So the challenge has been extended.
I admit to having trepidation at stepping forward to write about it.
I am a small publisher, yep there I said it.
What is my side of the story?
To start at the beginning, I love books, I read all the time. I bought an ereader a few years ago and was totally hooked. For someone who can easily read 4+ books a week it was a perfect device for me.
I noticed that many of the big publishers were not releasing their books as ebooks, or doing so at extremely high prices. However, I found that small ebook publishers were perfectly willing to fill the void. They tend to focus on genres and made it really easy to find ebooks that I specifically wanted.
Then came the Big 5 pricing decision, I admit to being totally baffled. Did they not go to business school?
So I took the plunge, I knew about ebooks and I knew about books in general. Frankly I did not think I could do any worse than the big guys. I have read books of theirs with typos and poor formatting.
I started my own little publishing house, eStar Books. It focuses on Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction.
I looked at the market and at first thought about romances and erotica, they sell extremely well and have a good customer base, however I felt it was a bit saturated with well known independent publishers. Sci-Fi has a few companies selling ebooks, but nowhere near the saturation point in my opinion.
eStar Books publishes both public domain books and brand new never been published before stories. I know how fun it can be trying to decipher what the heck that OCR output is actually saying. It can be time consuming and mind numbing. Not to mention that the originals frequently have errors in them! Then you have to decide if you want to keep the error? Or change it to what you think it should be? There is a reason that Distributed Proofreaders goes through multiple rounds of proof reading (apparently no one at the big publishing companies have donated their time to saving the world’s books).
I know that errors sneak by me and get out in my books, drat it all! But I do my best to prevent it. When someone points one out I go back fix it, and then re-upload the book. Yes it takes time, but it is not terribly difficult.
For me I feel the big publishing houses are doing me a favor, they are turning off their base and leaving a market opening. People still want to read, I am perfectly happy to come in and provide them with ebooks at reasonable prices.
There was once this little online bookstore, who had a funny name. No one thought too much about it, after all the internet was new and no one had heard of buying books online. Yet today Amazon is a giant of the industry.
So Big 5 publishers, please continue to have insanely high prices and crazy release schedules, so I can snap up more of your customers.
Amelia St. John, Editor
eStar Books LLC
Publisher of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Paranormal ebooks.
email: contact@estarbooks.com
website: www.estarbooks.com
Thanks for writing, Amelia! When you don’t have to support a legacy print business, it becomes a lot easier to produce ebooks at a reasonable price.
Perhaps someone might enlighten me if I am missing something. What is the difference in this case between being a ‘publisher’ and an online ‘eRetailer’ ? Because that’s what it looks like this sTar is, to me.
Looks like a bookseller to me too. I see no Submission Guidelines or anything like that. I mean I see their logo on the covers and all, but nothing like I’d expect to see from a publisher (unless it was just the store part of their site).
I can’t speak to eStar’s editorial quality or anything like that, but they do have a submissions area on their website: https://estarbooks.com/?page_id=27. It wasn’t hard to find, but I guess you guys have to find something to complain about.
Surely a submissions policy does not a Publisher make. It just makes a choosy eRetailer.
No anon, I just missed it & I wasn’t complaining, just mentioning what I’d come to expect from other pubs.
I guess to me a publisher is somewhere you submit work and they assign it to an editor (provided they want it in the first place) who works with the writer. It looks like eStar doesn’t do any editing other than a copy edit. Not saying that’s wrong, and more books could stand a good copy edit, it’s just not what I think of when I think Publisher.
BTW Amelia, if you are reading the comments you might want to check the link for Kindle in your menu bar. I get a Page Not Found error on the pages I tried it on.
I agree Brian. I would expect a Publisher to work on editing with the writer, and then on wider marketing, as well as some exclusivity of distribution.
For me eStar is not a Publisher at all. It is simply an eRetailer.
@Sherri, you are indeed correct it is much more difficult for the large publishing houses to change direction, but they can do so. It takes time, money and effort but other large business’s have managed to change with the times, those that have not have eventually failed.
@Anon, thank you for letting me know about the kindle page, I disabled it until I can figure out what is wrong with it.
@general comments
I have looked at other publishers policies on submissions, I would say that my policy is in line with the industry standard. I work with the writer and do copy editing. I do not know how many of you have suggested a author change something in their book, in my experience it is met with great resistance. It is their baby! I understand that, but I am not going to fight with them about it, it is not worth my time. I refuse anything that I think needs major editing and reworking. There are plenty of writers circles and online groups that authors can join.
I am not sure what you expect a publisher to do? We work with the author, get it isbn’d, generate the cover, do formatting and conversions to a variety of formats, release the ebook to a variety of vendors, and do marketing with the author. For that we take a cut of the books profits. Could the author do this? Sure, they can self publish, but all of these take time, money and effort. Call me a discriminating eRetailer then, I will not deny that I see publishing as a BUSINESS. It is not my job to write the story. If it was I would be an author.
Amelia – I don’t believe the issue is one of criticism of eStar. It’s just an issue of what is the best terminology in this changing world. And ultimately language and terminology does matter.