Think about how a public mural comes about. The artist doesn’t sell tickets to look at the wall. A sponsor pays for the wall, the paint, and the artist’s time, and the finished piece goes to the whole neighborhood for free. The sponsor gets goodwill and a plaque. The public gets the art. A sponsor can fund a book the same way, and most authors never learn that this option exists.
This model is smart, and almost nobody mentions it. Authors get told there are two roads, a traditional contract or self-publishing, and for a book meant to comfort sick people or guide a family through something awful, both of them put a price tag between the book and the person who needs it most. I think that’s backward for books like that.
On the Leaders and Their Stories podcast, Randy Peyser described the model she’s using for her own new book, a small hundred page book of daily wisdom for people going through chemotherapy.
She doesn’t want it sold to chemo patients. She wants it gifted to them. So instead of pricing it for a bookstore, she’s funding it through sponsorship, and she’s learning the model as she goes. It’s a different path than traditional or self publishing, and for the right book it can be a powerful one.
What is the sponsorship model for publishing a book?
It’s a way of paying for a book’s creation and printing through donations instead of sales.
Instead of a reader buying a copy, a corporation, a foundation, a hospital, or an individual philanthropist funds the book so it can be given away to a target audience. The author’s income doesn’t come from royalties on units sold. It comes from the funding raised to produce and distribute the book at scale. The book becomes a gift with a sponsor’s name attached.
This only fits a certain kind of book. The book has to serve a mission a sponsor would want their name on: helping cancer patients, supporting veterans, guiding kids through a hard diagnosis, spreading a public health message. A general business book or a novel doesn’t fit, and I’d tell any author trying to squeeze one in to stop wasting sponsors’ time. A book that does obvious good for an identifiable group of people is exactly what the model is built for.
How does a fiscal sponsor make book sponsorship work?
The model runs on the fiscal sponsor, and it solves the tax problem that would otherwise stop a donor cold.
A fiscal sponsor is a nonprofit that agrees to sponsor the project. Because it’s a registered nonprofit, it can accept donations and issue the tax write off documentation donors need. The author approaches corporations, philanthropists, hospitals, and chemo wards for support. The sponsor pays into the nonprofit, the nonprofit sends back the tax paperwork, and the book gets funded and gifted.
Without the fiscal sponsor, a company writing a check for someone’s book gets no tax benefit and a lot of hesitation. With it, the donation becomes a deductible charitable contribution to a cause, a far easier yes. I wouldn’t approach a single sponsor before that nonprofit is lined up, because walking in without it turns a generous company’s accountant into the enemy of your book. Finding the right fiscal sponsor is the first practical step in setting up the model.
Can you make more money gifting a book than selling it?
Sometimes considerably more. That surprises people who assume free means unpaid. The money is in the scale of the print run. Books printed and distributed in bulk cost far less per copy, and the larger the run, the lower the unit cost. A sponsor funding fifty thousand copies to gift to hospitals is a very different financial event than a bookstore selling a few hundred. I watched this play out with one of my own early authors, who wrote children’s books for kids in hospitals facing terminal illness.
She raised real money from sponsors, gifted the books to the children, and then printed more as new sponsors came in. The model paid for itself and kept going.
The economics reward mission and reach over retail price. Instead of persuading thousands of people to each spend fifteen dollars, you persuade a handful of sponsors to each fund thousands of copies. For a book with a clear cause, that math often beats the bookstore, and it reaches people who would never have bought the book on their own.
I find this model moving in a way retail publishing rarely is. Somebody sitting through chemotherapy shouldn’t have to go shopping for a book of daily wisdom on a bad day, and a sponsor who puts that book in their hands is doing good work by any measure I know.
Is the sponsorship model right for your book?
Ask one question: does your book do good for an identifiable group that a sponsor would be proud to fund? If the answer is yes, the model deserves a serious look, and it may serve the book’s purpose better than either traditional or self publishing.
If the answer is no, if you’re writing the book to sell instead of to serve, the model isn’t for you, and the real paths are the usual ones. The comparison of traditional, self, and hybrid publishing covers those, and the reason to write the book while you still can applies no matter who funds it. What the sponsorship model adds is a fourth door, one most authors don’t know is there, for the books whose whole point is to be given away.
If your book exists to help a specific group of people, the funding model is worth planning before you write, because it shapes the book’s length, format, and voice. That’s exactly the kind of decision the publishing and marketing hub is built around, and my services exist to help you choose and execute the right one.
I’d like to see far more authors with this kind of book try it. The publishing industry has trained writers to measure every book by copies sold, and for a book written to help people through the worst months of their lives, that yardstick is wrong. I’d count the patients, veterans, and families who got it for free, and let the sponsors worry about the printing bill.
