Literary launches: how crowdfunding is fuelling the avant garde

The White Review, BOMB and Guernica are just some of the magazines turning to the wisdom of the crowd to publish quality literature

Fancy a 90-minute walk around London with Will Self, “writer and psychogeographer”, or dinner with the Booker-longlisted writer Ned Beauman in London’s “best Indian restaurant”? Either would set you back £500, but would also support the quarterly arts journal The White Review, the latest in a line of high-end literary endeavours which are going direct to their readers for funding, rather than struggling for space in a crowded market.

And readers are lining up to support them. “My own hunch is that people are sick of passively consuming – that they don’t want to be told what to buy,” says Dan Kieran, chief executive of crowdfunding publisher Unbound, which is preparing to release its 50th title, a memoir from Rose Bretécher called Pure. “Sites like Kickstarter and Unbound are not about saying here is this thing someone has selected for you to buy, but rather, if you want in, you need to step forward and say so, contribute money, tell your network about it. And it becomes a movement. That’s how this community feels.”