There was a person who posted on WAE talking about authors' co-operatives. Unfortunately I don't remember who it was. I do remember asking her to say more about it, and she did, but now I can't find that posting.
Does anyone here know how author cooperatives work or might work? Could they be a useful way to do effective but inexpensive promotion?
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It might have been me. I have a young author friend in Salem who got together with a few other authors who all right fantasy or paranormal fiction and they sponsor book signings and presenting their books at different book stores or wherever they can audience and they do the promoting, publishing etc and set them up. they are selling books that way but I don't know if they will ever get famous because I don't know how good their writing is but they are getting more notice than individually and they dress up like some of their characters. They are all under forty with lots of energy and imagination.
Joan Adamak
A good friend of mine is Deborah Crombie, who writes a British Mystery series. She can hold her own, but she was invited to join a blog forum for a select list of mystery writers, and she joined it. She is big in promoting all of her books, both sponsored by her publisher and self-promoting efforts that she does, but she finds that group book signings and things like this blog benefit her, so she continues to do them. At her level of success, she probably doesn't need to do them, but maybe that's what keeps her on the Best Seller list.
Depending on how you define them, I'm involved in a couple. I'm part of the multi-writer blog From The Write Angle and I published an anthology of short stories called Spring Fevers, which has sixteen stories from ten different writers. One of the reasons we did it that way was to maximize our marketing and promotional efforts. We have another anthology in the works, too. (Send me a message if you have questions: submission deadline hasn't passed yet.)
I'd add that in From the Write Angle, we coordinate schedules and topics. We'll share ideas or comments before posting. Many of us also share twitter duties, responding to emails, etc. As for the anthology, a friend and I honed our initial ideas and reached out to other writing friends we trusted to help with book and cover design as well as copy editing. We invited submissions from writers we knew.