Jon Franklin, a well-known writer’s advocate, author of Writing for Story and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, said the new company was founded to raise the quality of writing while simultaneously cutting costs to the consumer and increasing royalties to the writer.
*bylines* is a pay-per-read internet site where readers can buy in-depth articles and stories for as low as 29 cents and books for as little as $1.99. Writers receive 60 percent of the gross income from the sales of their work.
“That’s at least sixty percent,” says Franklin. “and we may be able to do better than that. We think we can do this and also make a healthy, sustaining profit.”
The site opened with 13 items on its virtual shelf, ranging in price from 29 cents to $2.50. Everything except books was priced at less than a dollar. A customer who bought the entire list, which includes several books and almost 600,000 words, would spend a total of $15.88.
The venture is a partnership of Franklin, his wife Lynn, and George Rodgers, formerly a projects editor at the Baltimore Sun. It was put up on the web by a professional journalism association, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and its National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting.
“The IRE board gave us a helping hand because, if this works, it’s going to be good for journalists and journalism—for that matter, for writers of all kinds. We’re starting out with a literary nonfiction book list, but we plan to expand fairly quickly into fiction and poetry,” Franklin said.
“It’s not a nonprofit, though, and while it does have some attributes of a writer’s co-op, it isn’t one of those either. We thought of becoming a nonprofit, but decided the organization would be more viable, and independent, as a private business. We’ll pay taxes. Once we reach a sustaining level, we won’t have to be obligated to anyone but our readers, which is the best of all possible situations. To that end we have no plans to take advertisements.
“What we offer is so good, and so inexpensive, that we think we have a better mousetrap. We expect people to beat a path to our door.”