Funding books and falling apart

Jessica Jones

The death of books has been proclaimed many times, with digital assumed to be the chief assassin. Print can’t last they say, as Kindles and e-books take a larger share of a market in apparent crisis. The truth is that it’s not the format that dead, there’s room for paper and digital editions – but the business model is looking a bit peaky. In troubled times, publishers become more risk averse, only taking on what’s guaranteed to sell. And that limits the flow of new writing.

So we at Unbound have come up with a new approach to book publishing. We’re flipping the commissioning model – publishers don’t decide what gets published, readers do.

It works like this – authors upload their ideas to Unbound and readers then choose the ideas that they like and pledge their support (from £10 to funding the entire book). Once the idea has enough supporters, the book is written and supporters receive a handsome limited Unbound First Edition with their name listed in the back. Supporters can track the creative process via the author’s private area or ’shed’, where they can read the author’s blog, watch interviews and meet other supporters. Rewards for higher pledges include an invitation to the book launch party and lunch with the author. The idea is to get more and more people involved in the creation of books. If we build a wider community (including Facebook and Twitter), then we can help people find, and create, new writing.

So over the next few weeks, we’ll be parading some of the best projects in front of discerning Independent readers. We’d be interested in your feedback, just as much as your pledges (but don’t hold back).

So, for starters, The Elegant Art of Falling Apart…

Written by Jessica Jones, an Australian who has been a long-time resident in London, this about as far away from a misery memoir as you can get. For one thing, it is entirely free of self-pity and very, very funny.

Jones had done the hard yards: booze; drugs; bad boyfriends. But moving to London she’d managed to re-build her life. At long last, she had a good job, a flat in Notting Hill and was in love with a man who loved her back. Then in May 2009, the thing we all fear happened: she was diagnosed with cancer. The perfect life was put on hold and, with the help of doctors, nurses, friends and family, she stumbled through the horrors of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. And she survived.

Then, on Christmas Eve that year, she flew to Sydney to be with Nick, the man who had stuck by her side through all the pain and the fear. She hadn’t been there for more than a few hours when she suffered a second blow. Nick had been seeing someone else. He didn’t love her after all.

The real point of Jessica’s honest, funny and compelling story is that her emotional rejection felt more devastating, and difficult to recover from, than the cancer.

So, don’t expect an emotional wallow. The Elegant Art of Falling Apart is about learning to ask for and to accept help. It’s about living in and enjoying the moment. It’s about freeing yourself from our culture’s obsession with romantic love. It’s about how looking good makes you feel good. Above all it is about staggering through the darkness with laughter and with friends (and a good lipstick).

And while the book offers useful tips about how to survive serious illness with style, it doesn’t offer medical advice or quacky recovery programmes aimed at saving your life. This book is about saving your sanity.

And you don’t need to get cancer to find yourself on the wrong side of that line…

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