The online organisation behind 50 Shades of Grey

As Rick Spilman of OldSaltBlog comments, there is a very interesting back-story about 50 Shade's first publisher that  may say a lot about where publishing might be headed in the future.

The Writers Coffee Shop started out as an on-line community for book lovers to talk to discuss what
they were reading. The community is still on-line.

Their mission statement:

The Writer’s Coffee Shop is an up and coming independent publisher based out of New South Wales, Australia. The company launched in October of 2010 with the vision of working alongside talented authors while providing quality e-books to the growing marketplace.


It didn’t take long for the community, which called The Writer’s Coffee Shop “home,” to outgrow what the site was currently providing. On January 26, 2010, The Library was launched, with the aim of providing a friendly, easy-going environment in which anyone can post and read original and derivative works. The Library is also used by The Writer’s Coffee Shop Publishing House to host regular fiction writing contests.   Patronage is overwhelmingly female and 82% of the readers are based in in the US.

Remarkably, this Australian writing community had a stall at the Books Expo America (see picture above), where Rick met one of the founders, Alexa.   Up until quite recently she was a third grade teacher in North Texas, but is now director of marketing for the publishing arm.

50 Shades was the first book published by Writers Coffee Shop once the board leaders decided to go into publishing. 

Undoubtedly it is all upward from there ....