and motivations gave her an insight into some of the problems facing writers and freelancers alike. When she realised that at least some of these problems could be addressed by shifting motivations from profit to parity, she decided to recruit some of her former colleagues from the worlds of publishing and charity to form Ensemble Publishing. 

I Read Your Writing became the first supplier to Ensemble’s authors, and I Read Your Writing's clients became some of the first published by Ensemble. 

Charlotte makes money charging for her editorial services, but she manages Ensemble for free because she knows how important it is for writers to be read. She has learned so much in her years reading other people’s writing, and she wants everyone to have the opportunity to read it too. By ensuring the quality of the printed product without trying to estimate potential for commercial success, she hopes that opportunity will continue to grow.

Not every writer that comes through Ensemble will be a client of I Read Your Writing, and not every client will be right for Ensemble Publishing. But the two organisations work together with a common set of values and a shared vision.