Publication by subscription

From the late 16th to the 18th centuries, books were published by subscription in English-speaking areas including Britain, Ireland, and British America. Subscriptions were an alternative to the prevailing mode of publication, whereby booksellers would buy authors' manuscripts outright and produce and sell books on their own initiative. The subscription model was not common and books published using the model were often about specialist subjects. Contemporaries sometimes considered subscription unseemly.

Background

In the late 16th and 17th centuries in England, businesses including insurance enterprises and trading companies such as the East India and Hudson's Bay companies operated on a subscription basis. Some lectures were also funded by subscription.

Writers who did not organize subscriptions would usually sell their manuscripts at low prices to booksellers, who would then produce and distribute the printed book. Selling the manuscript meant abandoning any legal rights to the literary work the writer might have, such as copyright or moral rights. According to the literary scholar George Justice, subscription was a descendant of patronage, whereby writers would depend on the financial support of a single person to produce literature. W. A. Speck describes it as a "half-way house" between patronage and selling a book on the market.