Our Books & Authors

This week, we wanted to share more immediate, seemingly smaller, but just as important details about: OUR BOOKS.

We know some of you may have worried about what happens to our previous books, especially traci kato-kiriyama's incredible Navigating With(out) Instruments, a title that just came out less than a year ago. Let us explain what was done, what was changed, and what is coming.

First, a short bit of history. We were Writ Large Press for a long time (technically we never went away) and we published titles as such. Then we the individuals (Peter, Judeth, Chi) partnered with a couple of other publishers to form The Accomplices. Recently, for various reasons, we shut down The Accomplices, meaning we had to do something about all the books we'd published.

Well, Writ Large Press is back (although it technically never went away), but as the publishing facet of Writ Large Projects (an official LLC, no less!). What we did is we put all WLP titles out of print except for traci's, bridgette bianca's Be/Trouble, and Mike Sonksen's Letters to My City. There's a process in which one publisher can transfer a title, keeping the same ISBN, to another publisher so that's what we did. This way, the sales of the book won't be affected and there won't be any pauses and such in printing. We are giving each of these three authors a new contract to extend our partnership an extra three years.

But, as we were writing up the new contracts, we thought about terms. All of our future book contracts will have these terms: 50% royalty and audiobook rights will be separate contracts so authors can negotiate those rights with other publishers.

We don't think 10-20% royalty is enough for authors. We hope more publishers move closer to 50/50 splits.

As far as upcoming books, we have A.I.R.Head from Alan Nakagawa and Emotional Anthropology: The Secret Lives of Negroes... from Ernest Hardy, and My House Faces East from Jimetta Rose Smith. They have been sent contracts reflecting our new terms.