I'm crowdfunding my next book advance

And sharing the earnings with readers.

The cover of my book was designed by Duncan at Typography Studio. I can’t wait to have this on my shelves!

In case you missed it, I’m crowdfunding my next book advance and giving a share of the earnings to investors.

The book is called We Should Own The Economy: A vision for the future of capitalism (and the world). It’s about creating more owners of the economy so it only made sense to invite readers to become owners of the book too.

We have reached $17,800 in investment with another $11,500 promised—that’s $29,300 of my $50,000 goal—we’re nearly 60% there!

You can read all about it + invest in the project here.

This is the first, and most long-term of the media projects I’m releasing this year, and the only one I’m raising financing for upfront. Publishing a book is hard work and I need to self-fund all of the things a traditional publisher does: Like researching the book, marketing the work leading up to the launch, and ultimately designing and printing and shipping the books to everyone I also wanted to gauge interest in the project and ensure that all of the hard work and money I’ll be putting into writing it will meet with an audience wanting to read about it.

This is the kind of thing book advances traditionally help with: Gauging interest in the project, funding the research a writer needs to do, and paying the marketing expenses that will make it successful. But instead of benefitting the publisher when it sells, I want this project to benefit readers, because you are ultimately the stakeholders in this project and I want you to come away with concrete ways you can be part of the solution.

One entrepreneur might read an article about employee ownership and decide to sell their business to employees instead of to a large corporation. A politician might read my article about incentivizing employee ownership and be inspired to pass a bill through Congress. Several journalists might expand my work on participatory democracy through other media outlets, proliferating these ideas to a wider audience. In the years to come, there could be more economic models proliferating in the world, and better ones. As more and more people read about these ideas and put them into practice, they will become mainstream rather than niche. During key moments of inflection, people in positions of leadership will reach for those mainstream solutions and enact them.

In 100 years, we could have a better economic model than we have now. One created and owned by us.

There is no way to measure this. There is only continuously proliferating it. Making more and more people aware of it. Changing one mind at a time. Each of us using our own work and our own place in the economy to affect it. In the past few weeks alone, I have received several comments and letters letting me know that an article I wrote about Mondragon inspired them to turn their business into a cooperative, or that my series on employee ownership convinced them to sell their company to their employees when they retire. And these are only the examples I know about!

The point of this book is to benefit you, and not just financially. The world at large needs a better economic system and I may be writing it into existence but you’re going to build it. We all are!

But that starts with raising a $50,000 book advance—and we’re getting there! If you are interested in supporting this project as an individual or as an organization, I would really appreciate your support. 👇🏻

A few updates

Some incredible things have happened since I launched this crowdfund. As I’ll be sharing the process with you live and exposing you to the inner workings of writing and researching this book, I wanted to share a few of them with you:

• Rutgers invited me to apply for their Employee Ownership fellowship! The program is competitive and I’ll be one of the less academic candidates, but I’m excited to put my name in the ring and see if I can garner some additional support for my research. I submitted my application over the weekend and am working on securing letters of recommendation now.

• I met with Jonny Price, president of WeFunder, he gave me some solid advice as far as raising a round, and will be joining my subscribers and investors for a Guest Lecture about crowdfunding and fractional investment in two weeks—save the date here. WeFunder will also be hosting an event for the book in San Francisco this June! Stay tuned…..

• WeFunder connected me up with a lawyer who is helping me write my profit-sharing contract pro-bono. I could not be more grateful for his support of my project—I’ll be writing about all of these complex legal particulars as I learn about them in real time.

• I met with the Nathan Schneider, author Everything for Everyone and Governable Spaces, which are, in many ways, spiritual predecessors to my work (I’m a huge fan of his). He gave me incredible feedback on where he thinks we need more research and solutions today (specifically around funding and creating policy for unique ownership structures) and gave me a good place to start my research. Being the sort who is very into open source everything, he also gave me access to his research notes which are pure gold in value to me. It inspired me to create my own Zotero account so you can now access and follow my own research notes here.

• I reached out to a list of more than 100+ people I want to work with on this project—including a lot of the ones you’ve recommended to me! I’m having meetings with new people every day, expanding my research notes, and scheduling Guest Lectures with them. The research is officially underway! More to come!

A few questions

There are also a few things I need help with and I was wondering if you might know the answers:

• Is there an easy way for me to transparently share my finances with readers? How can I do this?

• Does anyone have experience creating a ledger/cap table for profit-sharing purposes? This is what I need to upload to Flexile and I do not know the best way to organize it for what I want to do.

• Does anyone know politicians who might be interested in shepherding some of these solutions? I have quite a lot of business support but I would love some political support of these ideas too!

• Would you consider sharing this link with a friend?

Overall, this is a very promising start and I’m feeling a lot of community support around this project. Thank you so much for investing, for sharing your ideas and resources and expertise, and for introducing my work to your friends.

Our economies and our democracies are in danger, but we can fix them together.

Thank you for working on it with me,

Elle Griffin

Disclosure: The Elysian is "testing the waters" to gauge investor interest in an offering under Regulation Crowdfunding. No money or other consideration is being solicited. If sent, it will not be accepted. No offer to buy securities will be accepted. No part of the purchase price will be received until a Form C is filed and only through Wefunder’s platform. Any indication of interest involves no obligation or commitment of any kind.