Historic England and Unbound to provide new publishing service

Historic England is partnering with crowd-funding publisher Unbound to offer a new publishing service to the heritage sector.

The service will enable heritage organisations to produce books for their own membership, supporters and the general public. Historic England, a public body which looks after historic places in England, will publish the book and the funding will be administered through the Unbound crowd-funding platform.

John Hudson, head of publishing at Historic England, said: "It struck me that the heritage and cultural sectors were obvious candidates for crowdfunding because of the way they inevitably form groups of friends or supporters around a particular building, neighbourhood or landscape they love, and funding a book is a way of demonstrating that support and publicising their passion."

He added: "The core of support will clearly be the client organisations themselves, but also over 100,000 Historic England supporters via social media and our newsletters, and the community of Unbound supporters who have already subscribed to other books, many of whom have an interest in heritage issues."

The books will be peer-reviewed and published to the standard of all Historic England titles, Hudson said, and marketed internationally under the Historic England imprint.

The move follows Historic England's initial foray into crowdfunding with a title about the landscape gardener Capability Brown which is now almost fully funded.

Jason Cooper, chief operating and commercial officer at Unbound, said: "We're thrilled to be working with a publisher of the stature of Historic England and have thoroughly enjoyed helping with Place Making: The Art of Capability Brown. The innovative pre-order model we have developed with Historic England means membership organisations with specialist areas of publishing can reach out directly to their communities to ensure important books find their audiences in a direct and mutually supportive way.  It’s great to see a public sector organisation taking the commercial initiative and experimenting with new models and technologies in this way."