The Cuba Press
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What we do
A tough publishing climate and a small reading population means New Zealand publishers need to be increasingly flexible and collaborative in their approach to making books. The Cuba Press is a hybrid press, which means we have two ways of funding our books.
- The traditional publishing model, where we meet all the costs ourselves or with funding from Creative NZ or other sources, including via online funding platforms like Boosted, and the author receives a standard royalty. Three-quarters of our books are funded this way.
- The author collaboration model, where the author contributes to the costs of making, marketing and distributing the book. This is most often a 50/50 split, with the author receiving 50 per cent of the net returns as their royalty.
We select manuscripts the same way whichever way we fund them, choosing strong writing and great Aotearoa New Zealand stories that we think will make the best books. We market and distribute our books in the same way whoever pays for them, with our logo on the spine and our reputation on the line. We are not a platform for authors who want to self publish.
We like a balance of titles in our annual list, ranging over fiction, non-fiction and poetry, as well as memoir through our Wayfarer imprint and children’s books through our Ahoy! imprint.
We choose manuscripts we will enjoy working on and with authors who want to work hard with us to get their books into the world.
Resources for authors
- NZ Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi O Aotearoa: Editors and Assessors
- NZ Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi O Aotearoa: Awards, Grants and Fellowships
- NZ Association of Manuscript Assessors
- Creative New Zealand funding
- Creative New Zealand: Other Sources of Funding