What is Group Publishing?

[Diane]

Member Patrick Mackeown has once again proved that WE are, indeed "Agents of Literary Change". He has created a spanking new literary site named Litarena.com and coined a term I think we will all be using in days to come: Group Publishing.

What is Group Publishing?

New phrase, 'Group publish,' (Invented by Patrick Mackeown 20th February 2008) Group publish, verb. To coordinate or to take part in the production of a book, where the tasks of writing, editing, typesetting, laying out, graphically designing, covering, summarising, proof-reading, detailed reading, reviewing and copyrighting the product are all carried out by separate specialists.

Explanation:

Group publishing is distinguished from previously known forms of book production, such as mainstream, independent and self publishing in so far as the separate specialists are unlikely to belong to a single organisation. Although necessarily practised in their respective fields, in relation to this particular endeavour, they may be volunteers. The end product, the book, however, is necessarily indistinguishable from that of a mainstream or independently published book insofar as all of its composite parts have been produced by, and all of its tasks have been performed by, trained specialists in each of their respective fields.

Thanks Patrick!

[Patrick Mackeown]

Hi Diane and everybody,

Yes. The definition sounds a bit strict. But personally I think it's really only common sense, in a way. We've all known publishers who maybe have their own closely guarded reputations or limited finances. Perhaps they haven't taken on our books for publication, and sometimes have even praised them when sending them back to us unpublished! That's disappointing because to get so far and yet have so far yet to go before reaching publication can be devastating. The thought of doing the job of publishing yourself is bound to crop up.

Historically it was fair that, before the Internet, not every person who wanted to publish a book knew a book cover designer, an editor, a book reviewer and so on. Today such experts can be located in Google. Today sample chapters can be read and reviewed online. In recent history it was said that people who produced their own (DIY) books produced bad books because they lacked the relevant expertise necessary to produce good ones! Well, not any more. Everybody knows how to use Google! So if you don't know how to design a great book cover you contact someone who does! The same goes for typesetting, proofreading and so on and so on. There's no reason to produce books which aren't excellent any more. There simply isn't any reason for it.

Now that that's said it's not correct to call these books "self-published", because they're not. They're book coverdesigner, editor, author, typesetter, proofreader, book-reviewer, test-reader, formal reader(s) and so on published. That's too long a list to repeat and so it's simpler and easier to say that the book has been published by an expert group, or group published.

Next:

We need a way of recognising these "group published" books. At the moment the world only recognises published and self-published books. Litarena has been created to start the process off of formally recognising books which have been published by an expert group and would otherwise not be recognised by a literary system which has no official category for this type of book production method yet.

Any thoughts or questions would be welcome.

Kind regards,

Patrick

I review books here: http://www.litarena.com/books/