Pubslush: Can the Kickstarter for books find its niche?

Technobiru :

If you’ve been following online trends over the past few years, you’ll no doubt have noticed the hockey stick-growth of crowdfunding as a ‘thing’. From smartwaches and ad campaigns, to mobile phones and everything in between, someone at some point has taken to the Web’s myriad of crowdfunding portals to try to see their visions through to reality.

But what about books? Well, sure, you can turn to Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but one budding entrepreneur has her sights set on building a dedicated platform specifically to help authors garner enough funds to push their work to the masses.

Publish? Pubslush.

Amanda Barbara is the vice president of Pubslush, a New York-based crowdfunding platform that has, for the last couple of years, set out its stall to become the preeminent go-to for writers. Writers, that is, without the capital to see their books through to market.

With a full-time team of less than ten, Pubslush is still a company on the up, but is has already undergone a minor pivot of sorts, one that steered it away from a very similar company based out of London.

Launching in September 2011, Pubslush was originally more akin to Unbound (previous coverage), insofar as once the funding had been finalized, it also became the publisher.

“We found there was a much bigger need for people to raise funds and choose what they wanted to do at the end of the process,” explains Barbara.

As such, Pubslush relaunched in August 2012, so it’s actually only been live for a little more than a year in its current guise. Now, if you crowdfund for thirty days and decide you want to self-publish, you can do. Alternatively, if you want to tempt a publisher with the impressive figures you notched up during your crowdfunding campaign, well, you can do.

And this is an important point to pick up on – as with Indiegogo, Kickstarter and all the rest, crowdfunding has emerged as much more than a simple platform for raising capital – it’s basically a market validation tool. Something that can be used to ‘prove’ an idea has legs.

“It’s a huge advantage this, being able to test the market prior to publication, and we’re seeing a huge boost in people’s sales after the process, with this pre-marketing and pre-publication of their books,” explains Barbara.”

The need for niche