Galapagos to Grammie Guide: That’s the trajectory of the 232-page handbook on grandparenting that four San Jose-area women have written and published. Their company, Tell-A-Gram Publishing, started because of Richard Mobilio, an adventure travel buff who wanted to visit Ecuador. He and his wife, Laurie, put together a group of about a dozen couples in …

Why publish an anthology? At Running Fox Books, an Alaska-based press and authors’ cooperative, the answer was simple: We believed it would help sell our other books. With the anthology we titled simply Alaska Sampler 2014, our idea was to make it easy for readers to discover the real Alaska, minus the hype and minus …

PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2014 SEE ALSO: Part 2, Part 3 Common Cause at Conventions During a convention for small publishers that I attended in Europe last year, someone said, “We sell more books at local festivals and city fairs than we ever do at autograph sessions in branches of major book chains.” Four months later, I …

For centuries, printed books have included indexes to give readers easy access to particular aspects of their contents. But since the beginning of the digital age, many content providers have considered indexes extraneous, even though indexes offer users a higher degree of success than search functions in finding information; at least one study has shown …

As a book editor of a certain age, I have license to grouse about the decline of civilization. Many things are worse today than they were when I commuted to work on the wings of a pterodactyl. Yes, electric trains are faster than dinosaurs, and word processors, email, digital scans, and computer-to-plate printing technology have …

Linda Carlson writes for IBPA’s Independent magazine from Seattle. She can be reached at linda@ibpa-online.org. Like the people who left home to build America, the 22 employees at DawnSignPress think of themselves as pioneers, always seeking new ways to deliver content. Appropriately, their informal motto is “Think big, start small.” Founder Joe Dannis attributes that …

Bringing Books Back, Part 3: A Guide to the Learning Curve March 2014 by Linda Carlson Whether you wrote the book or someone else did, reissuing a title that another publisher has let go out of print may sound like a way to short-circuit much of the work of acquisition, editing, and design—and possibly even …

February 2014 by Linda Carlson Authors Acquiring Rights As you know from Part 1 of this series (January), some IBPA members have created perennial bestsellers from titles that had languished with their original publishers, having met the challenges of acquiring rights from companies that are still active, acquiring rights held by companies that closed long …

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 2014 by Linda Nix, Founder, Golden Orb Creative — Although e-books are no longer the novelty they were only three years ago, the publishing industry is still experiencing massive disruption from the effects of the digital revolution. Considering three different aspects of today’s publishing landscape, I arrive at one conclusion: The role of …

Kristen Eckstein is an author and award-winning international speaker who has started 50 publishing companies and published 160 books and e-books. The founder of the “I Am Published!” Ghost Publishing program, the Self-Publish On Demand training program, and the 21 Ways book series, she reports that she embarked on writing and publishing a new Kindle book every …