Seeking out Literary Venture Capital

Now this has the potential to be a cool idea, especially if its reach is broadened beyond working with publishers & authors to all interested parties in the literary and arts worlds. The Boston Globe’s Chris Reidy profiles the Literary Ventures Fund, a private nonprofit foundation with offices in Boston and New York that applies venture-capital principles to writers and books. A portion of revenues from books financed by the Writers Fund program are to be returned to the fund so that other writers can benefit.

Literary Ventures, whose motto is “Investing in literature one book at a time,” has selected Thomas O’Malley as the first recipient of an investment from its new Writers Fund, one of several foundation initiatives for promoting worthy fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. LVF declined to disclose how much O’Malley is receiving but said the amount should let him write for a year without distractions.

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