Sean O’Keeffe, Publishing Director, Liberties Press

Liberties Press, Robert Kirby of United Agents and Gerry ‘The Sheriff’ O’Carroll have developed an innovative arrangement for publication of Gerry’s debut novel, crime thriller The Gathering of Souls. Instead of the standard advance-plus-royalty structure, proceeds from bookshop and overseas-rights sales will be shared equally between the author/agent and publisher.

For Liberties Press, this arrangement enables the press to acquire a major title without having to pay a substantial advance. As a result, it can devote significant additional resources to sales and marketing efforts: the book will feature in all the big summer promotions run by the bookshop chains.

The deal also enables Liberties to tap into Robert Kirby’s network of international contacts. For Robert, it presents the opportunity to play a more active role in the publication of the book and to help Liberties, which he describes as an Irish Canongate, make a big initial impact in the fiction market in Ireland and the UK, with a view to selling rights worldwide and developing a successful series.

The Gathering of Souls, which has been endorsed by John Boorman, is a race-against-time serial-killer thriller, set in Ireland, featuring a conflicted detective and a colourful cast of gards, informers and innocent victims. Gerry O’Carroll’s memoir The Sheriff, about his time as a detective on the mean streets of Dublin, sold 20,000 copies in Ireland; everyone involved has high hopes for The Gathering of Souls.

Liberties Press, which was one of only ten organisations nationwide to see an increase in its funding from the Arts Council for 2010, will be publishing six fiction titles, a mixture of literary and commercial projects, in 2010, in addition to twenty non-fiction titles. Recent successes include two top-ten-selling titles: Get Your Tax Back by Aidan Kelly and My Father, The General by Risteárd Mulcahy, which is due out in mass-market paperback after the first two runs in trade paperback sold out.

Given the current unpredictable state of the market, even for big-name authors (witness the recent poor performance of celebrity memoirs in the UK last autumn), such profit-share schemes are likely to become more common as publishers, authors and agents find new ways of doing business in a recessionary environment.