New Alexandria Creative Group is a cooperative publishing company founded in 2020 by author/illustrator E.A. (Lissa) Provost and her family. In a rapidly changing economic landscape for creatives, they imagined an entirely different business model in which the creatives controlled their work and formed a cooperative company to help them bring it to market rather than mass media corporations deciding what to make, hiring creatives, and owning the creations.
We are building a publishing home for all types of creators, beginning with authors and artists but expanding into every form of media over time. We are open to all genres and styles. Membership is through nomination, submission and ultimately election by the current membership. It’s not about a particular work a creator wants to publish, but having their skills approved by a jury of their peers and once they join they can create what they’re passionate about.
We believe the market doesn’t always know what it wants but when creators work with passion, interest follows. However, individual works are reviewed and approved by peers before publishing to ensure quality for our brand. Members are not required to publish all work through the group, but once a work is branded with NACG the group is entitled to 15% of the creator’s profit on all current and future iterations and derivatives of that creative property. That percentage pays for common resources like our website, ISBN’s, marketing, and business overhead and represents a substantial saving over covering all those expenses as an individual. The creator remains in control of what happens with their work.
Co-publishing is similar to self-publishing where the creator is the originator and manager of their projects but, since no-one is good at everything but everyone is good at something, they gain the advantage of a network of other creators with diverse skills. In this way, our members get their work released at a professional level in every possible format to reach their maximum potential, and readers can rely on NACG books to be professionally edited and produced, setting them apart from the sea of “who knows how well they’re self-published” books. This is the foundation for branding and market collectively, making that Herculean task more affordable and manageable. Since we’re a group of creative people, we want to innovate with our marketing, reach into all the niches, and cultivating new readers by taking books out of bookstores at every opportunity.
New Alexandria Creative Group is for serious passionate creatives who want to make a career out of their craft and want to help others do the same. Our metric for success as a company is not how many books sold or our collective bottom line. It’s the percentage of members making the median income for their area or better from their craft. We are building a different ladder for creatives to climb with lots of reachable rungs between “paying dues” and “celebrity.”