If you're considering running a shared world, here are a few questions you should think about.
How do potential authors find out about your shared world?
PubShare does not know or advertise the fact you are seeking authors. You can use your blog, social
media, industry contacts, etc., to spread the word.
How should authors contact you about writing in your world?
This happens outside PubShare and you should think through how you will be organizing this. Do you use
email? Do you save the emails? What is your standard writeup to give to authors interested in your
shared world?
What will be the royalty split?
This needs to be defined before authors contact you. The royalty split should be part of your contract
with the authors. Keep in mind the royalty split can vary from book to book, but cannot change at
PubShare once the book is published.
How will you approve books in your world?
Do you read each book before it’s published or do you trust each author’s writing and editing, and just
accept anything they want to publish in your world? Or are you somewhere between? Is this something you
have in your contract with the author?
Who is responsible for cover creation and branding?
What type of branding are you doing on covers of books in your world? Are you providing the covers, an
artist, or the author? Is there an approval process for covers?
Who is responsible for ebook formatting and creation?
Is each author responsible for formatting and creating the ebooks, or is this something you are doing?
Will there be different epubs for each vendor?
Who is responsible for print manuscript and cover creation?
Same questions about formatting and cover creation for the print version.
Will there be common back matter for books in your world?
Regardless of who creates and formats the books, will there be a standard set of pages in the back
matter? Links to other books in your world? This is a great place to provide information about your
shared world.
Who is responsible for uploading and creating the meta data at PubShare.com?
Will you be creating the collaborative project at PubShare.com, inviting the author to participate in
the project, uploading the version for each sales channel, setting the meta data, and clicking the
publish button? Or will this be the author’s responsibility?
Even if it’s the author’s responsibility to handle the publishing process at PubShare, you may want the
author to give you management access to the project. This gives you the ability to go in and tweak
things if
needed.
