The Writer’s Coin

I’ll admit that sometimes it’s a little strange when I think of this blog as being about “Personal Finance and writing (with some advertising thrown in on Fridays),” but in this month’s issue of Poets & Writers I found an article that fits right in to the whole theme of the blog.

On page 13 there’s a story called “Venture Capital for the Literary Set”

It’s about a company called the Literary Ventures Fund, or LVF. What they do is function as a kind of intermediary between writers and publishers to make sure certain books/authors get the funding they need to get to press. Why? So they can make a return on their investment. They front some money ($7,500–$50,000, according to the article) to get the author to press and to support any marketing or publicity needed. Reading through their mission statement may seem kind of cold, but this is first and foremost a business, so it’s kind of refreshing to hear things like:

We do not make loans. We do not make grants. We make investments.

Instead of

“Books are a cultural part of our very identities and we seek to express . . .”

Which is something a publisher may write.

Anyway, for writers it’s just another avenue to try and get themselves published. You can check out the books they’ve invested in here.

[Update: I got an email from Ande Zellman, Editorial Director of Literary Ventures Fund, and she wanted to clarify a few things:

It’s important to know that we aren’t a publisher nor do we represent authors. We work using an investment model, which is to say that if publisher were to acquire an author’s book and we wanted to help, we would be making an investment with the  publisher. There isn’t really a way for us to invest with the author directly. Authors interested in working with LVF should alert their publishers and ask them to contact us directly.

Tags: literary ventures fund