16 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ JULY 29, 2019
Department|GLOBAL PUBLISHING
preorders that are bought from and fulfilled by the publisher.
Among the traditional publishing deals that the company has
helped midwife in the U.S. are The Business of Influence by Neal
Schaffer (HarperCollins Leadership), Live Big by Aljit Nawalkha
(BenBella), Modern Tribe by Al Jeffrey (Hay House), and
Superconductors by Derek Loudermilk (Kogan Page).
With this track record, Vincent is confident that Publishizer
can transition into signing traditional literary agency contracts
with authors, and it thus signed Loudermilk as its first client.
With Publishizer as the agent, Loudermilk, a travel writer and
personal development expert, sold his next book, Experience the
Revolution, to Wiley in April after 517 preorders. In return,
Publishizer is taking the traditional 15% fee against advances
and royalties for domestic rights, as well as 20% for foreign
rights, on top of the initial 30% for the crowdfunding.
“We are looking for quality,” says Wendolin Perla,
Publishizer’s head of publishing. “We think that there are more
authors out there who can fit into publishers’ lists, if only the
publishers learn about them. We have largely had success
working with nonfiction authors in business, mind/body/spirit,
and self-help categories—but we have started to see more fiction,
such as That One Cigarette by Stu Krieger,” which was bought
by Harvard Square Editions.
The move into fiction will require a different set of skills than
selling self-help or business titles. Perla is suited to the role,
having joined Publishizer last year after more than a decade at
Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial in Mexico City, where
she served as literary director. She says that despite her pedigree
in the industry, it is a challenge to get the attention of acquiring
editors.
“The traditional publishing business is based on reputation,
referrals, and prestige,” Perla says. “All of these
take time to establish, and a lot of publishers are
used to only deal face-to-face with an agent.”
So, in the near term, Perla is building her data-
base of contacts and has put together a rights cata-
logue of titles from authors who have had successful
crowdfunding campaigns, which she’ll be taking to
the Frankfurt Book Fair in October.
For his part, Vincent is firmly planted in
Amsterdam, where he is focused on further devel-
oping his team, which now numbers nearly a dozen
and is spread across an ever-growing list of coun-
tries, from Canada to Hungary. “But as global as the
company may be, Bali will always be Publishizer’s
spiritual home,” he says, sounding a note of nostalgia
for his nomadic past. ■C
an a nomadic Australian tech entrepreneur trans-
form literary agenting? Guy Vincent thinks he
can. Vincent says that in 2013 he was living in
Singapore and working for Tien Wah Press, one
of the region’s largest printers, when his friend
Jackie Treagus asked for help publishing her book—a pocked-
size cookbook for adventurers titled The Backpacker Chef. Vincent
helped Treagus raise $5,220 through crowdfunding, garnering
522 preorders, and thus Publishizer was born.
Fast forward six years and Publishizer has become, Vincent
says, “the world’s first crowdfunding literary agency.” He is
speaking via phone from Amsterdam, where he lives after
moving from Singapore to Bali, then Peru and New York City.
The company is based in the Netherlands due to a $420,
investment from Netherlands-based Arches Capital, which
built on an earlier $100,000 investment from 500 Startups, a
startup accelerator in Silicon Valley.
Initially, Publishizer launched its own crowdfunding platform
to fund books that would then be self-published, taking 5% of
the money raised as a fee for the service. As the company grew,
it began seeing that publishers were interested in acquiring
books that had garnered more than 500 preorders on the platform
and began placing books with publishers on behalf of authors.
Today, Publishizer takes a fee of 30% of the crowdfunding
campaign’s earnings, but it gets no cut of any ensuing publishing
deal, and authors are also free to sign up agents and publishers
on their own.
If things go as planned for Publishizer, the idea of looking for
an agent will become moot. “To date, 800 authors have used
Publishizer to raise a total of $1.8 million, resulting in 160
publishing deals,” Vincent says. The money raised pays forLiterary Agency 2.
Publishizer is building an international virtual agency Ed Nawotka
The Publishizer team with Vincent, at center, and Perla, second from r., who was introduced
to the company when they shared a coworking space in Bali.