|
Your
book
is a big part of who you are. You’ve written it to get
your message out, to build your brand and professional
credibility, to satisfy a longstanding desire to
express yourself, to teach, to communicate in depth
about something important to you—and, yes, to be
respected and admired.
Authoring a book gives credibility and career
enhancement as well as the satisfaction of sharing
something important. It feels good to see a book with
your name on it.
It is an achievement of which you can be proud.
Your book reflects who you are, what you know and what
you want to tell others without you having
to say anything. The book speaks for you. Let’s face
it, being the author of a book is impressive—just as
you’re impressed when holding the book of a colleague
or acquaintance.
Twenty
years ago it was hard to break into publishing because
there were only so many publishers and the field was
something of a closed circle—if you did not have a
personal contact, getting your manuscript to the right
person was extremely difficult, if not impossible.
That was the heyday of the literary agent—a member of
that “inner circle” who would, for a sufficient fee,
arrange for someone with decision-making power to take
at least a brief look at works by unknown writers. If
you didn’t have a publisher with at least a toe in the
mainstream, you had almost no way to get your book to
the marketplace.
Today we have numerous ways around publishers,
with Amazon and others ways to get to the marketplace
and easy-to-use technology to create the book. You no
longer must put books letter by letter into molds to
create words on the page. With word processing, Photoshop,
InDesign and other programs, just about anyone can
“publish,” that is, create a book. These
days, with the Internet and the inexpensive
“publishing” it allows, and with online outlets such
as Amazon and B&N.com, there are many routes to
getting your book into print, including inexpensive
do-it-yourself self-publishers, once cynically called
“vanity presses”—in which you take on all the roles
involved in bringing out a book: design, layout, cover
art, typesetting, editing, marketing, distribution,
sales and more. There are many web-based
self-publishers that will sell you these services. You
can cobble together several different providers to
create what you want, supervising each constantly to
make sure they follow your wishes and then making sure
that the various pieces meld together in a way that
satisfies you.
If you want to explore the do-it-yourself
route, click on our “do
it yourself” link for a list of the major
self-publishers. Then visit their sites, find out what
they offer and at what price, and become your own
project manager. We wish you the best of luck if you
choose to self-publish. There is much to applaud about
it—as well as some issues of which you should be
aware. A
positive element in self-publishing is that you have
total control over the content and the packaging. You
are not following the requirements of a publisher who
may be pig-headed or who doesn’t understand your work.
You’re the boss. A
negative element, and the biggest drawback to
self-publishing, is getting your books to the
marketplace—into bookstores, gift stores, specialty
outlets, and other retailers where books are sold. More and
more books are being sold outside the bookstore today,
in other retail stores, such as upscale dress shops
and sports stores.
These are called “gift” sales or sometimes
“special” sales. Yes, self-published authors can get
their books into some stores—say, the one in your
neighborhood, where the owner knows you. These
stores will take your books on consignment. If you are
lucky enough to sell a good number, they will order
from Ingram, a central wholesaler, although getting
books from Ingram takes time—usually a few weeks. Of
course, if your book has an ISBN and is listed in Books in Print,
any store can order it for a customer—but it can take
a few weeks for the book to arrive. It is hard to sell
a lot of books that way. Some authors have done it. Every once
in a while there is a self-published runaway success,
such as Eragon
by Christopher Paolini, which was later picked up by a
major publisher.
But books like that are the rare exception.
Most self-published books end up sitting on the garage
floor as the author becomes increasingly discouraged
by the effort it takes to promote and sell a book in a
national and international marketplace, while
competing with thousands of other authors. Self-published
books
rarely have any effective distribution. Without
knowledgeable, skilled distribution, you cannot get
your book to the market. Fortunately, we do now have
Amazon, which will take any book. So self-published
authors do have that avenue to the market—and it is a
good one, albeit limited. Not all authors need distribution. If you are a professional, such as a massage therapist or a college teacher, you can sell your book to your clients or students as well as get it into local stores by speaking with the store buyers and leaving copies on consignment. If you give speeches, having a published book gives you something to sell and something for interested audiences to buy. They are your market. However, for most authors, who hope to sell their books to the larger world, their books die on the vine without distribution. Publishing
with Ronin
At Ronin
we have more than 150 paper titles and more than 100
ebooks currently in print. We are experts in low-cost,
high-quality book production. We do project
management, handle the clerical aspects of getting
your book into all of the databases, editing, book
design, layout, cover art, digital rights
management—and we provide top-of-the-line, world-wide
distribution with live-person sales team to personally
present your book to buyers. into all book-selling
channels.
Through our distributor—the leading book sales
and distribution company in the United States—your
book will be marketed and sold nationally and
internationally. Our distributor, PGW/Ingram, is an
unrivaled marketing and sales organization that no
self-publishing arrangement can come close to
duplicating.
Ronin will not publish just any book, however,
as those old vanity presses did, just to get your
money. Slap anything in a cover and call it a book. We
are a nonfiction publisher, and we take our motto
seriously: “Books for Independent Minds.” Our
specialty areas are self-help, medicine, life skills—with attitude,
spirituality, pop culture, psychedelia, and a “fringe
series” of unusual and offbeat topics, such as ghost
hunting and underground comics. Our work is literally
an open book: go to our
site for a look at our backlist, or search for
our books with any search engine.
We are experts in creating books with high
commercial appeal, experts in producing them to
reflect what an author wants to communicate, experts
in bringing them to market, experts in marketing them
through all available channels, and experts in selling
them to bookstores—both independents and chains,
online and as ebooks.
If Ronin agrees to co-publish your book, you
will be tapping into our decades of proven experience
and expertise in all areas from design creativity to
national and international sales. This is something
that no self-publisher can possibly provide.
The first step, if you think you may have a
Ronin Publishing book, is to send us a query and we'll
go from there.
|
WHY
CO-PUBLISH WITH RONIN?