Crowdsourced funding for books

A new UK start-up is on the publishing scene, called Unbound, and it's a model worth examining. I'm curious to see how many successful books they're able to launch, and if a singular genre ends up taking off.

Basically Unbound is a program for creating new books, where in folks can pledge money towards publishing titles they enjoy; if the goal amount is raised, the book gets made. It's sort of a combination of Threadless (i.e. focuses on only one product type- books, and only the things the crowd likes actually get made) with Kickstarter and IndieGoGo (i.e. individual people pledge funds towards making the writer's dream happen, get rewards in return, and each writer has their own book page, video, etc.).

It looks like the "rewards" for every book are exactly the same though, which is one difference from Kickstarter's platform. The rewards range from a digital copy of the book to a launch lunch party. This makes the pledging based more on individual's desire for that specific writing style/author than their interest in a unique gift offering-- allowing the authors to concentrate on their true craft- writing.

If the books don't receive enough pledges, they don't get made- the most "successful" campaign posted thus far has only reached 3% of its goal but it has 46 days left, so fear not, perhaps. I read on Adpulp that campaigns with videos raise more money, according to IndiegGoGo and so far all the books featured have made videos, a pitch, an excerpt, and bios.

A unique feature to Unbound is the promoter opportunity. Unbound will reward you with 1 credit (£1) for every supporter you have referred when the books target is met. It's their way to encourage you to do their marketing.

I'm curious what % of the total money raised Unbound receives. I think Kickstarter takes a 5% fee.

Currently Unbound is only adding projects for authors with proven track records, but it looks like they hope to expand and increase their diversity of offerings-- taking submissions from "the public at large."

So at a basic level Unbound plucked a category off of Kickstarter and had a go at it. I'd like to see a similar concept executed for records/CDs. Actually speaking of music, I'd also like to see a platform like this that allows you to basically petition your favorite band to come perform in your area. Does something like either of those already exist?

How do you think Unbound will fair?

HarperCollins crowdsourcing community

Stumbled upon this gem via @brainpicker's article on Crowdfunding for Creativity. authonomy^TM is a writing community for writers, readers and publishers, conceived and developed by book editors at HarperCollins. Their goal is to flush out the brightest, freshest new literature around. Basically they want the crowd to spot the next big bestseller. At the end of every month the top 5 ranked books are delivered to the desks of HarperCollins editors. The board reads them and delivers feedback to the author’s authonomy profile. Each book only has one chance at this. In addition, you can submit your own manuscript, get advice, or write reviews of others. This is a fun idea-- there's no way any one editor can interact with all the content available on any given day or read all the thousands of potential books out there. Tapping the crowd for their collective curation seems like a good way to address the problem-- as long as the crowd is educated. Any other publishing companies doing something similar?