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Monday, November 21, 2011

New Venture! New Market for Writers too!

Above is the logo for my newest venture, Barbarian Books.We are an eBook publishing company. 


Why would a well-published writer, with contracts with other great publishing companies, L&L Dreamspell, Muse It Up Publishing and Freundship Press, for example, open an eBook publisher? Am I insane? I'm a writer, so of course. But not when it comes to Barbarian Books. My permanent boyfriend Bruce came up with the idea to answer several important questions. E-readers mean that it's a new world for writers. With, I believe, some tremendous advantages for us writers.


Since I'm certain the majority of my readers know about the publishing world here's a couple of thing in brief: The big publishers are no longer taking newbies, or often even trusted mid-listers. Anyone can self-publish for e-readers. And many, many do. How does an author stand out in such a crowd? Unless you're someone like Jim Murdoch and you have a great blog such as The Truth About Lies or Dennis J. Smith and know all about social networking, it's a struggle to promote your self-pubbed e-book. 

And who do readers trust to find good reads at a reasonable price? 


The answer is: small publishers. There are a number of legitimate small publishers out there. If you've written a good book, there'll be a spot for it with a good small publisher.


This is the great thing about this new world--you can write what you want and it'll find a place. Every publisher is looking for something somewhat different. For example, Barbarian Books is looking for genre fiction (no children's or erotica). We're looking for novel length crime (including mystery), horror, romance, science fiction, westerns and cross genre. We'll open soon for other lengths and genres. And we're looking for that great, unclassifiable and unusual novel that might fit our philosophy that there are a great many readers looking for great reads.


So, if you have a finished product, do your homework (i.e. read the publisher's websites and contracts, go to Duotrope, Absolute Write and Preditors and Editors) and then submit!