Assisted Publishing

For my first novel, Murphy’s Troubles, I self-published on Create Space, which is wholly owned by Amazon.  One advantage is that Amazon automatically lists the book.  I wanted complete control of the entire process and Create Space allows that or there are services that can be purchased through Create Space.  Authors are also assigned a personal publication assistant to give advice and answer questions about the process.   The assistant can be called anytime and you are guaranteed a response within 24 hours.  I got to know my publication assistant very well.  My learning method is to ask a lot of questions and my assistant was always helpful and understood the stupidity of my questions.  I devoted four months to doing nothing but working with Create Space to publish that first novel.

It was a learning experience but I didn’t want to repeat it.  I read several writers’ magazines and learned about a new model for independent authors called assisted publishing.  In this model an independent company offers an array of publication services for fee.  One stop shopping for the author.  I contacted one firm in Minnesota and received a quote of $10,000 to publish my second novel.  It took me several days to recover from sticker shock.  The company representative demanded a response the same day I received the quote, I refused to respond.  Several days later I responded that I would need to raise $8000 from crowd funding to accept their offer – never heard from them again.

I decided that using Create Space independently was the path for me.  I contacted the copyeditor I worked with on Murphy’s Troubles to have her copyedit Out of Darkness.  I shared my experience with the Minnesota company and she told me she had started her own publishing company.   I asked her to prepare a quote for me.  She gave me a detailed quote and I was pleasantly surprised at the difference in price.  In addition to publishing the trade paperback she will release both Murphy’s Troubles and Out of Darkness as e-books.  It helped that she offered a 25% discount because we had worked together previously.  I didn’t need to do any crowd funding to work with her.

I agreed immediately and Out of Darkness will be published by CK Books publishing in June.  To learn more about my publisher go to:  ckbookspublishing.com.