Authors

What is in this for authors

• access to many books yourselves

• increases number of book readers

• a chance to develop a wider following

• ebooks have been shown to drive up printed book sales as well

• a chance to get manuscripts published in this format, for publishers to see, retaining all other rites

• a chance to try new markets, formats, styles

• authors competition eventually

Many will see the major difference between the Worldwide Library and e-text depositories run by universities etc, not so much as the format of material, as many of them will be over time moving to formats that people can use easier, but in the content. While many depositories are for study, ours is for life. We are of course adding as fast as we can all the classics and well known books, and at the same time looking for as many more as we can, but we also want to get new material.

The work of current authors and new authors will offer current day fiction and non fiction books, that will be greatly appreciated by the readers. While we all may occasionally want to read Dickens or Shakespeare, much of what we want to regularly read is more relevant to today. We therefore need your work.

Normally as you will know it is more difficult to sell a book to a publisher than to readers who would like to read it, and many very successful authors were turned down by many publishers before someone saw the merit of their work. This is particularly noticeable with fiction and with non fiction topics where there is either a small audience or where a cartel currently controls the market. Established authors likewise find it difficult to write a different type of book.

Some were of course cynical when the project started and said that authors would not become involved unless royalties were involved, however some of the first people to become involved were published authors. Now the cynics will point out that authors have a lot to gain, either in getting their work known, where they have not been able to get published, or in getting a larger audience for their other books in print. Many writers do not expect to make very much out of royalties, and in some cases have to subsidize small print runs themselves in order to make their work available, while others would just like to see that manuscript that no one will take a risk and publish, made available. 

In giving permission for your book to be converted to an ebook and made available in the Worldwide Library, you give away no other rights so are at liberty to contact publishers and suggest they see your ebook and to make arrangements with publishers for it to be printed. You will also find it allows you to show what you have already achieved when putting forward new proposals.

In addition we are going to have an annual competition you can choose to be included in, where some books are selected monthly and put into a national competition, others reviewed positively in the book club, and none criticized. Our reviewers/judges are encouraged to show the difference by emphasizing the positive, and one of our objectives is to encourage authors. We pair you up with an editor, who will make suggestions for changes, however we believe that the author should always have the final say. If you have a competent editor you know, you are welcome to work with them. As the only way not to make mistakes is not to do anything, we see it as essential to have another person beside the author look over the work. Of course if it has already been published this has already been done.

We also want to encourage new authors, or people who have a lot of knowledge but need an author to collaborate with in joint projects. So we will be open to helping in any way that we can and also keeping a register of authors who would like to take on assignments for commercial companies. You will find a special section on one of the web sites specifically for authors. Please see this if you are interested, we want to help you to get your book published, but we don’t want to see your life's work delivered to us as a lorry load of manuscripts.

Work that has been published, but now gone out of print we would also like you to consider allowing the Worldwide Library to have. Many times an author will say it needs updating first, but there is no difference between the copy of the book that is in a library and the converted e-book version we want to produce. Of course if you would like to update it at some time, we would love a copy of that version as well, but don't hold back on the basis of a task that you may never get around to.

The index site for the Worldwide-Library is www.worldwide-library.com  this indexes you to all the sites by function

General enquiries 'general-enquiries @ worldwide-library.org' (no spaces), or see the pages specific to the class of interest you have above left

The worldwide-library is a non profit company limited by guarantee, registered in England no 4369113