Stona Fitch: Self-publishing for charity

“Here’s a crazy idea for these financially straitened times. Why not set up a small book publishing business where everyone works for free, from writers and editors to designers and printers, then give the books away.” as Doug Johnstone reports in a story for The Independent, that’s exactly what novelist Stona Fitch did. “I just woke up one morning and told my wife I’d come up with a new way for writers not to make money,” he tells Johnstone. “The idea was to produce beautiful, interesting new books and give them away, then ask people to give money to charity instead of paying for them.” The vehicle for doing this was was the Concord Free Press. Johnstone reports that the company’s first book which was, well, Fitche’s own novel Give and Take, “quickly” saw its first run of 1,500 copies “snapped up” and led to “over $30,000 in donations” to charities “from as far afield as Japan, Tunisia and Slovakia.” Says Fitch, “Publishing books is not hard, it’s making money from publishing that’s really hard. We’re blessedly relieved of the burden of profitability.”