Hello!

So we have a crazy idea, which, if you know us, isn't a surprise. This book is about disrupting the financial system and building something new. So maybe we should do the same with how we publish it?

Since we launched the pre-sale six weeks ago, we've sold 1,300 books, entirely through direct outreach, and a community that showed up in a way that has genuinely overwhelmed us. As we spoke to traditional publishers, it became clear that our vision for the book doesn't fit their business model, and that have an opportunity to take a more deliberate and disruptive approach to getting our book into the world.

We've been speaking to other authors about their experiences with publishers, what they gained, what they gave up, what they'd do differently. And I found myself reflecting hard on my own experience publishing Adventure Finance. I gave up real control, over pricing, over positioning, over decisions that shaped how the book reached people, and in many ways I regret it.

The more we sat with it, the clearer it became that publishing, in its traditional form, works a lot like the financial industry this book is about. A small number of centralised gatekeepers decide what gets capital, on their terms, and everyone else routes through them because that's simply how it's done. We wrote an entire book arguing that this kind of centralisation is a choice, not a law of nature, and that people are already proving it can be built differently. It started to feel strange, and frankly inconsistent, to chase that same centralisation for the book itself.

So here's where we've landed: we're not sure what a publisher actually offers us at this point beyond distribution, and we think we may already have something better than what a publisher would bring. We have you. We have a community that helped sell over a thousand books before this thing was even finished. What we don't yet have fully worked out is how to organise that strength on purpose, deliberately, the way this book's protagonists organised theirs. This has always been about purpose and mission for us, and we've always been committed to re-investing profits to drive the change we seek.

So we're leaning toward what we're calling community publishing: self-publishing the book, keeping pricing low and controlled by us rather than a publisher's margin requirements, and relying on this community to do, on purpose, what a publisher's distribution machine would otherwise do, get the book into people's hands, everywhere, including languages and markets a traditional publisher likely wouldn't prioritise. There's real additional work in that, logistics, coordination, that we need to figure out, but we think it is possible.

That's where you come in.

We have some early ideas we've batted around:

• A points or leaderboard system, so people who help spread the word get real, visible recognition.

• The chance to unlock things like a live workshop with Erinch or me, for whoever helps push this furthest.

• Real, public recognition for the people and communities who make this happen.

• An open door for anyone with a podcast, publication, event, or translation contact worth pursuing.

But honestly, we'd rather hear your ideas than lead with ours. If you've got a thought, a contact, a "why don't you just," or even a gut reaction to any of this, we want it.

Just hit reply and tell us what you think. We’d love your crazy ideas!

Thank you for being part of making this book real before it even existed. We'd love your help figuring out what happens next.

Warmly,
Aunnie & Erinch