Chisholm and Harper | Creating businesses of the future

One hundred years ago, Gerald Mills and Charles Boon created a user-generated content (UGC) publishing revolution. Mills and Boon started their publishing company in 1908, publishing education textbooks and novels by esteemed authors such as Jack London and P.G. Wodehouse. The problem was these authors cost a lot to sign and their books were only accessible to the educated classes - hence a limited market.

It was during the war that Charles Boon had a brainwave. Mills and Boon would publish books at a price the general public could afford, by getting the general public to write the books themselves! This also had the added bonus of guaranteeing the books topics were exactly what the general public wanted to read. Mills and Boon started advertising for people to send in their stories, and before long they were inundated with potential novels. They published the best ones and the books began flying off the shelves, much as they have been ever since.

You may hear about UCG being a concept created by the advent of the Internet, but in fact it has been a successful publishing model for over one hundred years.