The executives behind McSweeney’s intends to transform the company into a nonprofit. The independent publishing house was launched in 1998 as a for-profit business.
In an interview with SFGate, founder Dave Eggers explained why the company is heading in this direction: “We’ve always been a hand-to-mouth operation, and every year it gets just a little harder to be an independent publisher. An independent literary title that might have sold 10,000 copies 10 years ago might sell 6,000 now, for example…It just seemed that increasingly so many of the things that we wanted to do were nonprofit projects and were not really things that you could reasonably expect to break even on.”
This plan will be set in motion by next month with the hope of transitioning into a 501(c)(3) organization within a year. There will be no changes made to the editorial team. Once the switch takes place, the staff can actually take on projects that were put on hold including an expanded poetry series, a fiction anthology written by South Sudanese women, and the Collins Library.