How We Can Help You Publish Your Book
According to Wikipedia.com, many works now considered classic were originally self-published, including the original writings of William Blake, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, William Morris, and James Joyce.
For the past few years I’ve been observing the rapidly changing arena of digital book publishing, from “print on demand” hard-copy versions to eBooks and specialty formats such as Amazon.com’s “Kindle” format, which allows the reader to download a book in seconds, and read it at his or her leisure on a specially designed screen that emulates the look and feel of a real book page. In terms of print on demand, this is accomplished by feeding the electronic/digital file of your book, including its cover, into a special, high end digital printer, which prints and collates the pages, prints the color cover on special stock, glues them together, trims the book, and voila - out comes a finished book. Thus, the storage of files issue depends only on having a finished file with everything on it, which can be fed to the book printer. Obviously, storage of digital files takes up MUCH less space than storage of books that have already been printed. Even some commercial publishers are shifting toward print-on-demand because: With all books published by Health Life Press, authors will retain the right to reproduce all or portions of their own material, for example for handouts at conferences, and so forth. In fact, they will be able to sell portions of their book via any means of their choice, and we will help them do this, if our assistance is desired, because we believe that they have something to say, which is why we would publish their work in the first place, and we want to help them share their message as far and wide as possible. If you have a book manuscript that is what used to be called “camera ready” – i.e. the text is finished, needing no more than minor editing or proofing, we can take it from there to published form (printed book and electronic formats) very quickly. Our philosophy (see details below) is to share equally (50-50) the expense of publishing and the proceeds. Miscellaneous publishing costs might include images purchased for use on the cover, if an author cannot furnish something he or she owns already. If your book needs editing and/or rewriting before it can be considered “camera ready,” you have the option of paying someone to help you finish it, or arranging with us to help you get it ready. Our fees for manuscript services vary, depending on the amount of work a book needs. Unlike the scenario should you publish with a commercial house, with us, authors will have much more control over their finished product, from the cover design to the pricing and royalty percentage. You will even be able to include high resolution PDF prints in the finished book, because the finished book file, itself, is actually a high end PDF formatted file. To my knowledge, very few if any commercial entities allow for the inclusion of this type of creative graphics. David B. Biebel, D.Min. Publisher, Healthy Life Press Address: E-mail: DBBV1@AOL.COM.
Having published sixteen books commercially thus far, with # 17 coming out in December 2009, I know the thrill of an acceptance letter and the disappointment of a rejection letter (the first of which I received in about 1970, from Doubleday). You may have experienced rejections, too, but you still believe that what you've created deserves to be in print and available to the world, not because you are “vain” (implied by the pejorative term “vanity publishing”) but because you have truth to share.
The good news for all writers is that the digital age has changed just about EVERYTHING about publishing, including:
1. How books are authored or co-authored (i.e. co-author could be someone you have never met, or who lives half way round the world from you),
2. How books are edited and designed (both internal pages and covers),
3. How books are printed, distributed, or otherwise made available to readers,
4. How books are warehoused and their files stored for future reprinting or revision.
In this new age of publishing, people buy books primarily through Internet outlets such as Amazon.com and BN.com. Yes, some folks still frequent brick and mortar bookstores, perhaps as much for access to the social setting and the lattes they can sip as they peruse the latest "best-seller" as for the ability to buy a printed book from a "real" store. But such bookstores find it hard to compete with online “stores,”
1. Inventory is kept low – a crucial factor, when you consider the cost of inventory control, storage space, and liquidating inventory when necessary;
2. Storage of the digital files from which the book is printed via specially designed high-end digital printers takes up very little space, since more than 6,000 books can be stored on a single DVD.
3. eBooks produce almost clear profit, once formatted;
4. Depending on the contract, in theory a commercial publisher could keep any book “in print” forever, using these and other means, thus preventing an author from receiving back the rights to the material so he or she can market all or parts of the book in other ways. Of course, if you don’t own the rights, you can’t republish all or parts of even your own material.
So, if you have something important to say, and it fits within the mission of Healthy Life Press (i.e. it has something to contribute to the understanding of health as viewed from a Judeo-Christian perspective - with biological, psychological, sociological, and spiritual components), share your idea with us and we’ll share our expertise with you.
Sincerely,
PO Box
