Hi there, and thanks for your interest in The Stand Publishing. Welcome! So what’s this all about?
Well, we’re a collaborative group of writers working together to get our books out there, a group who collectively feel the publishing industry could do a lot better by authors. The Stand is our brand, a way to put our work out into the world, and also to assist and promote authors we love, and who believe in our approach.
Together, we hope to develop a strong expertise in publishing, share it, and under a combined brand, create a cooperative platform that functions the way we wish publishing worked elsewhere. We hope to make The Stand Publishing a kind of ‘look through’ publisher, one that’s intended to be a vehicle for the author, rather than a profit making business in its own right.
You see, we’re all professionals, with, between us, a small heap of books already behind us. We know how to do most of what a publisher does already. Collectively, as well as writing books, we can prepare them for print, design our own branding details and covers, and promote our work. Many of us have a heap of professional contacts and a long background in the industry. What we want from a publisher is limited, and we feel we can provide it between us. The Stand, though, gives us a structured support system and a brand to function under.
We came together through football writing, so that’s the area many of our books live in, but it’s not the only one we operate within – in the long term, we hope to be a publisher and platform for lots of writers on lots of topics, coming together to mutual benefit. The areas will be the ones we want to write about, or the ones in which we’re offered books that we love. We are a collective, not a company (we are pointedly not-for-profit as an entity, but a platform to enable authors to make a profit instead).
The name, naturally, is a double meaning: it’s a reference to our love of football, which is at the heart of this endeavour. Indeed, football writing is why we came together in the first place. But it’s also about our own stand: a stand about an industry that we feel isn’t giving us value for money; one that we feel is taking more from our work than its normally able to give back. The Stand is literally named for the terrace, but it’s also something of an act of defiance. We hope you’ll feel that spirit in our books.
If you want to know more, we’ll be publishing the origin story shortly, as well as our first books, and explaining how the business model works to potential authors. Watch this space.
If you want to publish with us, we’d love to talk about it, but we’d urge you to consider what we are first: we are not a conventional publisher, but a route to market for individual writers who feel, with a bit of backing, they can do this themselves. Read about how it works, and then contact us by email and we’ll get back to you.
Yours in solidarity and in writing,