The precursor to FC2, the Fiction Collective, was founded in 1974 by Jonathan Baumbach, Peter Spielberg, B. H. Friedman, Mark Jay Mirsky, Steve Katz, and Ronald Sukenick, among others. It formed the first US not-for-profit publishing collective run by innovative authors and for innovative authors. According to Sukenick, the Fiction Collective was intended to "make serious novels and story collections available in simultaneous hard and quality paper editions" and to "keep them in print permanently." Although geographically disparate (including members in California and Colorado), the offices of the Fiction Collective were located at Brooklyn College. FC established distribution in the fall of 1974, utilizing George Braziller, a distributor of European fiction. In 1979, Carol Sturm Smith took the reins of Co-Director (acting as president) from Jonathan Baumbach; Raymond Federman succeeded Peter Spielberg. For the remainder of the 1970s and much of the 1980s, the Fiction Collective published steadily (usually around six books a year), supported by The New York State Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.