Sandra Shwayder Sanchez is both a literary author and co-founder of The Wessex Collective, an unusual literary publishing company in more ways than one. For one thing, none of the authors get royalties; for another, they have a noble mission: to publish "committed fiction" that is "socially responsible."

Tell us about the Wessex Collective, Sandra. When and how did it get started?

I had been corresponding with R.P. Burnham for several years after I read his editorial prelude to an issue of The Long Story which I discovered at The Tattered Cover Bookstore. I submitted a story which he published and later he asked me for more work. What we had in common was a preference for fiction that focused on characters that lived on the periphery of society, the poor, the homeless, the very old or very young, the mentally ill, people who are neglected and often abused. I went to law school in my late thirties because I wanted to speak up for the rights of people who often have no voice and Peter helps to run a soup kitchen in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

For whatever reason, we both had this particular interest and we both expressed our empathy for the real people we encountered in our lives and work in fiction. Peter calls this "committed fiction" and perhaps in today's phrasing we could call it "socially responsible" fiction. After experiencing the usual frustration sending out full length book manuscripts, I suggested that we start an author's publishing collective. Peter had been publishing The Long Story for more than twenty years when I approached him about it and I was delighted that he was interested because no way could we do this without his expertise. We each invited work from authors we admired. We published our first three titles in spring of 2005, another three that fall. In 2006 we published two more titles and we have just come out with three more this fall. The way we work, no author is paid for his or her work so it doesn't matter how many copies of which books we sell, all the sale proceeds go back into the collective account to help print and promote all the books.

What type of books do you publish?

We publish literary fiction although our list includes one memoir that has the dramatic suspense of a work of fiction.

Are you open to submissions? 

We do not encourage submissions as none of us has the time to read a lot of manuscripts but we have received email queries from authors who have read our books and believe they have something that would be a good fit with what we are doing. Before we put a lot of time and effort into an author's manuscripts however, we want to know that the author will work with us to promote all our books, not just their own, as that is the whole point of the collective concept.