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 this book?

Here is a bit about what we are thinking and below are details for a call with us to get your feedback. :)

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 more it was clear to us 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 the place 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 Erinch and I are 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, 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, translation, logistics, coordination, that we haven't fully figured out. We're not pretending we have. That's what this call is for.

We have some early ideas we want to test with you:

• A points or leaderboard system, so people who help drive sales or awareness get real, visible recognition?

• The chance to "win" or unlock things like a private workshop or session with me or Erinch, for individuals or organisations who go furthest in helping distribute the book?

• Ways to properly recognise the community and specific people publicly, not as an afterthought, but as a real part of how the book succeeds.

• An open channel for people to suggest podcasts, publications, events, translators, or platforms we should be pursuing.

These are just what we've batted around ourselves. What we actually want from this call is your thinking. You've backed this book at a level that tells us you're genuinely invested in it working, and you likely have ideas, contacts, or instincts we haven't thought of.

We'd love for you to join. We're offering two times so you can pick whichever works:
Thursday September 17th, 11:00 AM UK time
Thursday, September 17th, 2:00 PM UK time

If neither time works but you'd still like to weigh in, reply to this email, We'll make sure your thinking gets into the conversation either way.
Thank you, genuinely, for being one of the people who made this book real before it existed. We'd love your help figuring out what happens next.

Chat soon,
Aunnie & Erinch